Education Needs to Address Significant Quality Issues with its Restraint and Seclusion Data

US Government Accountability Office:

The Department of Education requires public school districts to biennially report incidents of restraint (restricting a student’s movement) and seclusion (confining a student to a space alone).

Education’s data quality checks may not catch misreporting or statistical outliers:

70% of districts reported 0 incidents of restraint and seclusion, but Education’s quality check only applies to fewer than 100 large districts

Education doesn’t have a quality check for districts reporting relatively high incident rates like one that reported an average of 71 restraint incidents per student per year