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The U.S. Department of Education’s (Department) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is pleased to release the 2017-18 Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC). This data, which is self-reported and certified by 17,604 public school districts and 97,632 public schools and educational programs, has been collected and published biennially by OCR since 1968. It is a universal collection of data related to OCR’s civil rights enforcement responsibilities at Pre-K through 12th grade levels.
The 2017-2018 CRDC report provides a broad array of topics and requires school districts and their schools to collect and input as many as 1,700 data points. This information is used by OCR, as well as schools, researchers, parents, and other stakeholders. Among the data collected, parents and students can find information on enrollment, various advance placement and math courses offered, gifted and talented programs and data on school characteristics. OCR has traditionally achieved very high overall response rates for the CRDC, and the response rate for the 2017-18 collection was 99.81%. The CRDC includes data submitted by traditional public schools, charter schools and magnet schools. School districts directly benefit from the data submitted through the CRDC, often utilizing the data to both compare their results to previous years – and comparing their data to data submitted by other schools.
The 2017-2018 CRDC also utilized more data quality reviews, and contains technical enhancements in several categories, including the identification and rectification of anomalous data reporting by participating schools for increased overall accuracy.
The CRDC website includes many useful tools which display district or school data about key issues through tables and charts, for the current CRDC and/or multiple prior collections at the same time. The CRDC website can also be used to search data by school and school district; it includes detailed data tables and offers data analysis tools to compare school and district information and analyze trends over the years. This year, ED modernized the website’s user interface and infrastructure, making it look and function better than ever before. The new website has an updated look, has a Quick Search function and is faster. Now all content will be accurately displayed on all types of devices (e.g., phones, tablets, and desktops). The new website for the 2017-18 release is up to current World Wide Web Consortium standards (http://www.w3.org/consortium) and is fully compliant with section 508.
For your reference, OCR used CRDC data to produce two issue briefs that reflect the Secretary’s priorities regarding inappropriate restraint & seclusion affecting students with disabilities as well as sexual violence, which can be found here: Restraint & Seclusion Issue Brief; Sexual Violence Issue Brief.
The full CRDC data set is available at: https://ocrdata.ed.gov/.
Sincerely,
Kimberly M. Richey
Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights
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