The U.S. Department of Education is withholding a tranche of federal data related to some LGBTQ+ students and their experiences in schools, even as it released the remaining data from its Civil Rights Data Collection for the 2023-24 school year.
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 department did release some information related to sexual orientation as part of the data set.
The civil rights collection for the 2023-24 school year began under the Biden administration and concluded under the second Trump administration. The Education Department on Aug. 31 quietly released the data — with hundreds of entries involving nonbinary students redacted — and without any in-depth accompanying report or analysis tools as was typical in previous releases to help the public better understand the trends.
Collected by the Office for Civil Rights, 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.
The data collection is sometimes also used by the Education Department to inform civil rights investigations into schools and to help reform policies to make schools more accessible and welcoming for minority students. Under recent Democratic administrations, that included for LGBTQ+ students.
The department, in its "user's manual" for the recent data release, said it "suppressed" the information on nonbinary students in compliance with President Donald Trump's January 2025 executive order entitled "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government." The order made it official that U.S. policy recognizes only two sexes — male and female — and removed gender identity for transgender and other individuals as a "meaningful basis for identification."
The Education Department on Friday told K-12 Dive that it plans on releasing more data and materials related to the civil rights collection in the coming weeks. However, it did not specify whether that will include any of the redacted data on nonbinary students.
Implications of withholding public data
Maithreyi Gopalan, an education professor who has been familiar with the Civil Rights Data Collection for at least a decade, said this is the first time she has seen data suppression for it because of an executive order. Typically, data may be suppressed for reasons like data quality or errors, she said.
Gopalan, a faculty member at the University of Oregon, also co-leads AdvancED Equity, a research group that regularly analyzes CRDC data. Gopalan served as the inaugural data science impact fellow at OCR in 2023-24, where she worked on previous years' data collection.
"It’s one thing to decide not to collect data going forward, but it’s another (worse) thing to have the data but suppress it from the public."
Seth Galanter
Senior fellow at the Edley Center on Law & Democracy and former deputy assistant secretary at the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights under the Obama and Biden administrations
The agency's decision not to share the collected data on nonbinary students from the 2023-24 school year comes after the department in July decided to abandon gathering such data entirely for the 2025-26 survey — also as a result of the January 2025 executive order.
"It’s one thing to decide not to collect data going forward, but it’s another (worse) thing to have the data but suppress it from the public," said Seth Galanter in an email to K-12 Dive on Sept. 2. Galanter is senior fellow for the Edley Center on Law & Democracy and former deputy assistant secretary at the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights under the Obama and Biden administrations, where he worked on the civil rights survey.
"They've already invested in it. The districts have already used their time and resources to report it, and it exists in someone's electronic file cabinet," he continued in a follow-up conversation with K-12 Dive. "But they're just not going to do anything with it. That is the ultimate form of waste."
The questions were initially launched as part of the data collection under the Biden administration to get a better idea of LGBTQ+ students' experiences in schools — and after districts reached out to the department for assistance because students reported themselves as nonbinary, as opposed to male or female, said Galanter.
"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," said Gopalan. "I think it's just a significant loss for research and policy."
What the executive order said
According to the executive order leading to the data's redaction, "Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being." It continued: "The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system."
The executive order also mandated that federal agencies rescind federal documents, such as guidance under recent Democratic administrations to help schools in “creating Inclusive and Nondiscriminatory School Environments for LGBTQI+ Students,” “supporting transgender youth in school,” and “Confronting Anti-LGBTQI+ Harassment in Schools.”
That and other executive orders have been used by the Education Department in what districts and civil rights advocates say are attempts to curb efforts to make schools more inclusive for LGBTQ+ students. Such practices under scrutiny by the administration include gender support plans, pronoun usage, athletic participation by transgender students and parental notification policies.
Under the second Trump administration, the Education Department has maintained that these LGBTQ+-friendly policies violate cisgender girls' and women's rights, infringe on parental rights and make schools unsafe for students.
This comes as research has shown these students to be more at risk for harassment, bullying, and assault.
Data that could be used to help students?
The department's refusal to track the data for the 2025-26 survey and its withholding of the collected data for the 2023-24 survey has caught the attention of LGBTQ+ advocacy and civil rights groups. They say withholding available information and refusing to track it in the future will make schools less safe for nonbinary students.
“The Trump administration should not be purposefully withholding data from the public, especially data that could be used to help and support students," said Brian Dittmeier, director of LGBTQI+ equality at the National Women's Law Center, in an email to K-12 Dive on Sept. 2. "We know that LGBTQ+ students have historically faced marginalization and harassment at school, and school districts are better equipped to tackle these systemic barriers to safe learning when accurate data is available."
"Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being."
Trump Executive Order 14168 - Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government
Dittmeier added, "We urge the Department of Education to protect our students by releasing the full data set to the public immediately.”
According to the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute, there are around 724,000 transgender teens ages 13-17.
In Galanter's analysis of 2021-22 CRDC data, over 1,800 school districts reported enrolling one or more nonbinary students. That represented 11% of all school districts across 39 states and the District of Columbia.
Together, they enrolled at least 10,000 nonbinary students across thousands of schools, according to researchers including Galanter.
The Education Department said in July that it had decided to no longer track these students starting with the 2025-26 school year, because it had "determined that its costs outweighed its benefits."
In response to public feedback, the agency added that “the decision to retire the nonbinary category reflects OCR’s effort to design the CRDC to be compatible with LEAs’ reporting and recordkeeping practices, the vast majority of which use two values for recording student sex.”
And while it acknowledged that this might be a challenge for districts where students may be legally assigned a category other than male or female, the department said it "believes the prior longstanding, science-based, and widely accepted practice of categorizing individuals according to their biological sex, male or female, is the more prudent policy.”
The department's changes come as research continues to show that LGBTQ+ students face challenges due to their identity.
The Trevor Project reported in May, for the seventh year, that LGBTQ+ youth are at higher risk for suicide as a result of mistreatment and stigmatization.
Some 36% of LGBTQ+ youth — including 40% of transgender and nonbinary young people — had seriously considered suicide in the previous year, according to the organization.
Nearly 60% of LGBTQ+ young people ages 13-17 said they were bullied in the past year, and those who did reported significantly higher rates of attempting suicide compared to their peers.
