June 18, 2019.
The Government Accountability Office, the congressional watchdog agency, is urging the U.S. Department of Education to take "immediate action" to address the underreporting of restraint and seclusion in the nation's schools.
In a report released Tuesday, the GAO asserts that the Education Department has repeatedly and knowingly published the inaccurate data in its civil rights data collection.
According to the GAO report, 70 percent of school districts reported that no special education students were restrained or secluded during the 2015-16 school year. That 70 percent of districts included some of the nation largest school systems, such as New York, Philadelphia, and Florida's Miami-Dade and Broward counties.
According to explanations provided by districts directly to the education department or information the districts made public, nine of the 10 largest districts that reported zero incidents of restraint or seclusion that school year actually had incidents they did not report, incidents they were unable to report, or were not collecting the data. Rather than indicating that the districts did not report data, the department's civil rights data collection still indicates that the districts had zero restraints and zero seclusions, the GAO report found.
Left uncorrected, the erroneous data could severely limit the ability of the department to monitor, enforce, and oversee potential civil rights violations, wrote Jacqueline Nowicki, the director of education, workforce, and income security at the GAO.
To remedy the problem, the watchdog agency wants the department to "prominently disclose for past collections the potential problems with using restraint and seclusion data given the known misreporting issues" and ensure that school districts are adhering to reporting requirements for data submitted for the 2017-18 school year.
The GAO also wants the department to remind school districts that they are only to report no incidents of restraint when there are none.
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