Education Week reports in its December 11 issue that the landscape of diversity is about to become much more diverse. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has ruled that all federal agencies must begin using the new, more flexible racial and ethnic categories that were first used on the 2000 Census forms. Recall that the new definitions, allowing people to select more than one category, now allow for 63 different combinations.
Things get even trickier when it comes to the No Child Left Behind Act.
Under that law, schools are required to report student performance by race and ethnicity, and those outcomes can have a major impact on schools’ reputations. The data, broken down along racial lines, is a factor in evaluating a school’s “adequate yearly progress.” That measure, in turn, determines if a school is labeled in need of improvement and thus is subject to a number of penalties.
Because the stakes are so high, states are wondering how to compare data using the differing racial classifications of the old and the new systems….
If racial preferences are allowed to continue, it is also easy to imagine a new generation of political and legal conflict over determining which of the 63 racial/ethnic groups are “underrepresented” and what to do about it. I suspect that alone might make colorblindness seem to be an ideal whose time has returned.
I’ve had a few debates with a libertarian friend who abhors the new census, and in general abhors surrendering personal information to the federal government. Being about forty years younger, I am more receptive, and I can see possible benefits in such tabulation. I think that one possible benefit is that the shear number of categories tends to dilute the problem…that is, there’s simply too many different possibilities to raise many new issues, because each new category will contain tiny amounts of people that it represents. If anything, the major preference arguments will still revolve around African American, caucasian, Latino, and Asian representational levels. However, these new categories might even lower the absolute amounts of “white,” “black,” etc.. That might help show the futility of quotas in itself. In a perfect world, people would realize that when we’re talking about racial disparaties, we’re really talking about disparaties that result from economic and cultural gaps in our society. IM-not-so-HO.