Worries Surface in Racial-Identity Comments

Proposed guidelines would allow students to select ‘multiracial.’

State and school officials, advocacy organizations, and members of Congress have raised objections to proposed federal guidelines for collecting and reporting the race and ethnicity of students, contending that the changes would distort, and in some cases obscure, the true number of students belonging to different minority populations.

Those concerns were included in more than 170 public comments submitted to the U.S. Department of Education since the guidelines were published in the Federal Register Aug. 7. The comment period ended Sept. 21.

Under the proposal, schools would be required to allow students for the first time to identify themselves as multiracial—a change that many critics and supporters of the guidelines alike agree is needed to reflect the varied racial makeup of the school population. It would also have states, for the first time, report students as multiracial...