Summary

  • The Education Department’s 2023-24 Civil Rights Data Collection, released Aug. 31 after a six-month delay, documents persistent school-discipline and workforce disparities; the Trump administration’s withholding of nonbinary student data contracts the same federal evidentiary base used to document those disparities.
  • Dan Losen of the National Center for Youth Law, who analyzed the 2023-24 data, found that Black students lost over four times as many days of school to out-of-school suspension as white peers, with students overall missing more than 14 million school days in 2023-24.
  • The same release shows a teaching workforce that is 75% white while more than 720,000 students attend schools where fewer than half of teachers meet state certification requirements, with Black and Latino students making up 73% of that group.
  • Students with disabilities, who comprise 19% of public school enrollment, were suspended at disproportionately high rates and lose school-based services with each missed day, compounding the documented dropout and juvenile-justice risk Losen associated with suspension.
  • The Trump administration withheld 2023-24 data on nonbinary students collected for the first time and removed all nonbinary questions from the 2025-26 survey, contracting the federally gathered evidentiary base on school civil-rights conditions.

The Education Department’s 2023-24 Civil Rights Data Collection, released on Aug. 31 after a six-month delay and without the department’s usual “First Look Report” that makes the data easier to interpret, documents the persistence of disciplinary, staffing, and access disparities across the public schools it covers while simultaneously narrowing the scope of future federal data collection on nonbinary students. The two developments run in opposite directions: the released data expand the evidentiary base for documenting disparities, while the withheld and removed survey items contract the categories in which disparities can be documented. The release draws on more than 97,000 public schools and covers about 49.7 million students. Dan Losen of the National Center for Youth Law, who has analyzed the CRDC for more than 25 years, and Maithreyi Gopalan of the University of Oregon, who helps lead the research and policy group AdvancED Equity, each independently analyzed the data and shared findings with NPR. The federal government has gathered CRDC information for more than 50 years, partly to help the department hold schools accountable for protecting student civil rights.

Suspension disparities documented

The 2023-24 CRDC records 2.5 million students receiving one or more out-of-school suspensions and 2.3 million receiving in-school suspensions, an increase of about 100,000 in each category from the 2021-22 report. Losen told NPR that students lost more than 14 million school days to suspension in 2023-24, up from roughly 11 million a decade earlier. He characterized most district suspensions as responses to “minor offenses” rather than to unsafe behavior. “It could be truancy, it could be repeated tardiness, dress code violations,” he said. Losen described the practice of removing children from school as punishment as remaining widespread in public schools.

The four-to-one disparity in lost days between Black and white students is the most concentrated finding. Losen linked the practice to downstream consequences in two adjacent statements: “That lost instruction time matters more than people realize,” he said. “Even one out-of-school suspension greatly increases the risk of dropping out of a school or winding up in the juvenile justice system.” He described suspensions as often an ineffective way to change behavior, identifying emotional support and better training for teachers as constructive approaches.

Students with disabilities suspended at disproportionate rates

Students with disabilities made up 19% of public school enrollment in 2023-24, up from 17% in the previous CRDC, with boys making up nearly two-thirds of that group. Losen said disabled students were suspended out of school at disproportionately high rates and that the lost days can mean losing school-based services such as mental health counseling or physical therapy. He also identified disabled students as among the least likely groups to be enrolled in Advanced Placement classes in high school, a pattern he attributed in part to assumptions that students with disabilities cannot achieve at high levels. Losen acknowledged that AP classes may not be the right fit for some students with intellectual disabilities, but said many students have disabilities that have little to do with their academic potential. Gopalan extended the point: “These are all gateways to college, other opportunities beyond high school. And we see gaps in opportunity and access for students with disabilities.”

Teaching workforce composition and certification gaps

The 2023-24 CRDC collected teacher demographic data for the first time since the 1970s and found the teaching workforce is 75% white, 9% Black, and 11% Latino, a markedly different makeup than the students those teachers serve. Gopalan, citing research on the topic, said teacher diversity can play a role in student success, noting research showing that Black students have better achievement and school-discipline outcomes when taught by Black teachers, and that having more Black or Latino teachers can help all students. The collection also captures teacher qualifications: more than 720,000 students attend schools where fewer than half of teachers met state certification requirements, with Black and Latino students making up 73% of those students. Gopalan on the link: “Research shows that access to certified and experienced teachers and to counselors has a positive effect on who finishes high school, who graduates, and who goes on to colleges.”

Preschool enrollment rises, K-12 enrollment falls

Public preschool enrollment reached 1.5 million children in 2023-24, a 12% jump from 2021-22 but still slightly lower than in 2019. “It’s part recovery, part expansion,” Gopalan said, characterizing the rebound from a pandemic low alongside state investment in early childhood education. State-funded pre-K enrollment rose nearly 15% between 2021-22 and 2023-24, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research. California was in its second year of expanding universal transitional kindergarten for 4-year-olds and enrolled nearly 36,000 more children in preschool or transitional kindergarten than the year before; Colorado and New Mexico are among states rapidly expanding preschool access. K-12 enrollment fell almost 1% compared with 2021-22, a decline Gopalan said could relate to declining birthrates and an increase in private school and homeschool students in some states.

Mental-health services demand

Federal data cited in the reporting show that nearly 7 out of 10 public schools reported an increase in students seeking mental health services since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Losen tied that signal to the case for moving away from suspension toward emotional support and better teacher training, framing it as a constructive alternative to the discipline pattern the data document.

Withheld and removed survey items

Under President Joe Biden, the CRDC for the first time required schools to report the experiences of nonbinary students, and the information was collected for the 2023-24 school year. The Trump administration chose not to release it, citing an executive order that called for the federal government to “recognize two sexes, male and female.” Losen characterized the decision as unprecedented in the dataset’s 50-year history: “There is no Civil Rights Data Collection where they intentionally collected data and then just suppressed it.” He added: “Whatever kinds of injustices they’re experiencing, we would start to see that it was beginning to be reflected in those data, and now we can’t see it.” According to one UCLA analysis cited in the article, about 3% of children ages 13 to 17 identify as transgender nationwide, which includes nonbinary youth.

The Education Department’s emailed statement did not answer NPR’s questions about its decision to withhold data on nonbinary students, instead highlighting the Trump administration’s priority to collect data about sexual offenses on school campuses. The department said data for the next CRDC is being collected for the 2025-26 school year. All questions about nonbinary students have been removed from the list, along with questions related to whether students are harassed or bullied on the basis of gender identity.

How the parties are framing the decisions

The Education Department’s stated rationale for withholding the nonbinary data and removing related questions from the 2025-26 survey is the executive order calling for the federal government to “recognize two sexes, male and female.” The department’s emailed statement did not address the specific withholding decision; it highlighted the administration’s priority of collecting data on sexual offenses on school campuses. Losen framed the withholding as breaking a precedent in the CRDC’s 50-year history and described suspension as a widespread but often ineffective discipline tool, tying reductions in suspension to better teacher training and emotional support. Gopalan framed teacher diversity and certification as access issues with downstream effects on graduation and postsecondary enrollment, and described the pre-K rebound as “part recovery, part expansion.” Across these framings, Black and Latino students, students with disabilities, and nonbinary students bear the highest documented costs in the released and withheld data while exercising the least direct authority over the federal data infrastructure that documents those costs.

Who bears the costs and who benefits

The four-to-one disparity in lost days falls on Black students. Latino students are concentrated in the schools where the teacher-certification gap is most pronounced. Students with disabilities are suspended at disproportionate rates and lose school-based services with each missed day. Nonbinary students, about 3% of teenagers per the UCLA analysis cited, lose federally gathered visibility of bullying and harassment patterns in the released data; the withholding does not change the underlying prevalence of bullying or harassment, but it does remove the federally gathered measurement of it. White students are the comparison group against which the suspension disparity is measured and are suspended at substantially lower rates. Parents and families of suspended students face information asymmetry on each suspension event; for families of students with disabilities, each missed day can disrupt services identified in an individualized education program. Researchers and advocacy organizations that depend on CRDC coverage face a reduction in the survey’s category coverage on which their intermediary function depends.

Districts that retain suspension as a routine disciplinary tool carry staffing and budget structures built around in-school suspension rooms and the administrative processing of out-of-school removals; the data documenting the case for alternative approaches Losen describes represent a potential loss to those existing structures. Districts also gain a reduced reporting burden on the items removed from the 2025-26 survey, and schools or districts that might otherwise have been identified in the nonbinary data as sites of bullying, harassment, or unequal treatment are not identified on that dimension in either the withheld 2023-24 release or the redesigned 2025-26 survey. The federal administration’s executive-order framework aligns with the choices on which data to withhold and which survey questions to remove. Losen and Gopalan, whose organizations have used CRDC data to advocate for reform, gain analytical access to suspension, disability, and workforce figures that confirm patterns they have documented for years. Advocacy organizations that use the dataset, including the National Center for Youth Law and AdvancED Equity, gain evidentiary material that can support litigation, policy proposals, and district-level reform efforts. Teacher-preparation programs, certification bodies, and recruitment pipelines gain a clearer evidentiary mandate for change, and the teaching-workforce composition data, collected for the first time since the 1970s, provides a baseline against which future CRDC cycles can measure progress or backsliding on teacher diversity.

What happens next

In the immediate term, each out-of-school suspension elevates the documented risk of dropping out of school or involvement with the juvenile justice system; for disabled students, each missed day can mean a missed day of mental health counseling or physical therapy. Districts that recorded 2.5 million out-of-school suspensions in 2023-24 face the same disciplinary decisions in subsequent school years; without structural change, the figures are likely to remain at or above current levels, and the risks Losen documents materialize after a single suspension, with sustained increases in suspensions translating into sustained increases in those downstream risks. Over the medium term, a teaching corps that is 75% white while the student population it serves is majority nonwhite will shape educational outcomes for the duration of those teachers’ careers unless recruitment and certification policy changes meaningfully. Teacher-preparation programs, certification bodies, and recruitment pipelines face a clearer evidentiary mandate for change, and researchers gain a baseline against which future CRDC cycles can measure progress or backsliding on teacher diversity. Over the long term, the 2025-26 survey, by design, will not generate comparable information on nonbinary students or gender-identity-based harassment and bullying; the accountability infrastructure that has used CRDC data for more than 50 years will operate with one fewer category of federally gathered evidence in the next cycle. State pre-K expansion, which the National Institute for Early Education Research reports rose nearly 15% between 2021-22 and 2023-24, with California, Colorado, and New Mexico among the leading states, provides a counteracting force on the early-childhood side.

Analytical techniques used in this piece

This analysis applies the methods below. Each links to a short, plain-English explainer you can read and reuse.

Consequences & Sequels
Plays a decision forward to its first- and second-order consequences.
Cui Bono — Who Benefits
Asks who gains and who pays from a state of affairs, decision, or claim.
Stakeholder Mapping
Charts the parties to a situation — their interests, power, and alignments.