Civil rights groups are opposing the U.S. Department of Education’s plan to change the way colleges and K-12 schools have collected information about the race and ethnicity of their students for the past four decades. Higher education groups, though, have for the most part gone along with the proposal.
The changes, civil rights groups charge, would make it appear that there are more Hispanics and fewer African-Americans and Whites enrolled. The groups foresee difficulties tracking the academic achievement of minorities and independently monitoring compliance with civil rights laws.
The Education Department says its draft plan, released in August to comply with governmentwide rules adopted in 1997, will provide a more accurate count of the number of Hispanics. The new system will also tally mixed-race students for the first time. The department says its Office for Civil Rights would have access to sufficient information to enforce anti-discrimination laws.
Under current rules, colleges and schools identify how many of their students fall into one of five categories: Black, White, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander and Native American/Alaska Native. That information is then conveyed to the department each year.
The proposed changes, to be implemented by 2009, would allow students to first identify themselves as either Hispanic/Latino or not. Only non-Hispanics would then check as many as five races that are applicable. Pacific Islanders would shift into a new category, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, separating them from Asians.
How the racial-ethnic breakdown is reported to the department would change in one way. Educational institutions would total how many non-Hispanics checked more than one box and put them into a new category, “Two or more races.”
Which races those students identify would not be reported because, the department says, separate accounting of the large number of possible combinations would burden institutions.
