Education Department stripped nonbinary-student data from civil rights collection, dropped decade-old summary report

On September 4, 2026, the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights released its 2023-24 Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) -- the federal survey of civil rights conditions in nearly every U.S. public school -- with all planned nonbinary-student data stripped from each of the 37 published files. An Associated Press analysis of the released dataset found that every column tied to gender identity, including allegations of gender-identity-based bullying and related school policies, had been replaced with a code reading "Suppressed in Compliance with Executive Order," referencing the order President Trump signed on his first day in office declaring that the federal government would recognize only male and female sexes. The department also removed the nonbinary-student category, along with related disability and English-learner cross-tabulations, from the survey it has already begun administering for the 2025-26 cycle.

The 2023-24 cycle would have been the first CRDC to include a distinct nonbinary-student category in over fifty years of the collection's history; the redaction erased that dataset before it ever reached the public. The release also came roughly nine months after the department's own December 2025 publication deadline, following staff cuts that halved the Office for Civil Rights and a planned transfer of OCR's functions to the Department of Justice.

Separately from the redaction, the department discontinued the "First Look Report" -- a simplified, plain-language summary of the collection's findings that OCR had published alongside the raw data files for more than a decade -- leaving only the raw files, aimed at researchers, for public access. Catherine Lhamon, who led OCR under Presidents Obama and Biden, said the change left the data unusable "for somebody's mom" trying to see what is happening in a school community or compare it across districts. An Education Department spokesperson confirmed the release to reporters and said OCR would release additional data and materials "in the coming weeks," without specifying what that would include.

The archive already records the department's months-long delay in releasing this same collection (see the related entry in this episode); this entry covers a distinct act at the point of release -- altering what the collection captured and discontinuing the format that made it publicly usable -- rather than the earlier delay itself.