Appendix A.3. Office for Civil Rights

Civil Rights Data Collection

The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has surveyed the nation's public elementary and secondary schools since 1968. The survey was first known as the OCR Elementary and Secondary School (E&S) Survey; in 2004, it was renamed the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC). The survey provides information about the enrollment of students in public schools in every state and about some education services provided to those students. These data are reported by race/ethnicity, sex, and disability.

Data in the survey are collected pursuant to 34 C.F.R. Section 100.6(b) of the Department of Education regulation implementing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The requirements are also incorporated by reference in Department regulations implementing Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and the Age Discrimination Act of 1975. School, district, state, and national data are currently available. Data from individual public schools and districts are used to generate projected national and state data.

The CRDC has generally been conducted biennially in each of the 50 states plus the District of Columbia. The 2009–10 CRDC was collected from a sample of approximately 7,000 school districts and over 72,000 schools in those districts. It was made up of two parts: part 1 contained beginning-of-year "snapshot" data and part 2 contained cumulative, or end-of-year, data.

The 2011–12 CRDC survey, which collected data from approximately 16,500 school districts, 97,000 schools, and 49 million students, was the first CRDC survey since 2000 that included data from every public school district and school in the nation. Data from the 2011–12 CRDC are currently available. The 2013–14 CRDC survey will also collect information from a universe of every public school district and school in the nation.

Data marked with an exclamation point (!) have a nonresponse rate of more than 30 percent. Numbers should be used with caution due to large statistical uncertainty in the estimate. The methodology for flagging "large statistical uncertainties" is based on a standard error for each projected item.

Further information on the Civil Rights Data Collection may be obtained from

Mary Schifferli
Office for Civil Rights
U.S. Department of Education
400 Maryland Avenue SW
Washington, DC 20202
http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/data.html