School districts can now submit Civil Rights Data Collection forms for the 2011-12 school year. Providing information to the CRDC is mandatory under federal law. The form will be due Dec. 7.
The CRDC is conducted by the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education. The CRDC collects data on key education and civil rights issues in our nation’s public schools, including student enrollment and educational programs and services, disaggregated by race/ethnicity, sex, limited English proficiency and disability.
First collected in 1968, the CRDC is a valuable source of information about access to educational opportunities in our nation’s public schools that is used by OCR and other federal educational offices, as well as parents, policymakers, researchers and many others in the education community.
There was significant public interest in the data collected from the 7,000 school districts selected to participate in the 2009-10 CRDC. The website containing the results, www.ocrdata.ed.gov, has received over a half-million page views in the last seven months. The aggregate data, as well as the data concerning individual districts and schools, has been relied on by scholars, national and local newspapers, and policymakers. The U.S. DOE expects that the data generated by the 2011-12 CRDC will attract similar attention.
Because of this increased use and interest in the CRDC data, there has also been an increased focus on the accuracy of the data submitted by school districts. We encourage your district to pay close attention to data quality because of the importance of this data and the multiple uses to which it will be put.
Each school district has a primary contact person for the CRDC. He or she has been assigned the CRDC login for your district and has been receiving communications concerning how to access and use the system. If you, or any of your staff working on the CRDC, need assistance or have questions, please contact the CRDC Partner Support Center at 1-855-320-6459.