Using the federal data, they calculated suspension rates for middle school students, broken down by race, in 18 large urban districts.
Some of this information can be gleaned from federal records, but making it readily available to students would be a new use of the federal data.
But The Times analysis suggests that the trend could have been detected long before, if officials had used the federal fatality data as an early-warning system to identify possible manufacturing defects.
The federal data used in that study were available through 1989.
In 2009, the latest year graduation statistics are available in the federal data used by the Cumulative Promotion Index — which put the state's graduation rate at 72 percent instead of the T.E.A.'s 80 percent that year — Texas still lags behind the national average by about 2 percent.
And as Ms. Riedel encountered, colleges that use the federal template may suffer from stale data, because the Department of Education does not update its data set immediately when institutions report their information.
The Violence Policy Center (VPC) recently released Firearm Justifiable Homicides and Non-Fatal Self-Defense Gun Use, which uses available federal data to determine that, despite the myths propagated by the firearms industry and gun lobby, private citizens rarely use guns to kill criminals or stop crimes.
For the new study, Dr. Hamilton used three federal data sets — the Baccalaureate and Beyond study, the Beginning Postsecondary Students Study and the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study — and compared parental contributions and grades, controlling for parental socioeconomic status.
Jefferson said university professors who use such federal data — deemed to be nonessential under the rules of the partial government shutdown — may soon have to restructure their coursework if the shutdown continues.
The investigators used federal data to get an overall picture of compliance in a state or a region.
