Workforce Language Services

You can’t get much more straightforward than check boxes on applications.  Unless those check boxes refer to ethnicity or race and you are one of the millions of people in the U.S. who could check off multiple boxes to describe yourself.  Washington area schools are allowing new students to describe themselves as multiracial yet soem are concerned that this system will make it more difficult to track populations which historically fal behind.

Many civil rights advocates agree that it’s necessary to document the growing number of multiracial students, but they say these categories will mask valuable information about race that could be used to analyze educational challenges some groups face. They say it would be more accurate to report the data in detail, with racial and ethnic combinations.

“If we don’t know that some multiracial, Hispanic and black students are doing worse,” said Melissa Herman, a sociologist at Dartmouth College, “we can conveniently ignore that they are doing worse.”

Education Department officials have said the new rules strike a balance, providing more details about students without creating an overly cumbersome reporting system.

I understand their concerns about losing critical data that may allow districts to provide more assistance to populations that are lagging behind.  But being multiracial is more and more common, and this argument really pushes that fact to the side. 

To read the entire Washington Post article, click here.