Dear Colleagues,

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.

The CRDC, which collected student absenteeism rates for the first time, revealed that 6.5 million students—13 percent of all students—were chronically absent from schools in 2013-14.

While student discipline occurs in high numbers and disparities remain significant, the 2013-14 CRDC reveals that out-of-school suspensions decreased by nearly 20 percent since 2011-12, as more schools find alternative ways of addressing non-violent student behavior. But this progress is not occurring for all groups of students; the data show, that, in general, students of color, English learners, and students with disabilities are, on average, disciplined more often than their classmates.

The Department releases the CRDC every two years to create transparency around the educational opportunities and experiences of millions of public school students. Similar to the 2011-12 CRDC, the 2013-14 CRDC covers more than 50 million students enrolled in nearly every school and school district in the United States.

In addition to chronic student absenteeism, the 2013-2014 CRDC collected data on several new topics for the first time, including access to educational programs in justice facilities; availability of distance education, including online courses; the presence of sworn law enforcement officers in schools (including school resource officers); availability of partially or fully cost-subsidized preschool; and whether the district has a civil rights coordinator.

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.

One group that plans to use the new data is the nonprofit GreatSchools, which reaches more than half of U.S. families with school-age children with school information each year. Using the CRDC, GreatSchools aims to build a richer set of individual school profiles that shed light on student access to educational opportunity, with a particular focus on equity. Specifically, the group hopes to spotlight access to rigorous coursework, college readiness milestones, student absenteeism, discipline rates, athletics participation, and counselors-per-student.

Thank you,

U.S. Department of Education

Office for Civil Rights