The Trump administration this week released an updated version of a major federal school civil rights survey, but the data made public omitted information tied to nonbinary students and bullying based on gender identity.
The figures are part of the Education Department’s Civil Rights Data Collection, a sweeping federal survey that gathers information from nearly every public school in the United States. The latest release covers the 2023-2024 school year, a cycle in which the survey listed “nonbinary” as a gender category in addition to male and female.
An Associated Press review found that every field connected to gender identity had been replaced with a notation saying the information was “Suppressed in Compliance with Executive Order.” The reference points to an executive order President Donald Trump signed on Inauguration Day directing the federal government to define sex only as male or female.
Also withheld were counts of harassment or bullying allegations related to gender identity, details on whether districts had written policies barring that type of harassment, and links to any such policies.
Seth Galanter, a senior fellow at the Edley Center on Law and Democracy and a former lawyer in the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights during the Biden and Obama administrations, said those questions were intended to document the experiences of transgender and nonbinary students — including whether they face harassment, take part in sports or are subjected to disproportionately severe discipline.
Galanter said only districts that were already tracking data on transgender and nonbinary students had to submit it to the federal government. In the most recent collection, about 1,800 of the nation’s more than 13,000 school districts reported such information.
“We’re losing the granular experience of those kids,” Galanter said. “They exist in the world, their schools acknowledge their existence, but we now no longer have any way to have any kind of local, state or national picture about these kids and what their school experience is like.”
The Education Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The White House has targeted efforts to accommodate trans students
The data suppression reflects the Trump administration’s wider efforts to target protections for transgender and nonbinary students in schools. The White House has repeatedly clashed with schools and colleges over accommodations for transgender students, with the Justice Department this week announcing a federal lawsuit against the school system in Kansas City, Kansas, over its policies on transgender students.
It’s also one of many instances in which the administration has removed data related to gender from government resources.
The Williams Institute, an LGBTQ+ law and policy research center based at the UCLA School of Law, has identified around 360 cases where the Trump administration removed information related to sexual orientation or gender identity from federal data collections, ranging from Medicare surveys that asked about discrimination in doctors’ offices to data on homeless youth.
The author of the Williams Institute’s report, Lauren Bouton, said the Office for Civil Rights could have used the data to identify schools that have a problem with bullying of nonbinary students and then require them to follow an action plan to improve.
The Civil Rights Data Collection is one of the country’s most important and comprehensive sources of data related to educational opportunity in public schools. As required by federal law, the Office for Civil Rights collects information from every school in the country on topics like discipline, corporal punishment, bullying and harassment, and access to advanced coursework.
The lack of transparency around the most recent update could erode public trust the government has worked to build for its civil rights data, said Ivy Morgan, director of research and data at EdTrust, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that advocates for educational equity.
“The way this data was released is part of a long-standing pattern that we have observed for the last two years,” Morgan said. “This administration just does not care about data, doesn’t care about research, doesn’t care about evidence. And it particularly doesn’t care about that information when it is helping us understand the experiences of students and people who are marginalized in our society.”
The survey went to schools shortly before Trump took office
Preparations for the latest data collection began under President Joe Biden’s administration, and Morgan said the attempt to gather data on nonbinary and trans students was one of the most comprehensive efforts to date from the federal government. The survey went out to schools a month before Trump was inaugurated.
While Trump had previously announced his administration would remove questions related to gender identity, it was unclear whether that would affect the 2024 data or only future surveys.
The last time that the data collection was updated, under the Biden administration, it came with a detailed report on trends in educational equity and opportunity, including findings that Black and Latino students were far more likely than white students to attend schools where the majority of teachers were not certified and were far less likely to have access to advanced math courses in high school.
This year, the new data came out with no accompanying report. There was no official announcement from the Education Department that new data had arrived. The only indication of the change was a single row added to the department’s list of data tables. As of Friday, the homepage of the data collection website listed 2021-2022 data under the heading “What’s New?”
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