Trump administration scrubs data on gender-based bullying from school civil rights survey

The Trump administration this week quietly released an update to a major survey on civil rights in schools that was scrubbed of all data related to nonbinary students or bullying based on gender identity.

The numbers come from the Education Department's Civil Rights Data Collection, a federal survey of nearly every public school in the nation. The release this week covers the 2023-2024 school year, when the survey included “nonbinary” as a gender category alongside male and female.

However, an Associated Press analysis shows that in every column for information related to gender identity, the numbers were replaced with a code indicating “Suppressed in Compliance with Executive Order.” That refers to an executive order that President Donald Trump signed on his inauguration day calling for the federal government to define sex as only male or female.

The government also suppressed the number of allegations of harassment or bullying on the basis of gender identity in schools, information about whether the districts had written policies prohibiting such harassment, and any links to those policies.

Those questions in the data collection are designed to capture the experiences of transgender and nonbinary students — whether they experience harassment, participate in sports or face overly harsh discipline, said Seth Galanter, a senior fellow at the Edley Center on Law and Democracy and a former attorney with the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights under the Biden and Obama administrations.

Only school districts that already collected data on trans and nonbinary students were required to report it to the federal government, Galanter said, and roughly 1,800 out of the more than 13,000 U.S. school districts reported data in the last collection.

“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 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.”

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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