K-12 Illinois School Disciplinary Research: Working with CRDC Data

Abstract Information: Evaluators often rely on local data to answer local evaluation questions. Such data can provide valuable insights into the unique context of specific communities and are often well-suited for answering key evaluation questions. However, national datasets can also play a crucial role in understanding specific local contexts and histories and answering evaluation questions. Such datasets can be particularly valuable when wanting to compare and evaluate the impact of program or policy interventions across multiple communities. In educational evaluation, one such national dataset is the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) set administered by the Department of Education (ED). Established in 1968, the CRDC collects biennial data from public elementary and secondary schools nationwide, focusing on factors related to equal opportunity access and barriers (ED, 2024). The CRDC dataset encompasses a wide array of these factors, including student enrollment, disciplinary practices, and educational programs and services. Importantly, the data are disaggregated by key demographic variables such as race, ethnicity, sex, English language proficiency, and disability status. The nature of these data enables evaluators to examine the impact of specific programs or policies across a wide array of communities in detailed ways. For example, evaluators can discern nuanced patterns and trends based on categories of difference at the individual student, program, school and community level over time. In our ongoing project, titled Towards Ending School Expulsion (TESE), we use the CRDC dataset to evaluate the impact of two progressive exclusionary school discipline (ESD) laws on the overall and disproportionate use of ESD across schools in the state of Illinois. These legislative measures aimed to reduce instances of expulsion among preschoolers and curb the use of ESD practices across all grade levels, particularly targeting the disproportionate impact on Black and Brown students, as well as students with disabilities. Moreover, these legislative guidelines were formulated in response to the urgent need to address and disrupt the insidious preschool-to-prison pipeline perpetuated by pervasive "zero-tolerance" policies in schools across Illinois. In this session, we introduce and provide a primer on the CRDC datasets and their potential utility in answering key educational evaluation questions. We then outline our methodological processes for leveraging the 2014-2018 CRDC datasets as a compelling case study. By doing so, we seek to provide evaluators with important insights towards effectively utilizing national datasets to address and frame local evaluations; equip educational evaluators with sufficient detail to assess if and how they may use the CRDC dataset in their evaluation projects; and highlight key considerations for its use.