The Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) is the only nationwide comprehensive look at access and opportunities for all students, including students with disabilities. For more than five decades, CRDC has captured data on students’ equal access to educational opportunities. The critical insights provided by the data has helped schools understand and adhere to essential civil rights laws, whose implementation and enforcement is led by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). With recent efforts to dismantle the Department of Education (ED), continuing to uplift this data has taken on a new urgency.
As a leading voice on behalf of students with disabilities in all public schools — and lead author of the only reports available on the experiences of students with disabilities in charter schools — CLE understands the tremendous value of the CRDC data in informing research, policy, and best practice. Leveraging CRDC data can help schools and advocates better understand the experiences of their students with disabilities — and direct their attention towards improving areas of inequity to create the conditions for students to thrive.
With the release of two new reports, CLE analyzed what CRDC data reveals regarding students with disabilities’ experiences in schools, and a specific eye towards charter schools. Through this lens, below are our most recent key findings:
- Increasing Identification: One in seven American public school students is identified as having a disability. This includes just over 14% of students in traditional public schools and slightly under 12% of students in charter schools. Since most data collected by the CRDC are delineated by race, ethnicity, sex, disability, and English Learners, we’re also seeing a growing proportion of students with disabilities who are “dual identified” as multilingual learners — now including 13% of all students with disabilities.
Next Steps: Students with disabilities are students who learn differently, a vast majority of whom can learn and achieve at the same grade level as their peers when provided appropriate instruction. Looking ahead, educators and education leaders must carefully consider the unique needs of our dual-identified student population, whose individual learning needs span both language and instruction. - Disproportionate Disciplinary Practices: Students with disabilities are twice as likely to be suspended or arrested as non-disabled peers, and experience up to 20 times greater use of harmful disciplinary practices. These inequities threaten the right of students with disabilities to a free appropriate public education by removing them from instructional settings and meeting the behavioral manifestations of their disabilities with punishment instead of intervention. This most recent data confirms a long-documented reality that students with disabilities face disproportionate rates of harsh disciplinary practices.
Next Steps: The solution lies in robust and transparent data, routinely examined by local educators and families to spur action when disproportionality is surfaced. We support federal proposals that provide resources to schools to reverse their use of exclusionary disciplinary practices, and focus on turning toward holistic approaches to behavior. - Access to college prep: High school students with disabilities had two to six times less access to college and career preparation programs than their non-disabled peers. As we increase national attention and investment in career and technical education opportunities, we must prioritize the inclusion of students with disabilities in these programs.
Next Steps: As policymakers or local education leaders expand their college and career preparation programs, data on participating students must be examined. If students with disabilities are not accessing these opportunities, intentional steps should be taken to ensure their needs are accommodated with appropriate supports so they can participate, benefit, and thrive. - Inclusive learning environments: A small but significant portion of the charter school sector, representing 3% of charters nationwide, specializes in exclusively educating students with disabilities. This approach can create tension with long-standing goals to provide students with disabilities access to inclusive learning environments alongside non-disabled peers.
Next Steps: We encourage authorizers of specialized charter schools to ensure their local choice ecosystem provides meaningful inclusion opportunities for students with disabilities and focused accountability mechanisms for a specialized charter school’s area of specialization. State policymakers should also ensure outcomes for and growth of specialized charter schools are closely monitored, and that students are connected with the resources and services they need to succeed.
- Increasing Identification: One in seven American public school students is identified as having a disability. This includes just over 14% of students in traditional public schools and slightly under 12% of students in charter schools. Since most data collected by the CRDC are delineated by race, ethnicity, sex, disability, and English Learners, we’re also seeing a growing proportion of students with disabilities who are “dual identified” as multilingual learners — now including 13% of all students with disabilities.
Without this data, we lose transparency and a comprehensive picture of student access to educational opportunities informed by student identity. What’s more, we risk losing vital transparency on where to collectively target disparities in educational opportunities.
For far too many students, especially at the intersection of race, poverty, and disability, the promise of quality education has not been realized. We are now on the precipice of reaching nearly 8 million students eligible for IDEA services. Given the increased demand for resources, now is not the time to consider drastic changes to critical funding, guidelines, or structures that support this population of students.
Next Steps: Join us by urging elected officials and ED to continue to invest in data, research, and resources. Together, we must ensure that all students with disabilities can fully and freely access spaces of learning with a sense of belonging.
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