The Department of Education has proposed several key changes to its massive survey that collects data from the nation's public schools on a wide range of civil rights issues.
Among the changes, the 2019-2020 version of the Civil Rights Data Collection would remove questions that focus on preschool and school finance. The proposals would also add in more questions about sexual assault and bullying based on religion.
The CRDC, as it's known, is a massive trove of self-reported information published every two years by the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights. The data collected is used by the department, education researchers, policymakers and scholars from many fields. Every public school in the country is required to participate, and the government gets data from nearly all of them: more than 96,000 in 2015-16, from around 17,000 school districts.
The proposals for the upcoming survey, which will gather data from this school year, are still under review. The public comment period ends Nov. 18, and the department said the earliest that these proposals could go into effect is 2020.
Here are some of the proposed changes.
What's being added
While the CRDC previously compiled information about the number of sexual assaults reported at schools, it didn't distinguish whether those incidents were committed by students or school staff. In addition to collecting that information, the new survey would also track whether a staff member was found responsible, and whether they were reassigned, dismissed or allowed to retire "prior to final discipline or termination."
The Department says its reason for adding questions on this topic is "to ensure it has sufficient data to address rape or attempted rape, and sexual assault cases."
The CRDC also already records allegations of bullying and harassment on the basis of religion, but this year's proposed change would break down religiously based bullying into 14 different subgroups, the same ones listed in the FBI's hate crime data collection handbook.
The Department noted that in the 2015-16 data collection, about 8 percent of reported bullying and harassment was based on religion. Breaking down that bullying by religion "could potentially allow OCR to provide technical assistance where there are patterns of conduct, especially where ethnic or ancestral harassment is combined with directed religious discrimination," the department said in a statement.
What could go away
The OCR proposed retiring over half the survey questions around early childhood education, including the costs of public preschool, the amount of time students spend in preschool, and information about the student populations served. The change would also remove the requirement that respondents break down preschool enrollment by race.
Some researchers worry that this will prevent them from tracking racial disparities in areas like school discipline. The 2013-14 CRDC data, for example, found that black preschool students received one or more out-of-school suspensions at 3.6 times the rate of their white counterparts.
Under the proposed new survey, schools would still provide information about the racial makeup of pre-K students who get suspended, but it would no longer be possible for researchers to see whether that percentage is proportional to the number of students enrolled.