NCLB requirements aren't quite catching everyone - not in a ethnic sense, anyway:
Mesa sixth-grader Valeria Quezada, 11, cannot tell the truth when she takes a standardized test and faces questions about her race and ethnicity. She is Hispanic and a first-generation U.S. citizen on her father’s side of the family. But her mother is white and non-Hispanic.
The federal No Child Left Behind law does not allow for this scenario.
Under the law, all public schoolchildren in the United States must identify themselves in one of five racial and ethnic categories when they take tests such as Arizona’s Instrument to Measure Standards. Students may not check more than one box, and "multiracial" or "other" are not options.
"I don’t think they should have to choose," said Valeria’s mother, Michelle Quezada, an instructional aide at Zaharis Elementary S chool where Valeria attends with her second- grade brother. "I get frustrated every time I have to mark one of those boxes, and sometimes I don’t mark any box."
The five standard categories, which the federal government created in 1977 and incorporated into the No Child Left Behind law in 2002, are: White, Black, Hispanic, Asian and American Indian.
This is old-fashioned, but it was done for simplicity's - and statistical - sake. It's hard to understand why neither the reporter, nor anyone interviewed for this article, felt the need to point out that schools are required to show results disaggregated by these five ethnic groups, which explains why the categories are so large and broad. The goal wasn't to come up with categories that would cover every kid (a la the US Census model), but to define them broadly enough that there would be a substantial sample size in each category. If 10 more ethnic groups get added, it would be logical to require schools to meet the target for all of those new groups as well, which would be much more difficult.
And I'd bet that if "Other" were provided as a category for which schools didn't have to show results, quite a few poorly-run schools would be shoving all their bad test-takers into that category.
Tom Horne, state superintendent of public instruction, said the state is only following directions from the federal government and should not be blamed. "I’m opposed to racial categories on standardized tests," Horne said. "I think students learn as individuals and not as members of a racial or ethnic group."
I agree 100% - about the "students learn as individuals" part. One's race does not define one's performance. Not asking about race, however, makes it possible to disguise race-related test scores gaps, which do persist in this country due to inequalities in education and cultural specifics, not to mention the soft bigotry of low expectations. Removing the racial questions smacks too much of a cover-up to me.
Posted by kswygert at October 25, 2004 01:19 PM