IÂ’ve long watched bi-racial/multi-racial kids struggle over how to define themselves when they have been asked to pick one box to check on the annual student survey. How, for example, should my former student whose mother is black and father is Mexican classify herself? What about the son of a Japanese mother and a white father? It is quite a conundrum for some of them, especially since they may not identify with one more than the other.

IÂ’m therefore heartened by this move.

For many families in the District, Montgomery and other local counties that have felt forced to deny a part of their children's heritage, the new way of counting, mandated by the federal government, represents a long-awaited acknowledgment of their identity: Enrollment forms will allow students to identify as both white and American Indian, for example, or black and Asian. But changing labels will make it harder to monitor progress of groups that have trailed in school, including black and Hispanic students.

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Starting in 2010, under Education Department rules approved two years ago to comply with a government-wide policy shift, parents will be able to check all boxes that apply in a two-step questionnaire with reshaped categories. First, they will indicate whether a student is of Hispanic or Latino origin, or not. (The two terms will encompass one group.) Then they will identify a student as one or more of the following: American Indian or Alaska native; Asian; black or African American; native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander; or white.

Believe it or not, this is an improvement for my students. I worked in one school, for example, in which the policy was to count the students on the basis of their father’s race or ethnicity. So to take the first example I gave above, the girl would be Hispanic – but if her father was black and her mother Hispanic, she would be black. I’m familiar of at least one school district, though, that required that any child of a white and a non-white parent be classified as the race of the non-white parent in order to get additional state and federal funding – sort of the “one-drop” rule risen from the dead.

Personally, I favor dropping the entire system of counting students by race. The examples above show the arbitrary nature of such classifications. It would be better to classify by socio-economic status instead, and instead list the race of every student as “human”.

H/T Discriminations

Posted by: Greg at 01:32 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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