For the first time ever, kids of color make up the majority of students enrolled in Washington public schools.
It’s a slim majority, at 50.6%, but the growth in recent years has been rapid. Between 2009 and 2022, the percentage of kids identifying as a race other than white increased by nearly 50%.
The milestone was always inevitable; it’s just a question of timing. National estimates say that net U.S. population growth in the past several years has been from people of color, and public schools are generally more racially diverse than the adult population. Washington state’s total population is around 66% white.
But the pandemic may have tipped the scale here. Kids of color weren’t the majority until last fall, according to state data. In 2020, they were still in the minority.
The number is yet another sign that public schools are undergoing a major shift — and not just in the parts of the state where students of color make up the majority, such as in the Seattle area. Almost every school district in the state has seen its share of students of color zoom up. In a system that has long been criticized as being modeled on what works for a middle-class white kid, white kids are no longer the most common customer.
“We’re just falling in line with the rest of the world,” said Sharonne Navas, the executive director of the Washington-state based Equity in Education Coalition.
Much of the population shift seems due to two factors. One, the more obvious, is that the population of kids of color has grown — and especially multiracial kids, whose numbers have grown by 177% since 2009. Latino, Pacific Islander and Asian students also saw modest growth in that time. The second factor is that the white student population is declining — not just as a share of the population, but as a number overall.
At least half the drop in white students in Washington happened between 2020 and this past fall, suggesting the pandemic may have played an outsized role in the decline. While it’s tough to say with certainty, this could have to do with the state’s growing population of private school and home-schooled students. And though these educational avenues are diversifying every year, national figures show they are dominated by white families.
A study of state enrollment data from the University of Washington also showed white parents were disproportionately more likely to hold off sending their kids to kindergarten during the pandemic years.
“These could be temporary enrollment choices,” said Min Sun, a UW education policy professor who worked on the study. “We need to keep monitoring.”
More perplexing, perhaps, is the decline in some groups of students of color, namely Black and Native kids. No one interviewed for this story had a concrete answer, and there aren’t any signs that there’s been a mass exodus of specific demographic groups from the state. (However, national figures show both Black and Native student populations also declining.) The most plausible explanation is that it is the result of a combination of factors, including the data-keeping itself.
When a student is counted as multiracial, for example, they aren’t counted as any other race. Or, if a student is Latino and Indigenous they have to pick one — they won’t be counted as both, at least in this data set.
At least some of the loss of Black students is due to parents seeking options outside of traditional public schools, especially in light of the pandemic, said Steve Smith, executive director of the Washington-based Black Education Strategy Roundtable. Between the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and school closures, it was a perfect storm of conditions that led many Black parents to reevaluate their relationship with their schools, said Smith.
Once classes were back in person, school systems could have avoided that loss by focusing on building better relationships with families and focusing on academic progress, he said.
“We have a system that gets rewarded despite failing Black students. Districts in the school system can and need to do better,” he said.
When it comes to creating policy and changing the system to improve outcomes for students of color, being in the majority could be helpful, Navas said, and make it harder to dance around racial inequities. Compared to white students, most kids of color in the state score lower on average than every academic outcome measurable, a gap that has only grown in the pandemic.
To push better policy forward, Navas said, it’s time to dig more deeply into the nuances of demographic data and move beyond programs that simply address racial inequity as a poverty issue instead of an experience that can vary from population to population.
Asian students, for example, often score in the highest brackets of educational outcomes. But this obscures the difficulties faced by students of Southeast Asian heritage, many of whom are refugees or children of recent refugees. Some research also shows that Black students have lower educational outcomes on average than white students with the same income level.
“We cannot use income as a proxy anymore for race,” said Navas. “We have to look at race directly.”
This demographic change made UW professor David Knight also think about how slowly school-funding models tend to change.
“Maybe this milestone is going to finally start to remind people that we should have a more tailored school finance system,” he said.
It’s not common to allot funds to schools based on students’ race, but it isn’t impossible. Schools receive funds based on the number of English learners they enroll, for example, which can be a proxy for race.
While the population shift could move things in a positive direction, Smith said, the backlash is already here. He sees the uproar over teaching about racism in schools as a response to the perception that white people are losing power. That push has already arrived in Washington, where a couple of bills seeking to limit teaching about racism have been filed in the Legislature in recent years.
“Black students are a shrinking percentage of this group here, but it still doesn’t change the fact that how we treat Black students will affect how we treat all students,” Smith said. “Until we address those realities” for Black students, he said, education outcomes are “going to remain poor for all students.”
The population shift has already changed the game for many school districts. Community-based organizations have stepped in where culturally responsive help is needed.
“Our enrollments have increased drastically,” said Liz Huizar, who directs youth services for El Centro de La Raza, a Seattle-based civil rights organization that provides translation, cultural education and after-school programs in the King County area.
Services began with Seattle schools and then expanded as the organization received calls from southern and eastern King County school districts.
While the organization has historically catered to Mexican families, its educational programs now enroll growing numbers of Central American and Caribbean students. The population shift has inspired a retooling within the organization itself.
“In the past we used to rely on Chicano pride … Now the real emphasis is on centering on place for all the people,” Huizar said.
The services often help families and students navigate two cultures while schooling at the same time. School districts can adapt to the needs of these students by incorporating things such as ethnic studies and employing a more racially diverse teaching staff, she said.
Other areas of Washington state, such as in Central and Eastern Washington, need just as much investment, said Liz Huizar. They have also seen a rise in the number of Latino students.
The numbers might be there, but the state hasn’t caught up yet.