The U.S. Department of Education has published the latest dataset designed to highlight racial, ethnic, and disability-based disparities in schools, more than eight months after the agency initially said it would release the data.
The reason for the delay of the Civil Rights Data Collection was never made clear, but it follows a year and a half in which the Trump administration has pursued a major downsizing of the Education Department’s office for civil rights, which oversees the collection, and reoriented it toward enforcing the president’s policies cracking down on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and accommodations for transgender students.
“One thing Washington is uniquely positioned to do is make sure we know what is happening in the world of education through data and statistics,” said Rick Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, and an Education Week Opinion contributor. “So it’s an important, legitimate responsibility. It’s a problem that it was so long delayed. These data should be reported regularly.”
The data collection is the most comprehensive source available highlighting the experiences of students of color and students with disabilities in U.S. schools and the opportunities they have, said Ivy Morgan, the director of P-12 research and data analytics at EdTrust, an advocacy organization focused on racial equity in schools.
“We don’t get that information in a way that is as complete and comprehensive from any other source than the Civil Rights Data Collection,” she said.
The Education Department did not directly respond to a request for comment about the delay—it had estimated it would release the data in December 2025—but noted that it is continuing the congressionally authorized collection.
“The Department released the 2023-24 Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), and it can be found here,” an Education Department spokesperson said. “OCR has already released the 2025-26 collection to schools and the process for 2027-28 and 2029-30 has begun.”
The new data, collected from virtually every school district that receives federal funding, as well as charter schools, alternative schools, and juvenile-justice facilities, reflect the 2023-24 school year. The latest collection, designed by the Biden administration, was scheduled to include a number of new mandatory data points, including on preschool suspension and discipline, teacher absenteeism, and credit recovery, among other features.
Unlike in prior years, the Education Department this time released only raw data files and did not publish a summary of top-line findings highlighting new insights from the collection or comparing the figures with prior years’.
Education Week is not publishing any of the actual numbers until the media organization has had an opportunity to vet the files and identify any possible errors. Because the collection is based on self-reported figures from schools and school districts, OCR data in the past have had anomalies and required careful analysis and interpretation. Prior administrations have worked directly with districts to identify and update data-entry errors.
Morgan said she’s glad the department has released the data but lamented the absence of a report summarizing top-line findings and trends and the quiet release of the data files; a download link appeared on a department website within the past few days without a news release publicizing the data’s release.
“That is part of a pattern that we’ve seen with this administration of attacking evidence, attacking data, attacking research, attacking facts,” she said.
A changing set of topics
The collection, which has generally happened biennially since 1968, has expanded over the years and different presidential administrations to cover topics of rising and falling national interest.
The new release shows some fingerprints of the shifting political climate. The survey included new indicators asking districts to detail the number of reported allegations of harassment or bullying of K-12 students on the basis of gender identity and whether they had policies prohibiting such discrimination.
The Trump administration collected that data but did not release it, citing the president’s Jan. 20, 2025, executive order on “defending women from gender ideology extremism.” It also suppressed data it collected on the numbers of students school districts said identified as nonbinary.
The 2025-26 data collection that’s now in the field also reflects Trump administration priorities.
It will no longer ask districts to report on gender identity-based harassment or bullying or supply their policies prohibiting such harassment.
And the administration has removed the option to let districts report the numbers of students who identify as nonbinary in response to questions about enrollment, students receiving special education services, English-learner populations, and student discipline.
Schools first had the option to report numbers of nonbinary students in the 2021-22 data collection if they had such information. Eleven percent of public school districts, or about 1,880 in 39 states and the District of Columbia, reported that they had nonbinary students enrolled.
“Any changes that are made that reduce our ability to understand the real experiences of students, particularly students whose experiences we just don’t have as many other sources of information to understand, that’s certainly doing a real disservice to the students and the schools that are serving them,” EdTrust’s Morgan said.
During the first Trump administration, the Education Department added questions about religious harassment and sexual assault at school and cut back on questions about school spending, teacher absenteeism, course access, and preschool suspensions. The next civil rights data collection will also leave off some COVID-era questions about remote instruction.
The previous data collection to be released reflected data from the 2021-22 school year.
Published in January 2025 in the final days of the Biden administration, it showed, among other things, a continuation of long-standing racial disparities in schools related to discipline and access to advanced coursework.
The data collection reflects politicization
This kind of back-and-forth on the OCR collection shows the increased politicization of executive branch agencies, said Hess of AEI. He tied it back to the Obama administration’s interest in disparate-impact remedies—addressing discriminatory effects of policies that aren’t intentionally biased—and transgender student inclusion, and the Trump administration’s subsequent backlash to those priorities.
“Now, you have to be worried about lack of continuity and questions appearing and disappearing and framed in ways that are ideological rather than useful for any kind of comparable data collection,” he said. “It’s hard to see how the next administration says, ‘We’re going to set the back-and-forth aside and treat data collection and grant awards and oversight as a careful, nonpartisan professional responsibility.’”
The changing nature of the data collection for political purposes makes it difficult to measure some phenomena from year to year, Morgan said. But apart from the politics, there’s an upside to the survey’s ability to adapt.
“It allows the CRDC to be nimble and to shift a little bit to measure what we are hearing from the field needs to be measured,” she said.
