The federal government is finally collecting better data on what schools did to protect the civil rights of students during the COVID-19 pandemic—or if they didn't.
By updating the use of Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), organizations like Ed Trust say we can learn more about how we can help students from underserved communities receive the education they and their families want for them. Ed Trust shared a press release celebrating the Biden administration’s move to do just that.
Ed Trust has more on why this is enormous:
The CRDC is a vital mechanism to measure, identify, and address inequities in education for the nation’s most underserved students. The importance of collecting this type of data has grown exponentially during the pandemic. As research has shown, COVID-19 has exacerbated racial and economic inequities. Policymakers need updated data on racial and health disparities to develop policy solutions to address these inequities.
Ed Trust and allied organizations have been urging the government, starting with the Trump administration in 2019, to implement something like the new and improved CRDC—because it's useful for non-coronavirus reasons, too.
What would this improve? According to the 2019 petition signed by 24 education advocacy organizations, everything from preschool enrollment to discipline rates to education costs to tracking the progress of new teachers. And with all this data, interventions become easier for students who need them.
Learn more about the CRDC here.