 Race and Ethnicity and Change, Oh My
Daniel Burch, Raburn County Schools
During the Technology Leadership Forum, one of the sessions entitled SIS Sub-Committee Update focused primarily on the changes in the ethnicity coding which is reported to DOE. These changes include both students and staff. In Georgia these changes take effect fall 2009 and will create several challenges for school systems. This article will address some of these challenges.
One might ask, “Why make a change to a data element which we have collected for two decades?” The problem started with the 1960 United States census where it was determined that the Hispanic/Latino population was undercounted by several million people. The federal government felt steps should be taken to correct this error and now, almost fifty years later, the new policy and procedures are in place.
The new rules break the single ethnicity element into two parts. There is a new ethnicity element which is collected with the yes/no question: Are you Hispanic/Latino? There is also a new race element where a person will choose all races that apply. The choices for this element are American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, and White. You will notice that the old option “Multiracial” is no longer a choice.
All school systems in Georgia use electronic Student Information Systems (SIS) and Human Resource/Accounting systems. All vendors of these systems have already made or are in the process of making changes to their software to accommodate these new rules. All of this work will have to be completed very soon to allow school personnel the time needed to input the data.
Schools will use different methods to collect the student data needed for these new elements. Some are now in the process of sending a paper survey home to be completed by parents. Once these are returned, data clerks will enter the data into the school system’s SIS program. The same type of survey is also used to collect staff information. Others have elected to move the data currently held in the ethnicity field directly into the new elements. These schools will have to manually deal with the multiracial option since it is no longer a choice. These schools will also have to print out Student Profile sheets which include these new fields for all students and have them verified by the parent. This will give the parent the opportunity to make any changes they wish.
Before this data can be reported or used in other programs, it will have to be consolidated into its two required parts: ethnicity which is the answer to the yes/no question and the race code. This creates several scenarios:
If a person answers “No” to the question and checked a single race, say White, then their fields would be: Ethnicity=N and Race=W.
- If a person answers “No” to the question and checked several races, then their fields would be: Ethnicity = N and Race = “More than one race”
- If a person answers “Yes” to the question, then their race is automatically set to Hispanic no matter how many other races may be checked. Therefore their fields would be: Ethnicity = Y and Race = H
This last scenario is the one that I feel will cause problems for Georgia schools. Since all students who answer “Yes” will be marked as Hispanic, there will be many students that were marked as multi-racial under the old rules which will now be classified as Hispanic/Latino. This could very well affect AYP numbers for many schools and school systems.
As the Data Specialist, the transition to this new format will be my responsibility. I feel we have already begun addressing some of the issues but data and reports will have to be monitored closely over the next few years to determine the extent these changes will have on local school systems.
Return to Administrative Articles |