Catch up on what you missed with our Education newsletter, sent weekly. A massive trove of data about the civil rights of American students was quietly published on the U.S. Education Department’s website this week. The Civil Rights Data Collection includes information about which groups of students are being bullied, which students across the country
Catch up on what you missed with our Education newsletter, sent weekly.
A massive trove of data about the civil rights of American students was quietly published on the U.S. Education Department’s website this week. The Civil Rights Data Collection includes information about which groups of students are being bullied, which students across the country can access Advanced Placement classes and how students with disabilities are treated at school, among other things.
The CRDC was supposed to be published at the end of last year, according to the agency’s own deadline.
The data, from nearly every public school in the country, reveals disparities in the way students are treated based on race, ethnicity, disability, sex and other factors. It’s a tool for educators, policymakers, advocates and families to understand students’ experience, and for the federal government to better enforce student civil rights. The federal government has been collecting this kind of information for over 50 years.
The Trump administration did not answer questions from NPR about what was behind the delay. An Education Department spokesperson responded, “The Department released the 2023-24 Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), and it can be found here.” The agency typically releases the data every two years.
In another email, the spokesperson said “OCR will be releasing more data and materials in the coming weeks,” but did not specify what it was referring to.
While the reasons behind the delay are unclear, there have been big changes afoot at the Education Department: The Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which oversees the CRDC, cut its staff by half after the second Trump administration took office. The administration has also announced that it will move OCR to the Justice Department. All of these changes, advocates say, may have contributed to the delay, although a former Education Department employee who recently worked on the CRDC tells NPR that team is still intact at the agency. The employee asked not to be named out of fear of professional repercussions.
In a departure from the past, the Trump administration has been using OCR to prioritize actions such as cracking down on initiatives related to diversity, equity and inclusion, and investigating schools that allow transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports.
The data isn’t yet “usable for somebody’s mom”
For more than a decade, the CRDC has published the mountain of data it collects along with a simplified, accessible format for public use in a “First Look Report,” in addition to dozens of individual data files aimed at researchers. This time, there is no First Look Report — the raw data files are the primary sources of information.
“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.”
That kind of public usability of data, said Lhamon, was a central goal during her time at OCR.
The survey evolves from year to year. Maithreyi Gopalan is a professor and researcher at the University of Oregon and has been analyzing the latest files over the last two days. She says the 2023-24 collection introduced several new pieces of information including about teacher retention, whether schools evaluate preschoolers for English-learner or disability status and whether students who needed Wi-Fi devices for learning received them.
Gopalan, like other researchers NPR heard from, said she needs more time to fully understand the story the data tells.
“I have this [computer] program, that’s literally hundreds of pages of code long, running to get the data and analyze it.” She and a team of other researchers hope to publish a deeper analysis of the data on their website in the coming days.
“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,” said Ivy Morgan, director of P-12 research and data analytics at EdTrust, an advocacy group focused on addressing education inequity. “Hiding the data this way is part of this administration’s pattern of attacking research, data and evidence.”
How CRDC is used
Although the CRDC has existed for more than five decades, it wasn’t until the first Obama administration that the data was simplified and made more accessible for the public. Lhamon credits Russlynn Ali, the assistant secretary who preceded her, for making that change.
Ali said in a 2012 statement, “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, who now works for the University of California, Berkeley, began at OCR during the second Obama administration. She 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.'”
Daniel Losen, a longtime civil rights lawyer and researcher, now at the National Center for Youth Law, said he’s used the federal data source 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. For example, Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of N.J. used findings from CRDC data to craft a bill proposing the expansion of access to Advanced Placement courses for underrepresented students, including minority and disabled students. The data showed they had unequal access to these classes.
What’s known about the data so far Several data analysts and researchers told NPR they are working to understand the data from the 2023-24 school year and plan to make it accessible on their own websites.
Gopalan, the researcher from the University of Oregon who has worked directly on the CRDC team in the past, said the data files appear to be of a similar quality as previous releases. She said she’s glad to see it’s been published. But in her first look, she was also struck by a few things: “I was surprised at how quietly it was released, surprised not to see the ‘First Look Report,’ and very surprised to see the suppressed data.”
The suppressed data Gopalan is referring to is about nonbinary students. The 2023-24 report was set to be the first time the CRDC revealed how those students were being treated at school, but the Education Department stripped that information from each of the 37 files it released.
“I think it’s a lost opportunity, because we do have information now on how nonbinary students have higher mental health concerns, are harassed and bullied at higher rates using other datasets,” she said. 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 added.
The Education Department cited an executive order issued by President Donald Trump last year as its reason for suppressing the data. The order declared that the federal government would only recognize two sexes: male and female.
“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,” said Lhamon.
The Trump administration also eliminated the CRDC’s nonbinary student category for the forthcoming 2025-26 collection and references to gender identity from portions of the survey. The changes include removing questions about how many students identify as nonbinary, the number of nonbinary students with disabilities and nonbinary English learners. That leaves out information about thousands of students in American schools, although many schools do not track or report gender diversity data. According to one UCLA analysis, 724,000 children identify as transgender nationwide, which includes nonbinary youth.
While there are drastic changes unfolding at the Education Department and in the kind of data it collects, a spokesperson confirmed to NPR that it has begun the process of collecting data for the next three cycles of the CRDC.
Edited by: Nirvi Shah
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