Education Department releases student civil rights data six months late

Nonbinary student data stripped; no simplified report released

The U.S. Education Department published the 2023-24 Civil Rights Data Collection on its website this week, about six months past the agency’s own deadline. The massive dataset — drawn from nearly every public school in the country — reveals disparities in how students are treated based on race, ethnicity, disability, sex and other factors, but the release departed from prior practice in two notable ways: the department stripped data about nonbinary students and provided no simplified report for public use.

The federal government has collected civil rights data from schools for more than 50 years. The CRDC tracks which students are bullied, which can access Advanced Placement classes and how students with disabilities are treated, among other measures. The data serves as a tool for educators, policymakers, advocates and families, and helps the federal government enforce student civil rights protections. The agency typically releases the data every two years.

The Trump administration did not answer NPR’s questions about what caused the delay. An Education Department spokesperson said only that “The Department released the 2023-24 Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), and it can be found here.” The spokesperson also said “OCR will be releasing more data and materials in the coming weeks,” without specifying what that referred to.

The Office for Civil Rights, which oversees the CRDC, cut its staff by half after the second Trump administration took office. The administration has announced it will move OCR to the Justice Department. Advocates say those changes may have contributed to the delay, though a former Education Department employee who recently worked on the CRDC told NPR the team remains intact at the agency. The employee asked not to be named out of fear of professional repercussions.

In a departure from more than a decade of practice, the release included no “First Look Report” — the simplified, accessible summary that has accompanied CRDC data since the first Obama administration made the data more publicly usable. This time, only raw data files aimed at researchers are available.

“I’m glad that the Office for Civil Rights did still collect the data and did still clean it up and publish it for data scientists,” said Catherine Lhamon, who led OCR under Presidents Obama and Biden. “But it didn’t make it usable for somebody’s mom to be able to see what’s happening in a school community, advocate with a school board, compare the school community experience to another district or other states in the country.”

Lhamon, who now works for the University of California, Berkeley, said that kind of public usability was a central goal during her time at OCR. She credited Russlynn Ali, the assistant secretary who preceded her, for first making the data accessible during the first Obama administration. Ali said in a 2012 statement that “Transparency is the first step toward reform and for districts that want to do the right thing, the CRDC is an incredible source of information that shows them where they can improve and how to get better.”

Lhamon said the spirit of transparency continued under subsequent presidents, including during the first Trump administration. “Literally, parents have advocated in their school boards and in their school communities to say ‘students with disabilities should be in our gifted and talented courses. And we should see reductions in rates of discriminatory discipline, and evaluate rates of harassment in schools.’”

Maithreyi Gopalan, a professor and researcher at the University of Oregon who has worked directly on the CRDC team in the past, said the 2023-24 collection introduced new data points including teacher retention, whether schools evaluate preschoolers for English-learner or disability status and whether students who needed Wi-Fi devices for learning received them. But she said she needs more time to fully understand what the data shows. “I have this [computer] program, that’s literally hundreds of pages of code long, running to get the data and analyze it,” she said. Gopalan and a team of other researchers plan to publish a deeper analysis on their website in the coming days.

Daniel Losen, a longtime civil rights lawyer and researcher now at the National Center for Youth Law, said he has used the federal data for countless projects. “I’ve used the CRDC in my work with districts who have been asked to address very large disparities in school discipline,” he said. “Thousands of schools have cops but no counselors. We know this from the CRDC which counts both down to the school level.”

The data has also inspired legislation. Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey used CRDC findings to craft a bill proposing expanded access to Advanced Placement courses for underrepresented students, including minority and disabled students who the data showed had unequal access to those classes.

Ivy Morgan, director of P-12 research and data analytics at EdTrust, an advocacy group focused on addressing education inequity, said the format of the release breaks from established practice. “The public has come to expect that CRDC releases include easily digestible national statistics that showcase disparities in discipline, access to advanced coursework, and more,” Morgan said. “Hiding the data this way is part of this administration’s pattern of attacking research, data and evidence.”

The 2023-24 collection was set to be the first time the CRDC revealed how nonbinary students were being treated at school, but the Education Department stripped that information from each of the 37 files it released. The department cited a Trump executive order declaring that the federal government would only recognize two sexes: male and female. The administration also eliminated the CRDC’s nonbinary student category for the forthcoming 2025-26 collection and removed references to gender identity from portions of the survey, including questions about how many students identify as nonbinary, the number of nonbinary students with disabilities and nonbinary English learners.

“I think it’s dangerous and incredibly distressing that the federal government collected the data and deliberately suppressed it so that no one can access it, even though that’s information that schools have, and it reflects the experience of students,” Lhamon said.

Gopalan called the suppression “a lost opportunity,” noting that existing datasets already show nonbinary students have higher mental health concerns and are harassed and bullied at higher rates. “None of the other existing data on nonbinary students would have been as comprehensive and nationwide as the CRDC had it not been redacted,” she said.

According to one UCLA analysis, 724,000 children identify as transgender nationwide, a figure that includes nonbinary youth. The changes leave out information about thousands of students in American schools, though many schools do not track or report gender diversity data.

A spokesperson confirmed that the Education Department has begun collecting data for the next three cycles of the CRDC, even as the administration continues drastic changes to the department and the kind of civil rights data it gathers.