NY1 Follow Up: Racial Classification Of City Students Based On Clinton-Era Guidelines
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As NY1 first reported last week, Friday was the deadline for every public school in the city to collect information on every student's race and get that information to the Department of Education. Local officials now complain that the controversial new policy is based on outdated, 13-year-old guidelines. NY1's Education reporter Lindsey Christ filed the following report. This year, the city had to meet new requirements for reporting the race of public schools students, and local officials told NY1 that the requirements are insensitive and seem outdated.
As it turns out, the "new" guidelines were issued in 1997 by then-President Bill Clinton's administration. It has just taken 13 years to get them implemented, and nobody is happy with the result.
On the form due last Friday, parents were first asked whether or not their child is Hispanic. Then they had to choose their race from only five options: American Indian, Asian, Pacific Islander, white and black. Parents can choose one or more of those.
If parents do not choose, the school has to choose for them.
NY1 reported last week that Schools Chancellor Joel Klein was so unhappy with the policy that he wrote a letter of objection to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
Klein said the policy "may well be problematic and confusing for many of our community members."
Duncan had not responded to the August letter until Wednesday, when he was asked about NY1's story on WNYC Radio.
"I hear the concerns and it's something that I've asked my team to delve into," said Duncan.
Several politicians say the requirements are so out-of-date that they need to be changed, to reflect what's on the latest U.S. Census form.
Like the school form, the 2010 U.S. Census asks whether a person is Hispanic and then what race they are, but then lets people get more specific. They can say, for example, that they are Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban or they can write in whatever they want.
The census question on race has 15 options, instead of just five, and it also lets people write in another choice.
“The problem with what is happening with the Department of Education locally, as mandated by the federal, is that it really doesn't follow those battles that we were already able to win with the census and is trying to reinvent the wheel," said Bronx Congressman Jose Serrano. "It's trying to draw people into neat little boxes where they might not fit."
As of the Friday deadline, the city still needed to collect, or assign, race and ethnicity data for almost 7,000 students.
By next year, officials at many different levels of government say they hope this policy that was 13 years in the making will already be revised.