Abstrakt
This article deals with the collection of ethnic statistics focused on the number of Roma pupils in various types of Czech elementary schools that has been undertaken since 2009. Since then, this collection has grown into a large annual monitoring process that is conducted in every elementary school in the country.
Simultaneously, this development is attracting growing attention from opponents of such ethnic monitoring. The most provocative element is the method of the counting, which employs for the first time in the Czech democratic era attribution of ethnicity from the outside instead of the usual method of self-identification.
I argue that this method is both legal and legitimate considering, on the one hand, the inadequacy of the national census and, on the other hand, the objective to lift discriminatory barriers to the inclusion of the Roma pupils into mainstream education. However, I insist that the main shortcoming of this kind of ethnic monitoring is the lack of an appropriate terminology.
Thus, it is difficult to "place" the Roma in "their" statistics as there are no unambiguous definitions and criteria for how to identify them. Together with the important (and often negatively perceived) role that ethnicity plays in Central and Eastern Europe, this is the major factor generating criticism for the counting of Roma pupils.