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By Ellen Nakashima
Washington
Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 28, 1998; Page A01
At some point -- Suzanne Rolis de Barr
doesn't know exactly when -- a Montgomery County school official
decided her daughter Isabel was white.
But Barr, who is part Hispanic, was furious
when the 8-year-old was assigned to a school outside her Takoma
Park neighborhood because of her "white" classification. When she
asked that her child be allowed to go to a school closer to home,
officials said no, they needed Isabel to help increase the white
population of her new school.
"I never check off race, and someone just
assumed that's what she was and who she was," said Barr, who describes
herself as looking like a "WASP from Connecticut" and her daughter
as blond with brown eyes. "It's denying you for the wrong reason."
Barr appealed and won -- but only because
she convinced school officials that sending Isabel to the school
outside her neighborhood would be a hardship.
Montgomery's routine classification of
students by a single race or ethnicity is a long-standing practice
in many school systems, rooted in an effort to collect data that
will help officials guard against segregation and raise minority
student performance. But the practice is giving way as critics such
as Barr raise their voices and the growing diversity of the student
population outstrips officials' ability to neatly classify it.
"We have to face the fact that the population
is becoming more and more diverse each year. We can't force people
into categories that don't really describe them and force them to
deny a part of their identity," said Isabelle Horon, chairman of
the Maryland Task Force on Multiracial Designations.
A rising share of Montgomery students already
are checking "Other" when asked to identify themselves by race or
ethnicity, or leaving the answer blank, when they take the SATs.
Fifteen percent of seniors did so last year. By 2002, Maryland and
its public schools -- following the lead of the federal government
-- will allow students to identify themselves by more than one race
and ethnicity when they register for classes. Other states have
taken similar steps or plan to do so.
The changes may complicate efforts to set
school attendance boundaries, analyze test scores and reprogram
computers as school officials attempt to account for the new racial
and ethnic combinations.
"I think everyone has a right to classify
themselves as they see themselves. That does make it hard to find
out things like are the schools segregated or not," said Christina
Gomez, an associate professor of sociology at Dartmouth College.
The College Board, which administers the
Scholastic Assessment Test and reports test results by race, is
already puzzling over how it will parse the data when it starts
allowing students to choose more than one race or ethnic group in
coming years. In a test run last month, it found that 4.5 percent
of 450,000 students taking the tests identified themselves as being
of more than one race or ethnicity, using 186 combinations.
"When we report the average scores of African
American students, who do we now include in that group? Everyone
who indicated African American in [any] one of the categories?"
asked Brian O'Reilly, executive director of testing programs. "Or
the students who say they're half-white or half-African American:
does their score get counted as only half a score in the white category?"
In Virginia, Fairfax County already attempts
to grant students some flexibility by allowing them to identify
themselves as "multiracial" or "undesignated." But when reporting
demographic data to the state, school officials end up reclassifying
these students -- 3,311 this year -- by divvying them up among the
five standard racial and ethnic categories according to the student
body's overall makeup.
The changes could prove to be a logistical
nightmare, one as "massive" as the Year 2000 computer problem, warned
Julian Katz, testing director in Frederick County, Md. "You'll have
to rewrite every program -- probably thousands -- that has ever
been written that has a racial code," he said. "It's not an easy
fix."
It's necessary to give people more flexibility
in identifying themselves, officials say, not just to reflect society
more accurately but also to deal more sensitively with a complex
issue: the many ways that multiracial Americans define themselves.
"I feel mixed, basically," said Montgomery
student Aniel Mundra, whose mother is white and whose father is
from India. "It really is a terrible psychological thing every time
you have to choose one half over the other."
Others, however, are comfortable identifying
with one racial or ethnic group -- underscoring how identity is
partly a matter of personal experience.
Chloe Arnold, whose mother is white and
whose father is black, said she has no problem making a choice.
"I'm perceived as an African American. Therefore, I have to understand
my culture and how I am treated because of the color of my skin,"
said Arnold, a 1998 graduate of Wheaton High who now attends Columbia
University. "The bottom line is when you walk out on the street,
the perception people have of you deems how you have to survive."
Still others recommend a pragmatic course.
Highland View Elementary Principal JoAnn Steckler said parents sometimes
ask her for advice on what race to select. "Very honestly, sometimes
I'll recommend that they go with the minority because there are
more opportunities," she said.
Some critics say the debate obscures the
more fundamental question of whether to classify by race at all.
At a time when affirmative action programs are under attack nationwide,
some say, the real issue is whether race and ethnicity will be allowed
as factors in school decisions in the future.
The move to accept multiple categories
"may be a step toward the day when we don't collect racial information
at all because the population is so diverse there's no reason to
do it," Horon said.
However, Harvard University education professor
Gary Orfield said racial classification, though artificial, is still
needed as long as segregation and discrimination exist.
"The fact that you have increasing numbers
of multiracial kids who might be unfairly forced into one category
or another doesn't mean you don't need race-based policies to help
kids who are still subject to a very unequal education and to segregation,"
said Orfield, who stirred controversy several years ago when he
reported that Montgomery schools still were segregated despite measures
to achieve racial balance voluntarily.
Last year, Montgomery Superintendent Paul
L. Vance proposed having Hispanic students identify themselves by
race. That would raise the system's percentage of white students
to 65, since most of the county's Hispanics are white.
But he would prefer scrapping race classification
altogether. "I see it as a divisive force," said Vance, the first
black superintendent of a system that now educates 128,000 children
who speak 114 languages. "I see citizens afraid of diversity. I
say it's time to put an end to it."
Vance thinks educators ought to focus more
on socioeconomic status as a factor to link to students' performance.
"Tracking by race doesn't mean anything," he said. "Unfortunately
it's used to vilify and condemn African American kids, when it doesn't
apply to all of them."
Still, he said, he is "duty-bound" to uphold
racial and ethnic balance policies driven in large part by state
and federal laws, as in the case of his office's decision to deny
Barr's transfer request.
Yet even as the rules of classification
become more flexible, many young people of mixed heritage continue
to identify with one racial or ethnic group.
Tony Johnson, whose parents bequeathed
him African American, Chinese, Jamaican, native American and a smidgen
of Scottish blood, could be a poster child for the new diversity.
But he considers himself black.
"When I walk down the street," said the
17-year-old Blair High School student, "people don't say, 'He's
Chinese.' . . . If you look black, [and] you hang around black people,
[then] you are black."
Noting that many of his friends consider
themselves African American despite having mixed ancestry, he added,
"A lot of black people feel they have been rejected by whatever
other side they have in them -- white, Asian, Hispanic -- and they
identify more with black people because . . . that's something they
can really hold onto."
Jane Woodburn, a Chinese American Montgomery
school administrator whose husband is white, was amused to pull
up her two daughters' computer records one day and find out that
one had been classified white, the other Asian.
"The one that was listed as white, I had
it changed back because I felt that she's part Asian," she said.
Her husband "just laughed" at her cultural stand, she said.
Blair High senior Mary Anne Anderson, who
is part Korean and part black, said the conventions of racial identification
-- the adage that "one drop of blood" is enough for a person to
claim a particular racial background -- are mystifying.
"A lot of people have told me that because
I'm part black, I'm black and that's it," she said. "I don't think
that's right because they don't know how it is to be multiracial."
The 17-year-old has decided to write in
"biracial" or "other" on her college applications. She has hung
Korean calendars and ornamental weavings on her bedroom wall and
reveres the works of black authors her father shared with her. She
says her identity is a hybrid of both cultures.
"I have both those parts of me," she said.
"I have to juggle them. Most people don't have to do that."
© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company
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