Elizabeth Roman, the daughter of farm-workers, believes that checking 'Latino' on college application forms provided her with financial, academic and social support. The Stanford student is doing her practicum at Comprecare Health Clinic in San Jose.

Elizabeth Román wasn't considered college material, even though she took honors courses in high school. So she enrolled in community college, studied hard and eventually earned degrees in biology and communications at San Jose State University.

She also got help from something that would be outlawed under Proposition 54, a measure on the Oct. 7 recall ballot that would prohibit the state from collecting and using racial and ethnic data. Checking "Latino'' on college forms, she said, brought her the academic, financial and social support she needed as the daughter of farmworker parents who only attended grade school.

Román's experience drives at the heart of the contentious initiative created by Ward Connerly, the University of California regent who also crafted the successful 1996 campaign to ban affirmative action. The collection of racial and ethnic data, he believes, is merely an artifact of a bygone era of racial preferences.

But a look at practices in the areas of education, health and policing found that the information remains central to documenting discrimination, determining disease incident rates and evaluating student achievement. While Connerly says the proposition would allow for some collection of racial data, experts say much will be left for the courts to decide.

Proposition 54 has rekindled the heated debate over how to address California's achievement gap in public education, where previous laws already prohibit schools and universities from considering race in admissions or placement. Many schools instead use socioeconomic measures to reach out to disadvantaged students.

Most public educators, however, say they must collect racial and ethnic data to see whether they are meeting the needs of those students, who continue to be disproportionately black and Latino.

"There would be no data to work with and if you don't see the problems, you don't see the progress,'' said George Castro, associate dean of San Jose State's College of Science and Román's mentor. "We would be totally blind.''

To Connerly, Román is a perfect example of why his measure is needed. Students should receive special consideration based on measures such as family income or parents' education level, which have nothing to do with race.

"It's based on income, class, whether a student's parents went to school. It's based on neighborhoods,'' he said of student achievement. "There are ways of getting that information without saying, `Are you black?' ''

Some educators agree.

"There's no Hispanic way of knowing, or black way of knowing or white way of knowing,'' said Matt Cox, a Pacific Research Institute policy fellow who has studied low-income schools with high standardized test scores. "All students thrive if you have the components'' found in those successful schools.

Proposition 54 says the state cannot collect or use information on a person's race, ethnicity, color or national origin in public education, contracting and employment. It also applies to all other state agencies unless they receive legislative approval by a two-thirds vote.

The measure has exemptions for data collection that is required by federal law or needed to receive federal funds, for medical research and for some law enforcement and prison duties. It also exempts until at least 2014 the state Department of Fair Employment and Housing, which enforces equal opportunity laws.

While Connerly and his opponents are bitterly divided over how Proposition 54 would affect health care, they basically agree that educators would lose access to much of their research data.

Public colleges and universities could not collect racial or ethnic data on prospective students or on students such as Román who take advantage of education outreach or loan-forgiveness programs.

"I'm living proof that programs targeting race help people succeed,'' said the 28-year-old Santa Clara resident, who is in simultaneous graduate programs at San Jose State and Stanford Medical School.

The Legislative Analyst's Office, which does an independent review of initiatives, says a lot of education data still would be collected as part of federal education requirements. But the State Department of Education would lose key information on how students are performing in science, history and writing, subject areas where the federal government does not collect data, department spokesman Rick Miller said.

Under Proposition 54, the department also could not analyze schools' standardized test data by racial and ethnic groups, and school districts would no longer be able to track which high school students, by race, are taking the courses necessary to qualify for the University of California and California State University systems.

While 58 percent of Asian and 40 percent of white high school graduates meet the requirements, only about one quarter of black and Latino graduates do.

Some educators fear they would have no way to measure progress.

In 1995, 11 percent of Latino students in the San Jose Unified School District completed high school requirements for the UC system. After increasing graduation requirements for all students, half of the district's Latino graduates met the UC requirements last spring, while dropout rates remained the same, according to a study by Castro.

"Of the 23 largest school districts in the state, San Jose Unified is second in API scores overall,'' said Deputy Superintendent Don Iglesias, referring to the state's ranking of schools based on standardized test results. "But we come in ninth for Latino kids so, of course, we want to look at that difference and what programs would make up that difference . . . Why we wouldn't we want to know that?''