Pretty much what Tom said. Racism exists in the real world. Pretending that race doesn’t exist will just allow racism to continue in hiding.
Let’s say a school system has 2000 students in each class and on average 200 of them drop out of school before graduating. Now let’s say that of those 2000 students, 1500 are white and 500 are black. And of the 200 that drop out, 100 are white and 100 are black. These statistics will tell you that black students are three times more likely to drop out than white students. Racial discrimination may not be the problem but you should be checking into the situation to see what the problem is.
However, I suspect that the survey is not making any attempt to make a case for some 19th century definition of race. More likely, the word race is being used to indicate “group of people with some recognizable geographic origin.” Hispanic is clearly not a “race” by any definition that makes sense. Rather, having gotten a category called “race” on the census forms, “Hispanic” is used to indicate anyone living on the North or South American continents south of the Rio Grande River and the Gadsden Purchase plus the inhabitants of several Caribbean islands that were never taken by France or Britain. I suspect that actual immigrants from Spain tend to identify as “white European” rather than “Hispanic.”
The point of lumping Asians together in that area is probably to avoid having too large a category of “other.” It is unlikely that Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Vietnamese, Indians, and Pakistanis have radically different experiences in Southwest Florida. In a different place in the U.S. where there is a very large contingent of one of those groups, breaking them out more carefully probably makes more sense.
Just for clarity’s sake, the groups are proposed by the Federal Department of Education, and adhered to by the Florida BoE. They will be used everywhere, not just in Florida.
If discrimination exists, it’s unlikely to distinguish between someone whose ancestry is Vietnamese and somebody whose ancestry is Korean or between somebody whose ancestry is Mexican and somebody whose ancestry is Columbian. So it makes sense to lump national groups into larger groups like Asian or Hispanic or Black or European.
In the United States (and, for that matter, in every country in the world), the group self-described as Black (along with several other minority groups) have historically underperformed most other groups academically and financially.
This underperformance has been resistant to many efforts to ameliorate it. For instance children of wealthy blacks underperform children of poverty-stricken whites on SAT tests.
In an effort to improve the status of Blacks and other underperforming minority groups, the government has sought to compile data which are used for efforts such as race-based affirmative action or race-based appropriations and distributions of public funds and programs. This cannot be done without an effort to collect those self-descriptions.