Should we track the race of students taking standardized tests? | Hacker News Reader

Should we track the race of students taking standardized tests?

blogs.law.harvard.edu

3 pointstc3 comments

I always decline to answer. I dont think the answers are meaningful, except perhaps in medicine, where there are real differences. Income will tell you more about a person's chances. Give help by income; it will help all the disadvantaged by whatever classification. Otherwise the data will be misused by those with an agenda.

Declining to answer is always a legal response. But it gets reported as data in different ways, depending on who is asking. For a person applying for a government benefit (e.g., food stamps), an application without race or ethnicity filled in usually has that filled in by "sight identification" by a caseworker. For a student applying to college, the response of not responding is simply reported as "race/ethnicity unknown." Some colleges have very high percentages of enrolled students who are reported to the federal government as "race/ethnicity unknown,"

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1061012037-post4.html

which I think is a good social trend. But, sure enough, the federal government has a regulation from a year or so ago, to take effect in the next school year (2009-2010) that will remove from college application forms the current notice many have that the question is optional. The feds want to gather the data. Students will have to know the law well to know that they may freely decline to answer the questions. The full federal regulation for Department of Education data-gathering on race and ethnicity can be found at

http://www.ed.gov/legislation/FedRegister/other/2007-4/10190...

I'm a baby boomer, which is another way of saying that I'm a good bit older than most people who post on HN. I distinctly remember the day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated--the most memorable day of early childhood for many people in my generation--and I remember the "long hot summer" and other events of the 1960s civil rights movement.

One early memory I have is of a second grade classmate (I still remember his name, which alas is just common enough that it is hard to Google him up) who moved back to Minnesota with his northern "white" parents after spending his early years in Alabama. He told me frightening stories about Ku Klux Klan violence to black people (the polite term in those days was "Negroes"), including killing babies, and I was very upset to hear about that kind of terrorism happening in the United States. So I followed subsequent news about the civil rights movement, including the activities of Martin Luther King, Jr. up to his assassination, with great interest.

It happens that I had a fifth-grade teacher, a typically pale, tall, and blonde Norwegian-American, who was a civil rights activist and who spent her summers in the south as a freedom rider. She used to tell our class about how she had to modify her car (by removing the dome light and adding a locking gas cap) so that Klan snipers couldn't shoot her as she opened her car door at night or put foreign substances into her gas tank. She has been a civil rights activist all her life, and when I Googled her a few years ago and regained acquaintance with her, I was not at all surprised to find that she is a member of the civil rights commission of the town where I grew up.

One day in fifth grade we had a guest speaker in our class, a young man who was then studying at St. Olaf College through the A Better Chance (ABC)

http://www.abetterchance.org/

affirmative action program. (To me, the term "affirmative action" still means active recruitment of underrepresented minority students, as it did in those days, and I have always thought that such programs are a very good idea, as some people have family connections to selective colleges, but many other people don't.) During that school year (1968-1969), there was a current controversy in the United States about whether the term "Negro" or "Afro-American" or "black" was most polite. So a girl in my class asked our visitor, "What do you want to be called, 'black' or 'Afro-American'?" His answer was, "I'd rather be called Henry." Henry's answer to my classmate's innocent question really got me thinking.

So to agree with the submitted post, it is in some sense a defeat of the civil rights movement that we think of "black" as a category rather than as one arbitrary grouping of individuals among many possible groupings. The headline for the story about the recent release of the fifth AP Report to the Nation

http://www.collegeboard.com/html/aprtn/pdf/ap_report_to_the_...

could just as well have been about which state had the highest performance (Maryland) as about ethnic group differences in performance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com