LEARN ABOUT YOUR DISTRICT
To support your campaign, you should learn more about how your district is doing so that you can use that information to support your arguments. For example, if your district suspends high-need students or students of color at high rates, you should reference those numbers if you are fighting for restorative justice or other practices to change the culture at your schools. Here are some key
You can find information about your district in the following ways:
The California Dashboard: http://www.caschooldashboard.org/
Provides color coded charts that make it easy to see which sub-groups of students are not performing well in different categories. You can also see these reports by school to see which schools are doing better or worse on different indicators. For an individual school, you can also review the sub-group data for that school only.
Data Quest: https://data1.cde.ca.gov/dataquest/
Dataquest provides more data, but in a less user-friendly format. For example, Dataquest can be used to review expulsion rates, chronic absenteeism for high school, suspensions by offense category, and various other reports that are not available on the California Dashboard. Dataquest can also be helpful to view metrics across multiple years and to separate by grade span, gender, charter versus non-charter, and type of suspension.
ACLU Education Justice Tool: www.aclusocal.org/edjustice
The ACLU publishes an online data tool that allows community members to determine how many school counselors, school psychologists, school social workers, and school nurses each district has. You can access a feature of the school that lists and shows the thousands of schools across California that have police but lack one of the four school-based health and mental health positions by clicking here. The tool also provides information about whether districts provide enough arts access. Finally, the tool provides data about how much each school district is arresting students or referring students to law enforcement.
Other Helpful Data Sources:
- California Healthy Kids Survey Dashboard (https://calschls.org/reports-data/public-dashboards/) and Core Survey Dashboard (https://dashboard.coredistricts.org/public/core) provide school climate survey data. You can also ask your district to provide the data from school climate surveys on their own websites. This is a best practice that Oakland Unified follows.
- The Education Data Partnership (https://www.ed-data.org) provides user-friendly charts on student-to-staff ratios, teaching diversity and experience, and demographics, among other indicators, and allows for easy comparison of schools and districts.
- School Accountability Report Cards (https://sarconline.org/) provide information about student outcomes, facilities conditions, teacher credentialing, amongst other things at the district and school level.
Submit a Public Records Act (“PRA”) Request
If the information you are looking for is not available from the sources above, you can submit a PRA request with the district. The California Public Records Act requires that school districts provide most, but not all, records to the public when requested. For more information and guidance on PRA requests, see the resources below:
