The new white minority

When stuck for anything insightful to say, politicians often waffle about how children are the future. They are right, of course. When the new school year begins this autumn, most children in public schools will, for the first time, be non-white, projects the Department of Education. America will not be majority-minority until 2043, says the Census Bureau, so schools give an early glimpse of what that might feel like. The answer is: not so very different. White children are still a majority in most schools. This is partly because blacks are so concentrated: in the northeast, now home to the country’s most segregated schools, more than half of African-American pupils sit in classrooms where at least 90% of children are from minorities. On the 60th anniversary of the desegregation of public schools “separate but equal” has, in many places, been replaced with equal but separate.