The District is not adequately collecting and recording key education data, despite receiving federal money to build out a system to store and share the information, according to D.C. Auditor Kathleen Patterson.

In a report published Wednesday, Patterson said the District has received $10 million in federal grants and $25 million in local money since 2007 to create a centralized electronic system where data on students and teachers, including demographic, enrollment and transcript information, is recorded and analyzed over time.

The city is collecting some of the information, but Patterson said it does not meet all of the grant requirements. She also found data D.C. does collect on suspensions and attendance are flawed, putting the city at risk of not complying with federal data reporting requirements. 

“We do not collect the data needed to know whether public education in the District of Columbia is succeeding,” Patterson said in a letter introducing the report. “Our ability to bring about racial equity through education policy and practice is thereby crippled.”

Top education leaders forcefully pushed back on Patterson’s findings, expressing surprise by the nearly 300-page report. They said D.C. is in compliance with federal data reporting mandates and spending requirements for grant money it received. 

In a written response to Patterson’s findings, Interim State Superintendent of Education Shana Young said her office has made a “monumental amount of progress” in recent years to collect and provide data. 

She said the city has made several improvements to its collection processes, including the passage of a law aimed at gathering accurate student discipline data and the creation of a process where school leaders must review and certify the accuracy of the data they submit.

The report detailed standards in other states and cited information about best practices for collecting data from the federal government. Young said those practices are recommendations, not requirements. 

“We collect more than 100 million data points annually,” Young said in a letter that was included in the report. “To assert that our data is inaccurate or non-compliant when procedures and practices are merely different is deeply flawed and inaccurate.”

The audit was conducted to comply with a city law passed in 2018, which established a research practice partnership, where a non-government body would conduct education research for the city. Patterson said the law required an audit of education data in the city.

But city education officials said they expected the auditor to develop a catalogue of education data that researchers could use as part of the partnership. They said they did not expect to receive an audit of the city’s data collection processes.

In a letter to Patterson, Deputy Mayor for Education Paul Kihn did not respond to the report’s findings, deferring to the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE). But he said the audit did not accomplish what Kihn believed was its purpose. 

“Despite the effort, time, and collaboration afforded by the District’s education agencies, we regret this audit fell short of its charge,” he said.

Much of the audit focused on federal grant money D.C. received to develop a Statewide Longitudinal Data System, which is a system for storing information that could help educators and school systems make data driven-decisions to improve learning and close achievement gaps.

The audit examined 18 areas the city must collect information on, as part of the data system. It found D.C. is collecting information such as student demographics, scores on student assessments and attendance.

But Patterson found the city is not fully collecting data in several areas, including student courses, teacher demographics and teacher qualifications. She also said the city is not checking the quality of its data in many instances.

For example, the report said OSSE relies on D.C. Public Schools and charter schools to submit their own data on suspensions, which is federally-mandated. OSSE directs schools to record the type of suspension, in- or out-of-school, and the number of days a student is suspended. But the report found the D.C. Public Charter School Board, which oversees charters, provides guidance that says schools should only record incidents if they result in out-of-school suspensions.

The report also said the city does not consistently collect data across schools and across years. Erin Roth, director of education research for D.C. auditor’s office, said schools are not always recording important information such as the date a student leaves one school for another.

“It causes a whole lot of errors in the beginning of every year and we can’t confirm where students are and who’s responsible for them,” Roth said. “It causes a lot of transcript issues and general confusion.”