Note from Janel George on behalf of Dignity in Schools
Ashley Nellis
As a nationwide coalition of parents, students, educators, and advocates, the Dignity in Schools Campaign (DSC) advocates for ending school pushout. Overly punitive school discipline policies and practices result in pushing students out of school, the loss of valuable learning time, and the perpetuation of the school-to-prison pipeline. Accurate data on discipline disparities is critically important to informing the work of identifying and reforming discipline practices that result in school pushout.
As most of you know, the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) issued the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) for the 2011-2012 school year in March 2014 (http://ocrdata.ed.gov). The purpose of the CRDC is to obtain data about how well our nation's public school districts and their schools are doing in fulfilling their obligation to provide equal educational opportunity. Therefore, the accuracy of the data reported to OCR by districts is important. For instance, the data that was reported for the 2011-2012 school year indicates that students of color and students with disabilities are disciplined at rates far higher than their peers. It also tells us that discipline disparities start as early as preschool (this is the first year that preschool discipline data was reported). However, inaccurate or inconsistent data or failure of districts to report data, skews the picture of educational equity in our schools and of discipline disparities and undermines the purpose of the CRDC.
DSC is compiling issues related to inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and under-reporting in the 2011-2012 CRDC. Please report any such concerns that you may have about the 2011-2012 data to DSC and DSC will compile and submit a letter to OCR. You can submit comments to Janel George at jge...@naacpldf.org.
DSC will be hosting a webinar for DSC members on the 2011-2012 CRDC on June 9th, at 4:00 PM eastern. In the meantime, a thorough presentation on the 2009-2010 (released in June 2012) CRDC is in a previous DSC webinar that can be accessed here: http://www.dignityinschools.org/office-civil-rights-ocr-school-discipline-data-webinar.
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