Next federal school survey drops all nonbinary questions
The Education Department published its 2023-24 Civil Rights Data Collection on Aug. 31 after a six-month delay, releasing information from more than 97,000 public schools without the department’s usual “First Look Report” that makes the data easier for the public to understand. That report has since been made available. The findings cover about 49.7 million public school students and include data on enrollment, harassment and the treatment of students with disabilities. The federal government has gathered this kind of information for more than 50 years, partly to help the department hold schools accountable for protecting student civil rights.
Maithreyi Gopalan of the University of Oregon, who helps lead the research and policy group AdvancED Equity, and Dan Losen of the National Center for Youth Law each independently analyzed the data and shared findings with NPR.
Public preschool enrollment rose while K-12 enrollment fell. Some 1.5 million children were enrolled in public preschool programs, a 12% jump from the 2021-22 school year but still slightly lower than in 2019. “It’s part recovery, part expansion,” Gopalan said, describing the rebound from a pandemic low alongside state investment in early childhood education. According to the National Institute for Early Education Research, state-funded pre-K enrollment rose nearly 15% between 2021-22 and 2023-24. In 2023-24, 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, while 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.
Suspensions rose across both categories. The data show 2.5 million students received one or more out-of-school suspensions and 2.3 million received in-school suspensions in 2023-24, up by about 100,000 students in each category from the 2021-22 report. Separately, other 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 said the increase shows that the practice of removing children from school as punishment remains widespread in public schools, and that most districts suspend students for what he called minor offenses rather than unsafe behavior. “It could be truancy, it could be repeated tardiness, dress code violations,” he said. Those missed days of school mean missed days of learning: Losen’s research shows students lost about 11 million school days to suspension roughly a decade ago, and that students missed over 14 million days in the 2023-24 school year, according to the latest CRDC. “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.” Losen said suspensions are often an ineffective way to change behavior and that more constructive approaches include emotional support and better training for teachers.
Losen said the latest data show Black students lost over four times as many days of school compared with white peers because of out-of-school suspension.
The population of students with disabilities grew. While the previous CRDC showed 17% of students had disabilities, the newest data show they made up 19% of all students enrolled in public schools, and boys make up nearly two-thirds of that group. Disabled students were suspended out of school at disproportionately high rates. Losen said the lost days of school for these students mean they may also be losing services they receive during school, such as mental health counseling or physical therapy. Losen said disabled students are also among the least likely groups to be enrolled in Advanced Placement classes in high school, a longstanding pattern he attributed in part to assumptions that students with disabilities cannot achieve at high levels. AP classes might not be the right fit for some students with intellectual disabilities, Losen said, but many students have disabilities that have little to do with their academic potential. “These are all gateways to college, other opportunities beyond high school,” Gopalan said. “And we see gaps in opportunity and access for students with disabilities.”
For the first time since the 1970s, the CRDC gathered information about teachers’ race, ethnicity and sex. It found the teaching workforce is 75% white, 9% Black and 11% Latino, a markedly different makeup than the students those teachers serve. Gopalan said the data is valuable partly because 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. “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,” Gopalan said. Yet more than 720,000 students go to schools where fewer than half of teachers met state certification requirements, and Black and Latino students make up 73% of those students.
One group was left out of the release. Under President Joe Biden, the CRDC required schools to report the experiences of nonbinary students for the first time, 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, who has analyzed the CRDC for more than 25 years, said: “There is no Civil Rights Data Collection where they intentionally collected data and then just suppressed it.” He said students who are nonbinary are more likely to face difficulties such as bullying at school. “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, about 3% of children ages 13 to 17 identify as transgender nationwide, which includes nonbinary youth. In an emailed statement, the Education Department 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. While much of the survey will remain the same, all questions about nonbinary students have been removed from the list, and questions related to whether students are harassed or bullied on the basis of gender identity will also be removed.