Our Request For Simple Data From The District Of Columbia
For our 2015 report, “The State of Teacher Diversity in American Education,” we requested data on teacher race and ethnicity between roughly 2000 and 2012 from nine of the largest school districts in the nation: Boston; Chicago; Cleveland; District of Columbia; Los Angeles; New Orleans; New York; Philadelphia; and San Francisco.
Only one of these districts failed to provide us with data that we could use to conduct our analysis: the District of Columbia.
To be clear, the data we requested are public record. Most of the eight other districts to which we submitted requests complied in a timely fashion. A couple of them took months to fill the request, and required a little follow up. But all of them gave us what we needed. We were actually able to get charter school data for virtually all of these eight cities (usually through the state).
Even New Orleans, which, during the years for which we requested data, was destroyed by a hurricane and underwent a comprehensive restructuring of its entire school system, provided the data.
But not DC.