A principal at a low-performing school in Sacramento, Calif., changed the racial designation of four of his students—students who were classified as black but whose parents had actually marked “mixed race” or no race on their enrollment forms. By doing so, the principal avoided having his school dinged by No Child Left Behind sanctions because there were not enough students in the low-performing “black” category to count.

Obviously, this principal was gaming the system (apparently with the permission of the parents who were responsible for reporting their child’s race). But his actions raise a lot of questions about the use of race in school data and whether we should rely on strict categorizations or even use race as a factor when overwhelming evidence shows family income level and early childhood development has more bearing on a student’s success.

NCLB was designed in large part to expose the discrepancies between the academic performance of white and Asian students and their black and Hispanic peers. And it has done so. At the same time, we are seeing increasing numbers of mixed-race students enter our schools with no universal guidelines on how to categorize them.

A Sacramento Bee analysis showed the impact a few tweaks can make when using data to analyze a school’s performance. Two years of test data for some 6,000 California schools showed that 80 of those initially fell short of their annual NCLB benchmarks but met them after making “demographic corrections.” Of those, 12 schools had changed students’ racial classification, 50 had reclassified English language learners, and 11 had changed student demographics so that an entire group was rendered statistically insignificant.

Several years ago, when NCLB was first taking hold, I asked an elementary principal how she verified the race of her students. She said she didn’t—she couldn’t—because it was all self-reported by parents or guardians. Then she mentioned that even though she was white and her husband had both white and Hispanic ancestry, they classified their high-achieving children as Hispanic to help their schools meet NCLB requirements. It was just another example of how so many children do not fit neatly into racial categories—or in some cases, our assumptions.

We need to find better ways to focus on the truly disadvantaged students who are struggling -- regardless of their race.

Joetta Sack-Min, Associate Editor