Demographics and Teacher Education

Editor's Note: The editorial team of the Journal of Teacher Education asked Professor Hodgkinson to write a brief overview of U.S. demographics and teacher education that would help to introduce this issue of the journal on Demography and Democracy. In a later issue of JTE, a full-length article by Dr. Hodgkinson will explore these issues in more detail. The current article has two functions: first, to review demographic data, particularly from Census 2000; and second, to explore the relevance of this material for education and, more specifically, for teacher education. DEMOGRAPHICS Think of yourself living in the year 1900. The average American was 21 years old; life expectancy was only 47. We cannot imagine the infant mortality rate--in New York City, for every birth of a child, there was the death of a child--one to one. (Charles Dickens, describing London, mentioned that half the funerals in London were for children younger than 10.) Today, the average American is 38 and will live to 78, although there are differences by race and ethnicity. The major reason for virtually doubling the span of life in only 100 years was the use of vaccines that eliminated childhood diseases as a major cause of death. Now we are seeing the benefits of geriatrics as well, with 57,000 Americans older than 100, 1.4 million in their 90s, and middle age defined as 50 to 75. Today, in a nation of 281 million people, we find that only 15% of our 1 million immigrants a year come from Europe; a vast majority come from South or Central America and Asia. Ten states contain more than half the population, leaving 40 states to compete for the other half; the White fertility rate (1.7 births per female over the life span) is not enough to replace the White population, and Whites are aging out of the childbearing years. Immigrants and minority citizens are much younger, just starting families. When we look at our partners in the developed world, most are experiencing, or will soon experience, rapid aging and declining populations. We in the United States would be also, were it not for the higher fertility rates of our immigrant and minority populations. (Similar trends can be found throughout the world--the developing nations are much younger and have more children than the developed nations, although they too are declining in family size. Many of these nations are not developing in terms of health, education, and economic access to goods and services; and globalization is the province of a handful of the more than 200 nations in the world. The average American can buy a computer with 1 month's wages; a Bangladeshi worker would have to work for 12 years to buy the same computer. The distance between rich and poor is increasing in the United States and in the world as well.) But the one thing at which we are superb is absorbing amazing numbers of immigrants very quickly, allowing their children and grandchildren to rise through the social structure. It took three generations for Europeans in the 1900s; it takes three generations for Hispanics and Asians today. About 40% of members of Congress today have immigrant grandparents. Nothing is distributed evenly across the nation--not race, not age, not religion, not jobs, not wealth, not even crime. In fact, states are getting more different from each other as time goes on, just as pressure increases for a single national high-stakes test with a single cut score needed for high school graduation anywhere in the United States. (National goals are fine, but each state must chart its own path toward meeting those goals. As this is being written, Americans are trying to make our educational system just like the Japanese system, whereas the Japanese system, beset with truancy, violence, drugs, and students saying that they hate math and science as well as school itself, seems to be developing more interest in working with each student as an individual. We are not very good at their monolithic system, and they certainly are not very good at our freewheeling style! …