The Leadership Conference Education Fund Releases Federal Civil Rights Data Collection Report

Census and Data Equity News, Census and Data Equity Resources 04.25,22

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 
Contact: Dena L. Craig, [email protected] 

WASHINGTON – The Leadership Conference Education Fund today released “Information Nation: The Need for Improved Federal Civil Rights Data Collection.” The new report urges the Biden administration to restore and expand the scope, frequency, and public accessibility of federal data collections, in order to identify equity gaps and solutions to remedy them.

The report, which builds on The Education Fund’s earlier reports, documents the broad attacks on data collection that took place under the Trump administration, makes recommendations about how data should be collected and used to advance justice and equity, and provides examples about how those recommendations apply to particular data collections or issues.

“The distinct historic and ongoing challenges our country faces — systemic racism and state violence; historic levels of inequality; a worldwide pandemic; and increasingly severe natural disasters due to climate change — will not be solved by better data collection alone. But complete and disaggregated data is a necessary first step to tackle these crises. Without them, we cannot identify equity gaps, and so we cannot determine the right course to remedy them,” the report notes.

The  report also underscores many of the recommendations in the report recently issued by the White House titled, “A Vision for Equitable Data: Recommendations from the Equitable Data Working Group.”

Information Nation: The Need for Improved Federal Civil Rights Data Collection, is available here.

The Leadership Conference Education Fund builds public will for federal policies that promote and protect the civil and human rights of all persons in the United States. The Education Fund’s campaigns empower and mobilize advocates around the country to push for progressive change in the United States. It was founded in 1969 as the education and research arm of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. For more information on The Education Fund, visit civilrights.org/edfund.