The sobering new data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights makes clear that it’s going to take more than even the ambitious school accountability system introduced under the federal No Child Left Behind Act nearly a decade ago to close the incapacitating opportunity gaps among students of different races, languages, and social classes in public education.

We must, finally, begin to address the vast disparities in funding from school system to school system within states in public education. That’s likely to require more centralized funding at the expense of “local control.” A lot of high schools don’t teach chemistry and physics because they lack the funding for labs and advanced teachers. More subtle forms of funding inequality are just as problematic, such as federal formulas that allow funding for teachers within school systems to flow away from schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods.

We need to introduce more carrots into the incentive structure that NCLB introduced into public education, things like financial incentives for teachers to teach in tough communities and for schools to teach advanced courses. The sanctions imposed on schools under NCLB's accountability model aren’t sufficient, the OCR survey suggests.

And the new OCR report makes clear the important role the federal government has to play on behalf of the nation’s underserved students. Not a lot of local school systems have been publicizing the sorts of information that the Department of Education has just given us.

Rep. Miller is almost certainly wrong, but you only glean that if you go beyond the assumption that spending more, and providing more stuff, will inevitably lead to better outcomes.

Just look at National Assessment of Educational Progress scores for 17-year-old African Americans -- the "final products" of the schools. Both math and reading scores have stagnated since the late-1980s/early 1990s, the same time federal "accountability" was ramping up, and during which time real federal elementary and secondary spending rose from about $33 billion to $73 billion. Oh, and the biggest score increase was 31 points (out of 500) in reading between 1980 and 1988 -- the period of President Reagan's anti-federal education policies. If the simple formula of "more" equals "better" were accurate, scores would almost certainly have risen since 1990, and dropped under Reagan.

What the "gold-standard" research -- research using randomized treatment and control groups -- shows works is not more spending or government control, but more power to parents. It's private school choice.

Why? Because choice takes education money and power out of the hands of education bureaucrats and puts it in the hands of the people public education is supposed to serve: parents and children. It forces educators to respond to the needs of children because they have to compete for their money, not simply extract it from taxpayers.

But don't just look to the United States for evidence this works. Look around the world, as researcher James Tooley has done. If you do, you'll likely find as he has: The poorest people in the world are best served educationally when they pay educators who work for profit, and those educators have to earn every valuable ducat.

Civil rights is about empowering individuals. School choice -- not federal paternalism -- does that.

The Civil Rights data simply sheds more light on what those of us advocating for equity in the states have known for decades: the enormous disparities in the opportunity to learn for students in low wealth, high poverty communities as compared to their more advantaged peers in more affluent public schools and districts.

And we know the root cause of these disparities: the searing inequity in the 50 state school finance systems. Most of these systems are broken, failing to deliver the funding needed to ensure all students, especially low-income (at-risk) students, students in high poverty schools, and English language learners, have access to, and can achieve, rigorous academic standards and graduate college and workforce ready.

Even worse, most states allocate more state and local resources to low poverty (higher wealth) districts and schools than schools serving high concentrations of student poverty and need. Except for New Jersey, Massachusetts, Vermont and a few others, public school funding in the states is inadequate, unfair and regressive, resulting in the lack of effective teachers, course offerings, student supports and other resources essential for a meaningful opportunity to learn for students in the nations high poverty districts and schools.

Our National Report Card, Is School Funding Fair? documents this shameful, deplorable condition.

What to do? Let's start by recognizing that the states are responsible for these funding and resource disparities, and that the resistance to equity in state capitols is deep, longstanding and bi-partisan.

We also need to recognize that federal education funds, though small, currently flow to states blind to how schools are funded. In most states with unfair funding, federal Title 1 and other funds subsidize and perpetuate inequity, and even allow states to reduce fiscal effort during economic downturns.

And we need to recognize that the current iteration of school-based and process "reforms" -- school "turnarounds," charter schools, changing tenure and layoff policies, etc. -- will not improve opportunities and outcomes for our nation's disadvantaged students, unless we begin to remediate the underlying funding and resource deficits embedded in the state finance systems.

The civil rights data underscores the urgent need for a coherent federal policy on state school finance equity. We can start by requiring states, as a condition of receipt of federal funds, to meet a minimum "maintenance of effort" level, Next, we need a robust federal grant program to incentivize states to redesign their school finance systems so that they fund the cost of delivering rigorous standards, and ensure funding allocations driven by student and school need.

I love Michael Lomax’s use of Mother Teresa’s quote in response to poverty and applying it today’s topic.

Starting with the children in front of you is a simple (and effective) idea. It’s disheartening that new Education Department data show such dramatic education disparities, especially among our most historically underserved communities. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

One of KnowledgeWorks’ subsidiaries, Strive Network, did start with the children in front of them in Cincinnati, making effective use of data to help children in our most underserved communities. This TEDx video featuring Strive’s President Jeff Edmondson, “The Key to Educational Improvement: Data and How We Use It,” explains how they are doing it, but I’ll elaborate briefly.

It’s not just about making the data available but how you use the data. By partnering with Microsoft and others, Greater Cincinnati has come together around a community-wide data system that allows school officials and community organizations to identify at-risk kids, better understand the services they receive in-school and out of school, and align those services to maximize student achievement.

Imagine how empowered teachers would feel if they knew exactly what tutoring services an at-risk child received outside of the classroom, how many sessions a week, whether the child was showing up for the services, etc. And then think what would happen if you could better align those tutoring services with classroom data on where the child is struggling in particular.

Now that’s a real tool for closing achievement gaps, maximizing community resources and – inevitably – helping to fulfill the civil right of a good education for every child.

Findings like these are useful reminders that more than a half-century after Brown v. Board of Education, there are still broad and deep chasms between the education we give students of color and the education we offer to those from the majority population. These data are also useful in pin-pointing the subject and geographic areas in which the need for improvement is most acute.

But is anybody surprised that a decade after No Child Left Behind, we are still leaving children behind? Did anybody think that perhaps schools that serve African American students might have the most experienced teachers rather than the least experienced?

Certainly no one expects that large, cumbersome and budgetary straitened urban school districts would be able to change course quickly or agilely. Making good schools the rule rather than the exception will take years. Bad schools didn’t become bad overnight. They won’t become good overnight either.

But neither do policy makers, principals or teachers have to wait to make changes that will improve the education they give to children in school right now. A visitor once asked Mother Theresa, with so many millions of hungry children in the world, where do you start? “Start,” she replied, “with the children in front of you.”

Reform-minded educators should follow her advice and start by taking what works and applying it to the education of the kids in front of them—the kids for whose education they bear responsibility—not after studies are completed or when Congress reauthorizes ESEA at some other time in the future, but right now.

For example, KIPP schools in Baltimore (most of whose students are low-income children of color) persuaded the Baltimore Teachers Union (BTU), an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), to agree to longer school days and years in exchange for premium pay. It’s not a solution for all Baltimore schools, or for all AFT locals, or even for all union teachers in Baltimore. But it’s a right-here, right-now solution for the kids for whom KIPP-Baltimore and the BTU local are responsible.

Another example: Illinois applied for a Race to the Top grant to help it improve its schools. Its application was denied. So Illinois instituted its own reforms. Gov. Pat Quinn persuaded the Illinois legislature to pass its own education reform bill, enabling Illinois public schools, among other things, to run longer school days and years. And new Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel has announced he’ll implement the new law in Chicago’s public schools. Not a panacea for all that ails schools in Chicago or Illinois, but a right-here, right-now step in the right direction.

These are just two examples. But they demonstrate that while we’re waiting for the far-reaching kinds of reforms indicated by the Department of Education statistics, there are things we can do right now—if we have the will.

Education is the new civil right. But In high school math, as shown by statistics, we don't seem to be doing right by many of our kids:

• About 3,000 schools serving nearly 500,000 high school students offer no algebra II classes.
• Some 7,300 schools serving more than 2 million students have no calculus classes.
• Students with limited English proficiency make up 6 percent of the high school population, but are 15 percent of the students for whom algebra is the highest-level math course taken.

Among other things, some kids seem to have dramatically less access to the traditional math sequence of algebra, geometry, trig, and calculus. This not only affects who gets to learn math, it affects who goes to college.

But is it Really All in the Numbers?

Statistics paint a vivid the picture of the problem. But do they point us toward a solution?

I don’t think anyone would be surprised to learn that poor and minority kids have less access to college-bound curriculum. Statistics express the problem in measurable terms. But they only express a solution if they measure the right things.

If important aspects of the problem don’t readily yield themselves to statistical expression, data may lead us in the wrong direction—or as Shakespeare might have written, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stats, but in ourselves.”

Less Data, More Information

Analyzing inequities in terms of raw data points may not get us what we need because what we need isn’t data, it’s information. Numbers without the story behind them may lead us to think that academic equity can be achieved through a simple balancing of the books. But data-driven decision-making has its limits, one of which is that it may lead us to seek solutions that are more measurable than they are meaningful.

The math stats suggest that the problem is one of access to rigorous curriculum. The equitable solution, then, would be to create more high-end math access for certain high schoolers. Add the teachers, add the classes, close the curriculum gap, and all will be fair and just.

But what if the problem has other dimensions statistics can’t easily account for?

What if we achieved proportional representation in American high school math programs but test data showed that certain groups of kids performed significantly more poorly in their classes? Perhaps access is only part of the issue and new data will reveal an achievement gap factor as well.

Having solved the access problem only to uncover a statistically defined achievement problem, we might look to improving instruction, increasing time, or adding tutoring programs — all things from which we can easily generate more data.

But even with all these new data sets, we may still be unable to quantify the problem or calculate its solution. Just as it might not surprise us at the beginning of a reform cycle that some kids had less access to high-end math, new data probably wouldn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know.

It's easy to get new knowledge; harder to get new knowledge.

A Series of “What if…?” Stories

What if the lack of opportunity for some kids in high school math turned out to be a readiness issue? What if these kids weren't doing well in high school math because they weren't doing well in middle school math?

What if the readiness problem had its roots in elementary school, particularly at the primary grades where kids’ initial attitudes about math might be heavily influenced by their aptitudes in math? And what if early math aptitude was rooted in language — in particular, how well kids learned to read in kindergarten and first grade.

Extraordinary esteem is associated with reading success in the early grades; extraordinary stigma attaches to failure. Failure in one part of school often correlates with failure in other parts. Early math success also relies more heavily on language, especially at the early grades, than our traditional and often unscientific curricular distinctions lead us to believe.

All of these things are measurable, (though perhaps not always with purely quantitative instruments), but we would have to measure them all, and then connect the dots, to turn raw data that suggests a problem into useful information that spells out a solution.

Beyond Data

When we look at educational problems and focus so intensely on data, we often forget that what we really need is information. We need numbers, sure. But that's not all we need; we need to know why the numbers are the way they are — and we need the ideological flexibility to be open to the possibility that solutions other than those driven by data may be called for.

For example, why is the traditional high school math sequence of algebra, geometry, trig, and calculus the crucible through which kids must pass to pursue so many important post-secondary educational opportunities? Since few of us use these skills in our daily lives, and since few kids attending college take courses that demand a mastery of these skills, we’re probably just using traditional high school math as a sorting tool — exactly the kind of structure upon which many of the classic wrongs of civil rights have been built.

Beyond Data Equality

To ensure academic equity, we must move beyond numbers. This is especially true where matters of true civil rights are concerned. Using a simple scorecard to determine the state of equity in a given social system makes it too easy to claim that things are equal on paper when they are unequal in the world. (The reverse is occasionally also true; sometimes statistical disparities can be used to show that a given a situation is worse than it really is.)

In the pursuit of more equitable results in high-end high school math, simply squaring up the access numbers won’t solve the real problem of getting more math, and more college opportunity, to more kids.

To address the issue in a way that ensures equity for all, we need to do three things that numbers will never tell us to do:

1. Change the structure of our traditional math curriculum, especially in the early years, to better match human neurological development. (See Stanislas Dahaene's The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics);
2. Improve early literacy instruction. (See Diane McGuiness’s Early Reading Instruction: What Science Really Tells Us about How to Teach Reading);
3. Break down the artificial separation that exists between the study of language and math. (See the work of Robert Kaplan, George Lakoff, Frank Smith—and this hilariously insightful video from novelist John Green.)

These solutions are structural and cultural, not statistical. They attempt to treat root causes not surface symptoms. Best of all, they provide an opportunity for all children to receive better educations not just those we identify statistically as needing a little extra help five to ten years after they really need it.

Everyone Matters But Only Some People Count

It is time to begin asking ourselves whether we are committed to addressing things that are easy to count or things that really count. For the former, data alone will suffice. But for the latter, information must be privileged over calculation.

Academic equity will not be achieved by balancing the books. The new civil right of education will not be won through spreadsheet-inspired quotas but by changing fundamental structures and challenging long-held assumptions such that equity and excellence for all students become the core values upon which schooling in our nation is based.

In this regard, our editor asks good questions that are worthy of discussion.

How can data on education disparities help national policymakers?

Data without information makes it easier for all of us to spin the story we want to spin.

Some policymakers might use these numbers to argue for resource allocation on behalf of disadvantaged high school kids.

Others might take an historic view. They might say that while the numbers aren’t great today, they’re probably better than they were 20 years ago. This must mean we’re making progress, and that therefore we need do nothing but continue to let things improve.

Same numbers; different policy choices. Data without information is, at times, little more than a weapon one side uses to bludgeon another into taking actions that may change line items without changing lives.

Without information as to why the data is what it is, or knowledge of what would create the positive outcomes we seek, we often end up with more polemics than progress.

It’s important to keep in mind that we don’t seek to change data, we seek to change children. Data is a means, not an end. And this means that getting data to look good is not the same as being good.

In general, it’s better to have data than not. But sometimes, having data narrows our thinking about solutions to only those areas which data reveals. Like the drunken man looking for his car keys under a lamp post when his car is at the other end of the parking lot, we look for solutions where data casts a comforting glow, not because that’s where the solution is, but because the light is better.

For example, we don’t have any NCLB data on writing. Yet most of the people I know who’ve focused on writing in their schools and classrooms have seen extraordinary gains, not only in this single non-tested subject, but in other tested subjects as well.

Time and again, in my own work, I have seen that an intense focus on writing produces larger gains than similar efforts in any other single area. Yet because we gather no data on writing, no data-driven decision can be made to pursue this possibly promising course of action. Perhaps worse, since this avenue is never pursued, we never gather data on it even indirectly. As a result, over time, our data-driven mindset closes off what may be a powerful lever of positive change.

Data is, by its very nature, reductive. In some cases, the more of it we have, the less of reality we see. The writing situation in American schools is a prime example.

Since we can’t gather data on everything, we often have to look beyond the numbers to see things as they are. To solve many difficult problems, we may have to make non-data-driven decisions in order to see how the data we do gather is affected.

Even in this data-dominated age, policymakers must show both the courage and the creativity to look beyond the numbers for real insight into systemic solutions.

How can local school districts benefit from a database that reflects education access across the entire country?

The main thing local districts do with this kind of data is compare themselves to it.

So here in my little town, we’ll all be patting ourselves on the back because our numbers are so much better. But just a few miles north, in our county’s other school district, folks there might be justifiably angry that their numbers are just as bad or worse.

We’re ten miles away but a world apart, such is the disparity of wealth in our area.

Where I live, the numbers look so good nobody looks beyond them. The one thing we don't want to do anything about here is address the pre-Brown legacy of institutionalized racism that still permeates our district in ways that don’t show up so easily in spreadsheets and databases.

Because we have the highest test scores in the state, we are perceived (by those who only have the data and none of the information) as a very successful educational operation. But many folks who live here, and certainly those of us who have worked in the district, know that even though our data is outstanding, much of our information is shameful.

Should people in the education community be surprised that disparities continue, despite 10 years of No Child Left Behind?

Not at all. NCLB was designed to address a narrow but important range of statistical disparities through the mechanism of consequential accountability. To some extent it has been successful in this regard. At least we can now see the disparities more starkly, even if our new vision doesn’t tell us how to deal with them.

The law was designed to change the data but it couldn’t very easily get at the information behind the data. So we might see certain sub-groups moving up statistically in certain states, while others move down, but it’s often hard to know why, or how to make those sub-groups move differently than they do—or even if what are at times very small movements mean much at all in terms of what children know and are able to do.

This is where many of the arguments about NCLB arise. NCLB gives us data, and it gives us ways of comparing data. But it’s up to us to do the hard work of turning data into information we can use to make things better.

Like the proud Tareyton cigarette smokers of the 1960s, most of us would rather “fight than switch”, as our stubborn ideological intransigence often trumps more flexible, open-minded thinking. As we’ve discovered in recent years, data is both a blessing and a curse. Just as surely as one side can muster a table full of truth to support its worldview, another can pull out a satchel full of stats to counter anything they say.

Many of us hoped that better data, along with NCLB’s consequences, would pressure schools to make changes that not only improved the numbers but improved teaching, leadership, and school culture as well. In most of the hundreds of schools where I've worked, this does not seem to have happened. In fact, educators seem to have made many choices — often out of fear than anything specified in the law itself — that have made some schools worse. It’s fashionable for educators to blame this on NCLB and just as reasonable for reformers to blame it on educators. But rather than look for something to blame, we would do better simply to make better choices in both the halls of Congress and the hallways of our schools.

To the extent that educational inequities are grounded in structural and cultural realities, as opposed to merely statistical realities, we can’t reasonably expect NCLB to get this job done in such a short time and with only grudging compliance from the states.

Let’s not forget that even Brown wasn’t very effective in its first ten years. Significant desegregation took two decades, not one. And even at that point, we could hardly say that desegregation alone had produced educational equity. In the 1970s, data could have told us that all types of children were distributed more evenly across our schools, but that fact alone might not have told us very much about the quality of the education they were receiving.

Additionally, an unintended consequence of much of the early desegregation that did occur was the destruction of many fine black schools that served as cornerstones of their communities. In the early 1960s, many excellent black schools were abandoned (some newly built), many accomplished and highly-qualified black educators lost their jobs (unwanted in formerly all-white school systems despite their proven abilities and past records of success), and many black children were taken from schools full of caring adults and sent to schools where adults didn’t care for them at all (often splitting up siblings and neighborhood friends who lived together in tightly-knit communities simply to comply with statistical quotas).

This isn’t to say we should return to a pre-Brown education system. But it does remind us that things we don’t measure with statistics are often more important than things we do — especially when we consider civil rights.

What goals should policymakers set in light of the new data?

Goals set merely to change the numbers are unlikely to change the problem. In fact, to the extent that Campbell’s Law factors into things, changes to data may distort important indicators and make understanding problems in the future even more difficult.

The most important goal, whenever we have new data, should be to turn it into information by answering the obvious “why” and “how” questions through further study of the situation—some of which may often have to be qualitative.

For example, as I mention above, is the disparity in high school math access really a problem with math at the high school level? Or even a problem of access? Or is it a problem further down the grade levels in a completely different area of the curriculum?

And what is the nature of that problem? Is it instructional? Curricular? Structural? Some combination of all three? Or something we haven’t even considered like the possible connection between early literacy acquisition, early math achievement, and the stigmatization of low-performing primary age children as they enter the intermediate grades?

Is the civil rights aspect of education more or less salient now than it was after the passage of No Child Left Behind?

It’s more salient now than ever — and the mere fact that we’re having this discussion proves it.

NCLB made it salient to begin with when it introduced sub-group disaggregation. At the same time, in 16 years of working in schools, I haven’t met an educator yet who didn’t know already that things were pretty bad in our schools for poor, minority, second-language, and special ed kids. The problem was a lack of transparency and a lack of incentive — positive or negative — to do anything about it. We might hope that the better angels of our nature would inspire us to tackle these problems without external pressure, but even stronger pressures appear to be at work.

Prior to NCLB, we already had the information. Who in America didn’t know that poor and minority kids weren’t getting a good education? But NCLB gave us data such that we might be encouraged to talk about our problems more openly, and it established an approach to consequential accountability to encourage positive change. Whether it has achieved this aspect of its intent is a major point of contention. But I tend to think that the mere fact that we are contending it so stridently is better than not contending much of anything at all as we did prior to law’s passage.

NCLB also gave us the potential of an outside force that might move schools in the direction of correcting long-standing injustices. To a significant degree, this has not happened—yet. Addressing civil rights is a slow, painful, and unpredictable process. How long did it take our country to move from constitutional protection of slavery to the 14th Amendment? And from there wasn’t it yet another hundred years until we got the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965?

If we expect NCLB to affect civil rights in any meaningful and lasting way, we shouldn’t be talking so much about dismantling it — at least not without something more effective to take its place. We should also be asking ourselves if there are other types of data, and reliable ways of turning that data into useful information, such that we are certain that our country is moving in a positive direction with regard to civil rights in education.

The recent data collected by the Office for Civil Rights, although appalling, are actually not very surprising at all. They represent the challenges and frustrations I frequently hear from our network of education providers across the country. Although it’s both sad and frustrating to be reminded that we have made such little progress over so much time, this country must remain steadfast in its commitment to provide every child with access to a quality education. Education equity was at the forefront of our national agenda when the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was enacted as part of President Johnson’s War on Poverty, and now, as Congress debates the federal role in education, this issue has become salient again.

What happened between then and now? These data make it clear that states have not been successful in devising strategies to help children of color and English language learners meet very basic benchmarks in reading and math. Some would say that states have had to abide by overly stringent guidelines that make teachers dumb down lessons in order to show progress on standardized tests, therefore restricting what can be taught to students. Our view, however, is that states and schools have not tried hard enough to deliver this very basic promise to a growing share of American children.

Now, with congressional Republicans considering measures to allow states funding flexibility across the various titles in ESEA and the Obama administration considering granting waivers to states, we’re losing sight of this fundamental promise. Federal policymakers in particular should view these data as a red flag that we need to do more to hold states accountable for their lack of progress and devise incentives for states to do better. Those strategies should maintain a strong focus on subgroup accountability while providing supports and resources to help schools design programs that work. It is simply unacceptable that after so many years we continue to get this wrong. Education has always been a central issue in the battle for civil rights and our hope is that data will compel federal policymakers to make the right decisions in moving forward a comprehensive education reform agenda. There is simply too much at stake.

These findings from the recent Education Department report could only surprise those who have chosen to ignore that unequal education is still a fact of American life 55 years after Brown vs. Board of Education.

We should absolutely not be “surprised that these [and many other] educational disparities continue despite 10 years of No Child Left Behind. There is nothing in NCLB that would correct any of these problems. If anything, its provision have exacerbated inequity by rewarding schools for concentrating on state mandated tests that focus on lower level math and reading skills.

Rep. George Miller’s observation, however, is correct: The federal government could and should be playing a much stronger role in bringing an end to these disgraceful inequities. A good summary of that role can be found in the Forum on Educational Accountability’s February 2011 document: All Children Deserve an Opportunity to Learn, as well as the eight points on Equity and Access, highlighted by the Forum for Education and Democracy. Most of these recommendations require a reallocation of funds and better monitoring. If we are meet the current and future need for an educated citizenry, the United States must like its competitors, make high quality education a true national priority--available to every child in every neighborhood.

Cross-posted at TeachMoore.

The Civil Rights Data Collection has been an enormously valuable resource for advocates and researchers since its inception in the 1970s. And while one might imagine that standards-based reform, especially the rise of accountability for student achievement, diminishes the importance of these data, the opposite is true for four reasons.

First, inequities of the past remain today and policymakers cannot be reminded too frequently of this. There are troubling differences in enrollment in gifted and talented programs, AP, and math and science courses by the race/ethnicity of students and whether they are English language learners or students with disabilities.

Second, the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) has been keeping up with the times. This recent data release includes new measures with relevance to questions about both equity and excellence. Take, for example, the new indicator of when students take Algebra. The usual concerns about disparities by race/ethnicity, disability, or ELL status apply because Algebra is a fundamental gateway to college and career readiness. But given the importance of STEM outcomes to the country’s future economic competitiveness, pretty much everyone has a stake in knowing more about when students take Algebra. Also, for the first time we see data on the distribution of first and second year teachers and confirmation that there is a national pattern of African American and Hispanic students getting a very disproportionate share of inexperienced teachers.

Third, OCR is in not just about access and inputs anymore. The enhanced data collection shines a light on outcomes. The value of information on when students take Algebra is much greater when accompanied by information on whether students pass. Because of the new focus on outcomes, OCR smartly divided its data collection effort into two phases. Last week’s Phase I release includes information pertaining to the beginning of the 2009-10 school year. And the Phase II release, expected this fall, will include information such as pass rates available only after the school year has elapsed.

Fourth, given the protracted fiscal challenges facing education, it’s a good thing that OCR has gathered school-level expenditure information, part of Phase II. Doing more with less, as they generally must, requires that school districts overhaul the ways they allocate resources. Strategic, outcome-oriented decisions are called for, but most districts are accustomed to mindless standard operating procedures such as staffing-based budgeting. Building on the work of Marguerite Roza and Education Trust, the Center for American Progress has documented serious inequity in the allocation of resources within school districts. High-poverty schools tend to get the short-end of the stick when districts allocate resources in abstract terms such as staffing. A new age of accountability, to use a phase from President Obama’s inaugural address, requires transparency and decisions around actual dollars in schools, where the rubber hits the road in terms of student achievement. The Civil Rights Data Survey arms researchers and advocates with tools to help us move in that direction.