Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Metropolitan Council, a regional planning board representing more than 100 cities and townships in Minnesota, adopted the mandate of producing racial equity indicators. It has created an Equity Advisory Committee to ensure that residents and communities are full partners in making the decisions that affect them. However, nowhere in the strategic plan or the implementation documents is their clarity about precisely how racial or social equity is to be measured. Implicit in the definitions is the notion of reducing inequalities in various transportation, housing and educational outcomes. But equality of opportunities and not equality of relative outcomes are the concepts discussed in the mandate. Many local governments and regional planning boards face this dilemma: their mission statements claim to articulate social (or racial) equity as an aim but their implementation documents fail to detail exactly what they mean by “equity.”

This paper details alternative methodologies for measuring and assessing racial equity and points out the strengths and weaknesses of conventional indicators. The reference point for the analysis is an inventory of 50 different “racial score cards” and similar metrics used throughout the country to capture the salient features of social or racial equity.