The U.S. Department of Education (USDE) quietly released results of the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) for the 2023-24 school year, but redacted data collected on nonbinary students’ experiences. A tranche of federal data related to some LGBTQ+ students and their experiences in schools was withheld, even though the remaining data from the CRDC for the 2023-24 school year was released.
The redacted data covers nonbinary students’ experiences related to enrollment, discipline, bullying and harassment, and whether districts have policies prohibiting discriminatory harassment or bullying of students on the basis of their gender identity. Breakdowns of nonbinary students’ experiences by racial demographics, English learner status, and disability were also withheld.
The civil rights collection for the 2023-24 school year began under the Biden administration and concluded under the second Trump administration.
On August 31, 2026, the USDE quietly released the data, which had hundreds of entries involving nonbinary students redacted. It also lacked any in-depth accompanying report or analysis tools, which had been part of previous releases to help the public better understand the trends.
Collected by the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), the CRDC is meant to capture data on equal access to education for various student subgroups and give the government a picture on schools’ compliance with civil rights laws. OCR has typically administered the data collection biennially for more than five decades.
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