The nation’s Black and Latino students are less likely than their peers from other demographics to have access to advanced science, technology, engineering, and math courses and fully certified teachers. In addition, they’re more likely to be suspended or expelled from school—including as early as preschool—and subject to restraint and seclusion.
Those are some of the findings from new data released Jan. 16 by the U.S. Department of Education’s office for civil rights, which show the persistence of longstanding disparities in the nation’s education system.
The agency’s Civil Rights Data Collection for the 2021-22 school year contains information from more than 17,000 school districts and 98,000 schools. These data include student enrollment and staffing figures, information on school climate, discipline rates, and more.
The data come not only from traditional public school districts, but also charter school networks, juvenile justice facilities, multi-district magnet schools, and independent alternative and special education schools. (That explains why the data collection’s count of school districts is higher than the count from other sources, such as the National Center for Education Statistics.) The data collection has generally happened every other year since 1968—the COVID-19 pandemic delayed the 2019-20 data collection by a year—and is used to help the federal government enforce civil rights laws and for research on trends in the nation’s schools.
“The newly released data show that we cannot be complacent—that inequities in access to educational opportunities based on race, sex, and disability persist in school opportunities ranging from the number of STEM courses offered to our students to students’ experiences of suspensions in school,” outgoing U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a news release.
The new data come from the first full year of in-person learning following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Many of the findings align with what researchers have seen in the recent past, said Ivy Morgan, the director of P-12 data and analytics for EdTrust, a research and advocacy group.
“Change takes time, and the pandemic exacerbated so many of the inequities that we spend so much of our time highlighting and advocating for policy solutions to remedy,” Morgan said.
The 2021-22 report also includes some data collected for the first time, such as the number of nonbinary students enrolled in school districts that collect 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. Some 5,200 schools reported enrolling nonbinary students, but the civil rights office only reported full data for half of those schools due to privacy reasons. Those 2,600 schools enrolled 10,800 nonbinary students.
Black and Latino students had less access to STEM courses
Algebra I is a foundational course for higher-level math, but the new civil rights data show that not all middle schools offer the course—39 percent didn’t have it in their course offerings. And access to advanced STEM courses is also uneven: just 48 percent of high schools in the 2021-22 school year offered calculus, half offered computer science, 61 percent offered physics, 67 percent offered advanced math, and 76 percent offered chemistry.
When broken down race and ethnicity, the data show that students at predominantly Black and Latino schools (those where more than 75 percent of students are Black or Latino) have less access to mathematics, science, and computer science courses than students at schools with smaller populations of these students (less than 25 percent).
For example, approximately 35 percent of schools with high enrollments of Black and Latino students offered calculus compared to 54 percent of schools with low enrollments. With computer science, 42 percent of predominantly Black or Latino high schools offered it, compared with 54 percent of schools with small Black or Latino populations.
“Part of the power of the Civil Rights Data Collection that sets it apart from so many other data sources that we have on opportunities for students of color, in particular, is that it disaggregates the data by race, ethnicity,” Morgan said. “Overall averages mask so many of the inequities that particularly Black and Latino students are facing.”
Researchers at EdTrust and elsewhere have documented racial disparities over the years in students’ access to STEM coursework that can set them up for long-term career success. These include disparities in access to Advanced Placement courses—which the new civil rights data also show.
For example, Black students represented 15 percent of total high school enrollment, but accounted for only 9 percent of students enrolled in AP computer science, 7 percent of those enrolled in an AP science course, and 6 percent of students enrolled in an AP mathematics course, according to the new civil rights data.
Latino students were similarly underrepresented in AP STEM courses while white and Asian students were overrepresented.
A handful of states have policies in place requiring that schools automatically enroll qualified students in more rigorous courses, resulting in more students of color and students from low-income families who might otherwise be overlooked for those classes taking more advanced coursework. Such policies exist to help remedy inequities in access to rigorous courses, but it can take a while for them to directly change students’ experiences, Morgan said.
Access to school counselors is far from universal
As more schools contend with growing student social-emotional needs and mental health challenges, the civil rights data show gaps in access to the kinds of school staff who can help students access services they need.
Nearly a fifth of high schools, 19 percent, didn’t have a school counselor in the 2021-22 school year, according to the civil rights data. Those schools served about 5 percent of the nation’s high school students.
The American School Counselor Association recommends that schools employ one counselor for every 250 students, but that ratio stood at one for every 385 students during the 2022-23 school year, according to the association, which analyzed federal data.
And sometimes, schools had a school resource officer or security guard without having a counselor, nurse, or psychologist.
The new civil rights data show that approximately 42,700 public schools (44 percent) had at least one sworn law enforcement officer or security guard in 2021-22. Of these schools, 5,300, or 12 percent, did not have a school counselor. Two percent of the schools with school resource officers or security guards, about 850 in total, did not have a school counselor, social worker, nurse, or psychologist.
Black students and American Indian or Alaska Native students were 1.3 times more likely than white students to attend a school with a resource officer or security guard but no school counselor. Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander students were 1.2 times more likely than white students to have this experience.
Students of color were less likely to have certified teachers
Racial disparities also popped up when looking at whether students had teachers who met all state certification requirements.
Only about 537,700 students, or 1 percent of all students nationwide, attended public schools where fewer than half of teachers met all state certification requirements. But a majority of these students, 68 percent, were Black and Latino.
Black and Latino students were also more likely to face more serious discipline—suspensions, expulsions, and restraint and seclusion—continuing a historical trend.
For example, Black boys represented 8 percent of K-12 student enrollment, but accounted for 18 percent of students who received one or more in-school suspensions, 22 percent who received one or more out-of-school suspensions, and 21 percent who were expelled. Similar discipline disparities also applied to Black girls, Hispanic boys, white boys, and boys of two or more races.
And these disparities started as early as preschool, where Black children accounted for 18 percent of preschool enrollment but 38 percent of children who received one or more out-of-school suspensions and 33 percent of those expelled.
As President-elect Donald Trump takes power on Jan. 20, and management at the Education Department and its office for civil rights changes, Morgan hopes that investment in the Civil Rights Data Collection continues. 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.
“Everyone agrees that the nation’s education system can do a lot more to serve all students better, but we cannot fix the problems unless we have the data that tells us that they exist,” she said.
