Trump’s attempt to erase race from the Census will harm children

Children don’t live in averages. They live in neighborhoods, counties, cities and states, where their experiences and opportunities can differ dramatically.

Serving communities with good governance requires knowing what is actually happening on the ground. That’s true whether you’re a member of Congress deciding how to allocate federal funding, a governor directing resources for struggling school districts or a mayor trying to understand why one neighborhood is thriving while another isn’t. 

None of that work is possible without reliable, detailed information. And for more than 200 years, nearly since our nation’s founding and enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, the census has been the backbone of reliable information about who lives in the U.S. It has helped policymakers, community leaders and organizations like ours that are dedicated to child well-being answer two essential questions: How are children and families doing? And where are they facing the greatest challenges?

That information system is now at risk. A newly proposed Census Bureau rule would make several significant changes to how the decennial census counts and describes the nation’s population, with particular implications for children in communities that have historically been harder to count. 

Among them, the rule would eliminate questions about race and ethnicity on the decennial census — the one population count Congress requires every 10 years, and an important bedrock for population estimates used in improving accuracy in other federal surveys. Removing these questions from the census would make it much harder to access data on race and ethnicity consistently and........

© The Hill