Public schools in the big cities and urban areas will become proportionally more minority and poor in the 1980's and 1990's. The traditional measures used to collect data on minority population have proved to be inaccurate. The following items are needed and will be of value to people working in urban public schools: (1) data which distinguish between students who read with understanding and those who merely recognize or sound out words, and data which also assess students' level of understanding; (2) data on ages when students begin to show real growth in terms of higher order thinking; (3) correlation between grades, achievement tests and social class; (4) studies of cohort groups nationally by social class in relation to attendance and achievement; (5) alienation from school for students beginning at grade 5 or 6 and through high school; (6) type and nature of communication that occurs between the school and the community; (7) information concerning achievement data by social class cohort relating to improvement from year to year; (8) holistic data regarding students' writing improvement on a yearly basis; and (9) other data of importance not collected systematically such as teacher absence and student suspension, large district comparative statistical data, and state comparative data. (JAZ)