civilytics/crdc-school-arrest-rates

CRDC School Arrest Rates — Bayesian Estimates

Model-based estimates of school-based arrest rates for U.S. school districts (LEAs) and states, by race and sex, derived from the U.S. Department of Education Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC). Estimates come from Bayesian hierarchical binomial models (brms / Stan) that partially pool sparse counts, producing stabilized rates with full posterior credible intervals.

Data release: civilytics-crdc-arrests-2025.1

What's in this dataset

File	Description
summary.duckdb	Compact DuckDB (~260 MB) with arrest_summary (LEA grain, ~2.27M rows), state_summary (draw-wise population aggregate), district_dim (names + geo), and a meta table. Powers the live API.
parquet/	The full raw posterior draws (500 per group) as Hive-partitioned Parquet, partitioned by model_id / YEAR / LEA_STATE and sorted within shard by (LEAID, RACE, SEX). ~1,387 shards. For advanced/bulk use.

Coverage / code lists

• RACE ∈ {AM, BL, HI, WH} · SEX ∈ {F, M} (8 demographic cells, no TOTAL)
• YEAR ∈ {15-16, 17-18, 21-22}
• Models: 10 specifications (nat_m1–nat_m5, sg_m1–sg_m5); default = nat_m2 / sg_m2 (most-recent-year + referral-rate covariate).
• Estimates include count + rate point estimates and HPD intervals at 50 / 80 / 95%.
• State summaries are a draw-wise population aggregate (sum across LEAs within each posterior draw), distinct from the model's (1|LEA_STATE) random effect.

Quick start (DuckDB)

INSTALL httpfs; LOAD httpfs;

-- Summary estimates: download/attach summary.duckdb, then query arrest_summary / state_summary.
-- Raw draws for one slice (TX, Black males, default model, 2021-22):
SELECT *
FROM read_parquet(
  'hf://datasets/civilytics/crdc-school-arrest-rates/parquet/model_id=nat_m2_mod/YEAR=21-22/LEA_STATE=TX/*.parquet'
)
WHERE RACE = 'BL' AND SEX = 'M'
LIMIT 20;

summary.duckdb direct URL: https://huggingface.co/datasets/civilytics/crdc-school-arrest-rates/resolve/main/summary.duckdb

Live API & documentation

• API: https://crdc-api.civilytics.org (OpenAPI/Swagger at /api/v1/__docs__/, machine guide at /api/v1/llms.txt)
• Docs + data dictionary: https://pages.civilytics.org/crdc-arrests

Source data

U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights — Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), 2015-16, 2017-18, 2021-22; joined to NCES Common Core of Data (CCD) district directories for names/geography. Sample restrictions (e.g., enrollment ≥ 30) and data business rules are documented in the data dictionary.

Citation

Knowles, J. E., & Miller, H. (2025). CRDC School Arrest Rates: Bayesian Estimates. Civilytics.

License

Released under the Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0) — you may share and adapt the data provided you attribute the source (the citation above). Underlying CRDC data are U.S. federal government public records.