Trump Administration Removes Gender-Identity Data From School Civil Rights Survey/ TezzBuzz/ WASHINGTON/ J. Mansour/ The Trump administration removed data concerning nonbinary students and gender identity-based bullying from a major federal school survey. The suppressed information included harassment allegations, disciplinary outcomes and school policies protecting transgender and nonbinary students. The Education Department said its Office for Civil Rights would release additional data and was being realigned with its statutory mandate.
The Trump administration has released updated results from a major federal survey of civil rights conditions in public schools, but omitted information concerning nonbinary students and bullying based on gender identity.
The Education Department’s Civil Rights Data Collection covers nearly every public school in the United States. The latest release concerns the 2023-2024 school year, when participating districts could report “nonbinary” alongside male and female as a student gender category.
An Associated Press analysis found that figures in fields concerning gender identity were replaced with a notation reading “Suppressed in Compliance with Executive Order.”
The notation refers to President Donald Trump’s January 2025 executive order directing federal agencies to recognize two sexes, male and female, and to use that definition when interpreting and administering federal policy.
The withheld material included the number of reported incidents of harassment or bullying based on gender identity. Information about whether school districts maintained written policies prohibiting such conduct—and links to those policies—was also removed.
The survey questions were intended to document whether transgender and nonbinary students experienced harassment, participated in athletics or faced disproportionately severe discipline.
Seth Galanter, a senior fellow at the Edley Center on Law and Democracy and a former Education Department civil rights attorney, said only districts that already maintained data on transgender and nonbinary students were required to submit it.
Approximately 1,800 of more than 13,000 school districts reported such information during the previous collection.
Federal guidance for the survey confirmed that only schools and local education agencies already separating enrollment information into a nonbinary category had to provide that data.
In a written response, the Education Department said the Office for Civil Rights would publish more data in the coming weeks. The department also said the administration was “realigning the functions of OCR to align with its statutory mandate.”
The Civil Rights Data Collection is one of the federal government’s most extensive sources of information about educational access and equality. It gathers school-level figures on discipline, corporal punishment, harassment, bullying and access to advanced courses.
Lauren Bouton of the Williams Institute said civil rights officials could have used the suppressed information to identify schools with significant bullying problems and require corrective plans.
The Williams Institute has identified approximately 360 instances in which the administration removed sexual-orientation or gender-identity information from federal data collections, according to AP.
Preparations for the 2023-2024 survey began during President Joe Biden’s administration, and schools received it about a month before Trump returned to office.
Although the Trump administration had announced plans to eliminate federal questions involving gender identity, it had remained unclear whether that decision would affect information schools had already collected.
Unlike the previous release, the latest data appeared without an accompanying analysis of national trends or a formal announcement from the Education Department. The update was reflected through a new entry in the department’s list of available data tables.
Ivy Morgan, research and data director at the educational equity organization EdTrust, said the limited transparency surrounding the release could weaken public confidence in federal civil rights statistics.
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