When the new ISAT scores were released, Idaho Ed News used the state’s official reporting to share a familiar breakdown: top-performing districts tended to have higher percentages of white students, while lower-performing districts had fewer white students. This mirrors how the state and federal government report the data, but these standard categories can also limit what we truly learn about Idaho’s students.

At face value, the numbers seem to suggest that whiteness itself is somehow tied to better academic performance. But in Idaho, where every district is majority white, this framing doesn’t tell the whole story and risks sending the wrong message.

Here’s the reality:

• Even in the lowest-performing districts, white students make up 65% of enrollment. So, the idea that schools are underperforming because they have “fewer white students” is misleading.
• What’s really happening is that performance gaps line up with poverty, disability, and language barriers. These are all factors that often intersect with race but are not caused by race.
• Students of color in Idaho are more likely to live in poverty, attend rural underfunded schools, or come from families who relocated from another country and are adjusting to U.S. schooling and language. Those inequities, not racial identity itself, drive the differences we see.

The way we currently report race doesn’t help us see this clearly. The category “Two or More Races,” for example, makes multiracial students invisible by lumping them together in a way that hides their real experiences. A child who is both Black and White may face very different social and educational dynamics than a child who is Native and White—yet both are reduced to the same checkbox. Catchall categories like “Black” also collapse widely different student realities. For example, an African American student with long family roots in the U.S. may have a very different experience than a student who recently relocated from Africa and is still adjusting to U.S. schooling and language. Instead of shining a light on inequities, these categories blur them. And if the categories are so blurred that we can’t draw useful conclusions—even with best intentions—why report them this way at all?

At a time when national conversations are rolling back DEI efforts and weaponizing race in public discourse, we have to be especially careful about how we frame data. Saying “top districts are whiter” without explaining the structural drivers risks reinforcing the idea that diversity is a liability. That is inaccurate, harmful, and deeply unfair to the students and families working hard every day in Idaho’s schools.

There are better ways to frame the story:

• Highlight cultural and linguistic diversity, especially among students who relocated from other countries and are adapting to new languages and school systems.
• Look at the intersectionality of income, disability, and language status with race, rather than treating each as a silo.
• Call out the hidden assumptions in demographic reporting so readers understand that race is not a risk factor by itself—systemic inequity is.

This matters all the more in Idaho’s current political climate, where legislation such as Senate Bill 1198 has sought to roll back diversity, equity, and inclusion work in higher education. Even if K–12 reporting isn’t directly covered by that bill, the way we frame race data can either reinforce harmful narratives or resist them by pointing to the structural drivers that truly affect student learning.

We need reporting that goes beyond compliance checkboxes and points us toward solutions. If we want to tell the truth about Idaho’s students, we must stop treating whiteness as a stand-in for success and instead focus on the structural barriers that hold kids back, no matter their race.

Myesha Tegen works in institutional research and is pursuing a graduate degree in educational leadership.