As the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported in February 2019, the Department of Education's (Education) data suggest that the restraint and seclusion of K-12 public school students is rare nationwide, though it disproportionately affects students with disabilities and boys in general. In broad terms, Education defines restraint as restricting a student's ability to freely move his or her torso, arms, legs, or head, and defines seclusion as involuntarily confining a student alone in a room or area from which the student is physically prevented from leaving. Education's 2012 resource document on the use of restraint and seclusion states that restraint or seclusion should never be used except when a child's behavior poses imminent danger of serious physical harm to self or others. Every 2 years, Education collects and publicly reports data from nearly all public school districts and schools as part of its Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC). Districts self-report and certify the data. Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) uses CRDC data in its enforcement of various federal civil rights laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, and disability. GAO has work under way on districts' reporting practices for restraint and seclusion data in response to a provision in the explanatory statement from the House Committee on Appropriations accompanying the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018. As part of their data reliability testing for that work, GAO analyzed the number of districts that left fields pertaining to restraint and seclusion blank, or that reported all zeros for those fields, to determine the prevalence of blanks or zeros in the CRDC at the national, state, and district levels. GAO's data reliability testing raised questions about the completeness and accuracy of the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) restraint and seclusion data. Therefore, GAO issued this separate report on the issues they have identified to date regarding potentially incomplete data. Because Education is currently collecting and validating restraint and seclusion data for the 2017-18 school year, it is important it take immediate steps to address underreporting before it publishes these data. This report discusses the methodology and findings from GAO's research and offers four recommendations to the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR).