Chapter 2: Language, Culture, and Education

The United States is a country of incredible cultural and linguistic di-versity. This trend of ethnic and racial population diversification contin-ues most rapidly among the nation's young and school-aged children. California has already been transformed into a minority/majority state; 52 % of today's students come from "minority " categories, and, in less than 2 score years, 70 % of California's students will be non-White and one half will speak a language other than English on their first day of school. Nationwide, White, non-Hispanic student enrollment has de-creased since 1976 by 13%, or a total of 5 million students. In the same temporal period, the U.S. student population has decreased from 43 mil-lion to 41 million students (prekindergarten to Grade 12), while (a) mi-nority enrollment as a proportion of total enrollment in elementary and secondary education rose from 24 % in 1976 to 30 % in 1986; (b) Hispanic enrollment, as a proportion of total enrollment, increased from 6.4 % in 1976 to 10 % in 1986, and the number of Hispanic students rose from almost