Is Kentucky’s student racial mix really Southern?

The Southern Educational Foundation just issued “A New Diverse Majority,” a report on demographic changes in the public school student body. The report helps further a case I’ve been making some time about Kentucky – we don’t have a lot of minority students here.

In fact, as this graphical map from the Southern Educational Foundation shows, we have one of the lowest percentages of minority students in the entire country. We don’t look “Southern” at all.


As the Bluegrass Institute has pointed out before, Kentucky’s heavy white advantage makes it difficult to develop an accurate picture of how we really do in state-to-state education comparisons.

For example, because the other races score notably lower than whites, states with a lot of white students often look better than they really should when overall scores from assessments like the National Assessment of Educational Progress are compared.

You just have to look deeper when the national student demographic chart is as full of different colors as the one the Southern Educational Foundation just published. Simplistic comparisons of overall scores just can’t give an accurate picture.