The Chronicle News Blog: Report Assails Education Dept. Plan to Change Data Collection on Students’ Race
A new report by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University argues that proposed changes in how the Education Department gathers data on race “would make it extremely difficult, and sometimes impossible,” to conduct meaningful research on students of different races or ethnicities and would likewise hinder efforts to monitor compliance with civil-rights laws.
In an attempt to reflect the growing diversity of students attending the nation’s education institutions, the Education Department last month proposed new regulations calling for students to be asked two questions related to race and ethnicity when they fill out forms for the federal government’s data-gathering efforts (The Chronicle, August 9). Students would first be asked whether they are Hispanic, and then be asked to choose among five other designations: American Indian or Alaska native; Asian; black or African-American; native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander; or white. Those who chose two or more designations in response to the second question would be lumped together in the category “two or more races.”
In a report released on Monday, researchers at the Civil Rights Project said the proposed mix-race designation “would be an essentially meaningless category for civil-rights and research purposes” because it would include so many different racial and ethnic combinations. The report projected that the classification changes would result in increases in the number of students identified as Hispanic and would give the false impression that there had been sudden large drops in white, black, American Indian, and Asian enrollments.
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