[clickToTweet tweet=”@usedgov releases the first look at the 2013-14 #CRDC data” quote=”@usedgov releases the first look at the 2013-14 #CRDC data”]The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) today unveiled new data from the 2013-2014 school year showing gaps that still remain too wide in key areas affecting educational equity and opportunity for students, including incidents of discipline, restraint and seclusion, access to courses and programs that lead to college and career readiness, teacher equity, rates of retention, and access to early learning.
U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. said that, despite significant work from districts across the country, the persistent disparities shown in the new Civil Rights Data Collection – which collected data from all public schools and school districts nationwide for the 2013-14 school year – highlight the need for a continued focus on educational equity, especially in the implementation of the new Every Student Succeeds Act.
Key Data Points
Student Discipline
- Nationwide, 2.8 million K-12 students received one or more out-of-school suspensions – which is a nearly 20 percent decrease from the number of out-of-school suspensions reported two years ago.
- Black preschool children are 3.6 times as likely to be suspended as are white preschool students.
- In kindergarten through the 12th grade, black students are nearly four times as likely to be suspended as are white students. Black students also are nearly twice as likely to be expelled—removed from school with no services—as are white students.
- Students with disabilities are more than twice as likely as students without disabilities to be suspended in K-12 settings. They also represent two-thirds of students who are secluded from their classmates or restrained to prevent them from moving—even though they are only 12 percent of the overall student population.
Access to Advanced Courses
- More than half of high schools do not offer calculus, four in ten do not offer physics, more than one in four do not offer chemistry, and more than one in five do not offer Algebra II, which is considered a gateway class for success in college.
- By many measures, some student groups are more likely than others to miss out on these opportunities:
- Only a third of high schools with high black and Latino enrollments offer calculus, compared to 56 percent of those that serve low numbers of black and Latino students.
- Less than half the high schools with high black and Latino enrollments offer physics, while two in three high schools that have low numbers of black and Latino student offer physics.
- English learners have disproportionately low participation rates in Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) programs: while English learners are 11% of all students in schools offering GATE programs, fewer than 3% of GATE students nationwide are English learners.
- Black and Latino students also participate at lower rates in Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) programs. Although black and Latino students make up 42 percent of students enrolled in schools that offer GATE programs, they are only 28 percent of the students who participate in those programs.
Teacher and Staffing Equity
- 10 percent of the teachers in schools with high numbers of black and Latino students are in their first year of teaching, compared to only 5 percent in schools with low numbers of black and Latino students.
- 11 percent of black students, 9 percent of Latino students and 7 percent of American Indian or Alaska Native students attend schools where more than 20 percent of teachers are in their first year of teaching, compared to 5% of white students.
- More than 20 percent of high schools lack any school counselor.
- 1.6 million students attend a school with a sworn law enforcement officer but not a school counselor.
Today’s release is the first in a series of data analyses from the 2013-14 CRDC that the Department will issue over the course of the summer and fall. To make these data more accessible and useful for parents, educators, policymakers and others, for the first time, the whole data file is available online at CRDC.ed.gov.