How to Find Data about Your Child's School District — and Why

In the world of special education, we’re often told to be “data driven.” But as parents, what kind of data can we use to guide decisions about our child's education, or even strengthen our advocacy? And where do we find it?

When choosing where to live or comparing schools, many parents turn to resources like Great Schools and Niche, which offer school ratings based on public data and parent feedback. However, because students with disabilities make up a smaller demographic, these ratings often fall short as a reliable resource for Undivided families. Fortunately, there are other options. Here's a breakdown of publicly available data at the state, local, and individual school levels.

Before we get into the specifics of the metrics, let’s look at a few examples of how this data can be useful to parents. These numbers aren’t just interesting facts — they’re powerful tools that can help parents make informed decisions about their child’s education and advocate for meaningful, systemic changes. Here are a few ways you can use this data:

• These metrics are especially useful for parents advocating for systemic changes within their school district. For instance, parents can review district-wide outcomes for state test scores or graduation rates to evaluate and question the effectiveness of the district’s current special education policies.
• These metrics can sometimes be useful for parents advocating on the IEP level. For instance, a parent might be told during an IEP meeting that their child, due to an autism diagnosis, should be educated in the separate autism program. However, by reviewing district-level data, they might discover that many students with autism in their district are educated in general education settings. This creates an opportunity to ask the IEP team, "What’s the difference between those students with access to general education and my child?" Armed with this information, parents can make a more individualized and informed decision.
• The metrics can also be valuable for parents who are considering a move to a new school district. But remember, data provides just a snapshot and is often outdated by the time it’s reported. To get a more complete picture of what’s happening in a district, it’s helpful to gather anecdotal insights from other parents. That said, it’s important to remember that one parent’s experience is just that — one perspective. Combining data with multiple viewpoints can give you a better sense of the bigger picture.

The first place to look is the California School Dashboard, which allows you to view your individual school’s performance across various metrics. For many of these measures, you can look at the Students with Disabilities Report (more on this in a moment).

Note that on the California School Dashboard, students with disabilities are defined as students who have an active Individualized Education Program (IEP) and are receiving special education services. Students with 504 plans are not included in this data.

The Dashboard highlights changes in school performance. Improvements are marked with blue or green indicators, while orange or red signals, much like warning lights on a car dashboard, suggest problem areas, or areas that may need attention. However, the Dashboard can sometimes produce misleading results. In cases where numbers are low, even small changes can appear exaggerated. For instance, if a school typically suspends one student per year but suspends two this year, the Dashboard might flag this as a significant issue because the metric has doubled.

Check out this video on how to use the Dashboard. On the main page for your school or district, you see the colored indicators for each metric. Click on “View More Details” to see the student groups.

Looking at the student group detail allows you to see which groups have orange or red indicators — in this case, students with disabilities, among others.

Tip: to easily access data on students with disabilities, try clicking "Generate PDF Report" and selecting "All reports." This will create a report for all student groups, making it simpler to find the information you need.

If your child doesn't go to school in your district, where do they show up? According to the District of Special Education Accountability Rule for Students with Disabilities, the school of attendance and the district of special education accountability (DSEA) — not the district of attendance — are accountable.

For a deeper dive, Ed-Data.org is a platform funded by the California Department of Education that provides detailed data on California's K-12 public schools, districts, and counties. Ed-Data provides all the metrics found on the Dashboard, presented in graphs with detailed numbers and percentages spanning several years. It also includes district-level financial information about your school.

For students with disabilities, the platform offers publicly accessible data such as:

• Special education enrollment numbers and percentages
• CAASPP results for language arts (ELA), math, and graduation
• Suspension and expulsion rates

For example, for Los Angeles Unified School District, we could compare state testing results for all students vs. those for students with disabilities:

Ed-Data also lets you compare teacher salaries and access your district’s public finance reports. Under "Local Revenue Elections" for the state, county, or district, you can see the taxes local voters have approved, which play a crucial role in maintaining school buildings.

Here are some finance lines to look at:

• General Fund Revenues by Object Code 8181 and 8182 (Federal IDEA Funding)
• General Fund Revenues by Source, 2022-236500-6540 (State Special Education funding)
• General Fund Expenditures by Activity, 1100-1199 Instruction - Special Education [broken into Separate Classes, Resource Specialist Instruction, Supplemental Aids & Services in Regular Classrooms, Nonpublic Agencies/Schools (NPA/S), and Other Specialized Instructional Services.]

Bear in mind that spending a lot of money on special education does not necessarily equate to students receiving quality services.

Can you see how much they spend on attorneys?

You may be wondering if you can find out how much your district has spent on attorneys. The short answer is, not easily — you’ll need to review school board reports and warrant records. Knowing the names of the attorneys your district uses for special education can help. Additionally, you can look up each decision from the Office of Administrative Hearings here.

Each year, every public school district or charter school (collectively known as Local Education Authorities) is required to submit data to the CDE for the Annual Special Education Performance Plan (SPP), which the state then submits to the U.S. Department of Education. This report includes the following metrics defined by the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA):

• Graduation rates
• Dropout rates
• Assessment performance (math, ELA proficiency)
• Inclusion (percentage of students in general education for more than 80 percent of the day)
• Educational settings/environments [measures access to LRE in three ways: -the percentage of students inside the regular classroom 80% or more of day (5a); the percentage of students inside the regular classroom less than 40% of the day (5b); and the percentage of students in separate settings, such as public or private separate schools, residential facilities, or homebound/hospital placements (5c)]
• Preschool LRE [measures preschoolers’ access to LRE in three ways: percentage of students attending preschool in a regular setting (6a), a separate setting/classroom/school (6b), and at home (6c)]
• Preschool outcomes preschool students with disabilities (social-emotional skills, communication and academic skills, and behavior skills)
• Parent involvement
• Disproportionate representation (percent of LEAs with disproportionate representation of racial and ethnic groups)
• Timely evaluations (initial IEPs within 60 days)
• IEP implementation (by third birthday for preschoolers)
• Post-secondary outcomes (jobs, education after graduation)
• Dispute resolution (complaints, due process timelines)
• Suspension/expulsion rates

The reports are available for all LEAs as Microsoft Word documents on the CDE website. The state-funded SELPA System Improvement Leads Project has created a nifty data center that provides the data both in a download and in visually informative graphics for most LEAs.

Assessment performance data includes participation rates for students with disabilities because many students with disabilities are not included in the data as their parents opt out of state testing. This has been a recurring issue, with the U.S. Department of Education annually writing to the CDE to complain that too many students with disabilities opt out of the statewide testing designed to keep California schools accountable.

California Alternate Assessment (CAA) performance outcomes are not recorded in the annual performance reports, but they are included in the participation rates. For CAA outcomes (including at the school level in some cases), visit the CAASP website.

A number of documents must be posted on your school website. Most useful is perhaps the School Accountability Report Card (SARC). Tip: you can find a link to the SARC on Ed-Data.org. Non-public schools are also required to post a SARC.

The SARC provides information on:

• Demographics
• School safety and climate for learning information
• Academic data
• School completion rates
• Class sizes
• Teacher and staff information
• Curriculum and instruction descriptions
• Post-secondary preparation information
• Fiscal and expenditure data

Dashboard data is often also used as schools develop their Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP), which is part of the Local Control Funding Formula process that the state uses to determine the funding each school receives from the State of California. Every school is required to have a School Site Council that develops a School Plan for Student Achievement. These can often be found on the school or district website — and because they are data-driven, they may contain data that the school or district has collected, such as parent surveys. Your district LCAP and the committee materials should be on display on your district website, or you can request them.

Each school in California also now has a page in the California Department of Education School Directory that links to a school profile and a district profile. Both profiles offer statistical information, but special education data is available only at a district level. This shows you enrollment numbers by race/ethnicity and the educational setting.

Last but not least, you can also generate your own reports using this data via CDE DataQuest. For example, you can generate a report for each SELPA showing the IEP eligibility category by race/ethnicity. This is currently available only for 2017–2018 (update coming soon).

Perhaps one of the most useful links on DataQuest is the Downloadable Data Files section, especially the files for special education that detail the LRE figures for most schools and the private school data files (which include non-public schools).