Education - Student Demographics

In 2000 approximately forty-seven million public school students were enrolled in kindergarten through twelfth grade in the United States. According to The Condition of Education, 2002 (Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics, 2003), approximately 39 percent of these students belonged to a minority group. Hispanics (16.6 percent) and African-Americans (16.6 percent) accounted for the largest number of minority students in public schools, and these figures represent a significant increase since the early 1970s, when white students made up nearly 78 percent of the public school population. (See Table 7.1.)