ED Announces Data Items for New CRDC Collection

Districts - brace yourselves. The new Civil Rights Data Collection will likely be hitting your inboxes in January for the first time in 3 years. And that’s not all: for the first time ever you will have to report data two years in a row. The first data collection, which was created right as Secretary DeVos came into office is going to have some interesting new requests which include information like bullying on the basis of religion, data on the number and type of sexual assaults, and other data points that were of interest to the DeVos Administration. In contrast, the Cardona Administration announced this week that it has proposed a very different set of data (including throwing out some of the DeVos era data requests and reinstating ones that the DeVos Administration removed) for districts to collect in 2022.

At a practical level, the back and forth in the number and scope of requests renders some of the data collected for the first time (as well as skipped) fairly invalid. As we are fond of saying "garbage in—means garbage out". But more significantly, the basis for this data collection by OCR is that it’s essential for monitoring compliance with key civil rights laws. But with this massive data request it seems that the data necessary to monitor compliance truly varies by who is leading the agency and their desire to have data that backs up policies they have enacted or plan to enact. This is both unfortunate and inappropriate since these decisions place a significant burden on overwhelmed district personnel.

While the 2020-2021 collection under the DeVos Administration reduced the total number of data points reported by 22%, the Cardona Administration will increase the data collection burden by 47.5% for the 2022 collection. AASA wants to make sure that students' civil rights are protected, but we are beginning to strongly question whether this collection achieves that goal or whether it is time to take a more aggressive approach in determining what is statutorily collected by CRDC every year and what is being done with the data they are collecting.