The Education Department this week released updated data from its Civil Rights Data Collection survey covering the 2023-2024 school year, which previously included nonbinary as a gender category. However, an Associated Press analysis found that all columns containing information related to gender identity were replaced with a code stating “Suppressed in Compliance with Executive Order,” referring to an executive order President Donald Trump signed on his inauguration day directing the federal government to define sex exclusively as male or female.
The suppressed information included data on allegations of harassment or bullying based on gender identity in schools, whether school districts maintained written policies prohibiting such conduct, and links to those policies. Seth Galanter, a senior fellow at the Edley Center on Law and Democracy and former attorney with the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, stated these questions were designed to capture the experiences of transgender and nonbinary students regarding harassment, sports participation, and disciplinary treatment. Approximately 1,800 of the nation’s more than 13,000 school districts had reported data on transgender and nonbinary students in the previous collection.
The Education Department stated in a written statement that the Office for Civil Rights would release additional data in coming weeks and said the administration was “realigning the functions of OCR to align with its statutory mandate.” The data removal represents part of a broader administration effort targeting protections for transgender and nonbinary students in schools. The Williams Institute, an LGBTQ+ law and policy research center at UCLA, has identified approximately 360 instances where the Trump administration removed information related to sexual orientation or gender identity from federal data collections.
Researchers and education advocates expressed concerns about the implications. Lauren Bouton of the Williams Institute noted that the Office for Civil Rights could have used the data to identify schools with bullying problems and mandate improvement plans. Ivy Morgan, director of research and data at EdTrust, characterized the release as lacking transparency and part of a broader pattern in which the administration disregards data and research, particularly regarding marginalized students’ experiences.
Unlike previous updates under the Biden administration, this year’s data release included no accompanying report on educational equity trends or official announcement from the Education Department. The Civil Rights Data Collection represents one of the country’s most comprehensive sources of data on educational opportunity, including information on discipline, bullying, harassment, and access to advanced coursework across the nation’s public schools.
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