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Education Dive
Ed Dept civil rights data shows restraint, seclusion, sexual assault on the rise
We examined the latest Civil Rights Data Collection release, covering
the 2017-18 school year, and found four key takeaways for K-12 ed
leaders.
Kara Arundel
Oct. 20, 2020
A bevy of statistics about school enrollment, discipline practices,
academic offerings and more from the 2017-18 school year was released
by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights as part
of the biennial Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC).
The self-reported collection from 17,604 public school districts and
97,632 public schools and educational programs includes up to 1,700
data points — often broken down by race, gender, disability status and
other demographics — is used by school, district and state education
systems to measure trends and plan for improvements.
The CRDC includes all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto
Rico. State and national estimations for the 2017-18 school year are
not yet available on the CRDC searchable database.
Here, we summarize four major takeaways from this collection.
Students with disabilities are disproportionately restrained and secluded
In an issue brief released alongside the 2017-18 CRDC, the Education
Department noted 101,990 students nationwide were subjected to
restraint or seclusion during that school year. Of those students
restrained, 78% were students with disabilities. Of those secluded, 77%
were students with disabilities.
Although White students with disabilities were physically restrained at
a much higher rate, 26% of the students with disabilities who were
physically restrained were Black, even though they consisted of 18% of
the special education student population.
Restraint and seclusion rates also are increasing. The 2015-16 national
data set shows 71% of restrained students and 66% of secluded students
had disabilities. Educators and disability advocates have raised
concerns about disproportionate and inappropriate use of restraint and
seclusion.
“In the context of COVID-19, which has had an inordinate impact on
students with disabilities, it is even more important to act to reverse
disciplinary practices that perpetuate educational inequity,” said
Lauren Morando Rhim, co-founder and executive director of the National
Center for Special Education in Charter Schools, in a statement.
There are no federal laws limiting the use of restraint and seclusion
in schools, although several states recently approved or considered
legislation that would limit its use and add procedures for reporting
incidents, according to the Education Commission of the States.
In 2019, the education department announced an initiative to examine
inappropriate use of restraint and seclusion through data quality
checks, monitoring and technical assistance.
K-12 sexual violence has increased 55%
There were 14,938 of sexual violence in schools in 2017-18 compared to
9,649 in 2015-16, representing a 55% increase, according to an issue
brief from the education department. Sexual violence includes incidents
of rape or attempted rape and sexual assault. Incidents of rape or
attempted rape jumped by 99% from 2015-16 to 2017-18, the CRDC shows.
It’s difficult to say why sexual violence incidents increased that much
over a two-year period. It could be due to better reporting efforts,
said Miriam Rollin, director of the Education Civil Rights Alliance,
convened by the National Center for Youth Law. But, she added, “It’s
hard to believe there’s purely an incident increase when we have
numbers that stunning.”
The Education Department disaggregated sexual violence data by state
and said the states and territories with the highest incidents of
sexual assaults per 1,000 students includes Nevada, Georgia and Hawaii.
States with the lowest number of incidents include South Dakota,
Florida and Puerto Rico.
Earlier this year, the department issued final regulations for Title IX
regarding legal obligations for schools to respond, report and
investigate allegations of sexual harassment, including sexual assault.
The Trump administration said the rule, which went into effect Aug. 14,
holds schools more accountable for promptly responding to allegations,
as well as offering support and protection for both those who say they
are victims of assault and those being accused. Several Democratic
state attorneys general, civil rights advocacy groups and education
administration organizations, however, criticized the rule, saying it
weakens protections for victims of sexual assault and that the timing
of the rule burdens schools as they respond to the pandemic.
Efforts to improve data quality underway
In a push to receive and report more accurate data, the Education
Department has, over the last few years, put quality measures in place
that allow statistical outliers to be identified more easily and
provide districts opportunities to amend inaccurate data.
For example, 2015-16 data on the restraint and seclusion of students
had misreporting from districts of all sizes, according to an April
2020 report from the Government Accountability Office. When GAO took a
targeted look at 30 of the country’s largest school districts, it found
suspected patterns of underreporting in 13, in addition to the 10 that
reported zero for the 2015-16 school year.
To help pinpoint anomalies, the Education Department lowered the
district-level student enrollment threshold that would flag potentially
erroneous restraint and seclusion reporting for the 2017-18 CRDC data
collection, the GAO reported. OCR and the Office of Special Education
and Rehabilitative Services also is providing technical assistance and
is working with individual school districts regarding investigations or
compliance reviews.
Additionally, post-collection data quality checks looked for outliers
for individual data elements and where significant value changes in
individual data elements between the 2015-16 and 2017-18 data
collections occurred, according to the issue brief on restraint and
seclusion.
OCR also has partnered with the National Center for Education
Statistics (NCES) to validate data, and to review and revise data
quality procedures. In a statement, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy
DeVos said, “While self-reported data poses challenges, the quality
assurance measures we have put into place help make this data more
reliable than ever before.”
More work is needed, however, say civil rights advocates and researchers.
For example, the GAO report pointed out that the revised rule to lower
the threshold for detecting potential erroneous restraint and seclusion
data would separate the reporting of students with and without
disabilities. That creates the potential scenario where only three
districts in the country (Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City) would
meet the threshold of having at least 50,000 students with disabilities
and would report zero incidences of restraint or seclusion to be
detected for erroneous reporting, the GAO report said.
Dan Losen, director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies, said he’s
concerned about questionable or missing data for school-based arrests
of students, especially as school systems are trying to make decisions
about police presence in schools. For example, the country’s largest
school system — New York City — reported zero arrests for students with
and without disabilities, according to the CRDC.
State education agencies also aren’t posting school-based arrest
information on their websites, Losen said. “My concern is that you have
much more coordination when high schools talk to police about student
behaviors but we don’t see that data,” Losen said.
Pandemic is impacting the next scheduled collection
Due to the impact of the novel coronavirus, the Education Department is
proposing shifting the 2019-20 collection to the 2020-21 school year,
according to a notice published on Regulations.gov July 7. If the data
collection timing is altered, it will most likely delay the release of
the data, which was originally scheduled for 2022. The final schedule
for the next data collection is still being developed.
The absence of data and the reporting of inaccurate data worry civil
rights advocates. “How can you solve a problem if you don’t know the
data,” Rollin said.
She advises schools and districts to review the data they do collect
because analysis of worrisome trends is essential for creating policies
for improvement. “Schools should be a sanctuary of learning,” Rollin
said. “The big picture is that our schools are not safe or healthy
environments for all our kids, especially our marginalized kids.”
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