The Education Department Just Released Its Civil Rights Data on Every School. The Nonbinary Numbers Are Gone.

The Civil Rights Data Collection has run every two years for more than fifty years, and it is not decorative. It is the only federal instrument that tells you, school by school, who gets disciplined, who gets bullied, and who gets locked out of the Advanced Placement classroom down the hall. On August 31, the Education Department quietly posted the 2023-24 numbers online, eight months past its own deadline, with no press release and no First Look Report. Buried inside was a decision that matters more than the delay: every entry on nonbinary students, across all 37 files, had been stripped out.

What Got Redacted, and Why

The suppressed data covered enrollment, discipline, bullying and harassment, and whether districts had policies prohibiting discriminatory harassment based on gender identity. Breakdowns by race, English learner status, and disability for those same students were withheld too. The department’s own “user’s manual” for the release says the information was “suppressed” to comply with Executive Order 14168, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” which recognizes only two sexes as a matter of federal policy. The department already announced in July that it will stop collecting this category entirely, starting with the 2025-26 cycle.

This would have been the first CRDC cycle to show discipline and bullying rates for nonbinary students nationally. The last full picture, from 2021-22, found more than 1,800 districts, 11 percent of the country, across 39 states and D.C., reporting at least one nonbinary student enrolled, totaling roughly 10,000 students across thousands of schools.

“The 23-24 collection would have been the very first time we would have had information on the discipline experiences, school discipline, and perhaps for the bullying for non-binary students, which I think is very important, and that is now suppressed. I think it’s just a significant loss for research and policy.” Maithreyi Gopalan, University of Oregon, former OCR data science impact fellow (2026)

Why This Is Not Just a Culture-War Footnote

You already know the caseload behind these numbers, even without a federal spreadsheet. The Trevor Project’s 2025 national survey, released in May, found LGBTQ+ youth reporting high rates of suicidality and victimization, worsened by the political climate around them. Nonbinary and transgender youth carry the sharpest end of that risk. The CRDC was supposed to be the tool that turned that caseload knowledge into a public, comparable, school-by-school record. That record is now the one thing missing from an otherwise complete release.

Former OCR chief Catherine Lhamon, who led the office under two administrations, put it plainly.

“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.” Catherine Lhamon, former Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, U.S. Department of Education (2026)

Districts still hold the underlying numbers. They filled out the forms. The data exists in someone’s file cabinet, as one former OCR deputy put it, and the government has simply decided not to let anyone else see it.

The Data You Still Have Just Got Harder to Use

Zoom out from the nonbinary redaction and the damage gets broader. This release skipped the First Look Report entirely, the plain-language summary that has translated raw CRDC files into something a school board member or a parent could actually read since the Obama administration. What is left is 37 files of raw data, aimed at researchers with the time and the code to parse them. The Office for Civil Rights that runs the CRDC has also cut its staff by half since the second Trump administration began, and the administration has announced plans to move OCR to the Justice Department entirely.

That usability question is not abstract for your caseload, whatever population you serve.

“Thousands of schools have cops but no counselors. We know this from the CRDC which counts both down to the school level.” Daniel Losen, National Center for Youth Law (2026)

Every disparity your district has ever had to answer for, in discipline, in AP access, in the ratio of counselors to students, runs through this same collection. A CRDC that ships without a First Look Report and with fewer people to maintain it is a weaker tool for the next fight too, not just this one.

What to Do This Week

Download the raw 2023-24 files now, while they are live on ed.gov, and archive them locally. The department has already shown it will change what it collects and what it shows, and a First Look Report has no promised return date. If your district serves nonbinary students, and the 2021-22 numbers say roughly one in nine districts nationwide did, pair your own climate survey or MTSS data with the last federal baseline you have, because the next one will not exist. And when you make the staffing or the equity case to your board this year, cite the CRDC data you can still get your hands on. It counts cops and counselors down to the school level for a reason. Use it before it gets harder to find.

Sources

• Federal civil rights data about students is finally out. It’s different under Trump — NPR, September 2026
• Education Department’s latest civil rights data redacts hundreds of LGBTQ+ entries — K-12 Dive, September 2026
• Civil Rights Data — U.S. Department of Education
• 2025 U.S. National Survey on the Mental Health of LGBTQ+ Young People — The Trevor Project, May 2026