New Civil Rights Data Released


Last Updated: March 30, 2012
 

This article appeared in the March 2012 Rural Policy Matters.

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Most everyone agrees that schools should be safe and productive learning environments for all students. Ideally, communities work with schools to develop and implement disciplinary policies that create such environments and are widely believed to be transparent, appropriate, and fair. For schools and communities that are struggling with discipline issues, getting to the ideal takes effort, time, and data.

An important data source was updated this month. The U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights (OCR) has released the much-anticipated second part of the 2009–2010 Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC). This set of self-reported data — some of it broken out by disability status — covers such issues as college and career readiness, discipline, seclusion/restraint, school finance and student retention.  Summary analysis released with the data confirms that minority students and students with disabilities face harsher discipline than other groups of students.

At present, data for 2009 are available on a school and school district basis through the 2009 District or School Reports tab, with the ability to compare districts through the Detailed Data Tab. Longitudinal data and state/national estimations for 2009 are marked "coming soon."

Read more:

OCR’s website for the CRDC:

The Department of Education's press release is here:

You can read a summary of the major findings here:

National press coverage of the data release:


Read more from the March 2012 Rural Policy Matters.