Catch up on what you missed with our Education newsletter, sent weekly. A massive trove of data about the civil rights of American students was quietly published on the U.S. Education Department's website this week.
The Civil Rights Data Collection includes information about which groups of students are being bullied, which students across the country can access Advanced Placement classes and how students with disabilities are treated at school, among other things. The CRDC was supposed to be published at the end of last year, according to the agency's own deadline. The data, from nearly every public school in the country, reveals disparities in the way students are treated based on race, ethnicity, disability, sex and other factors.
It's a tool for educators, policymakers, advocates and families to understand students' experience, and for the federal government to better enforce student civil rights. The federal government has been collecting this kind of information for over 50 years. The Trump administration did not answer questions from NPR about what was behind the delay.
An Education Department spokesperson responded, "The Department released the 2023-24 Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), and it can be found here." The agency typically releases the data every two years. In another email, the spokesperson said "OCR will be releasing more data and materials in the coming weeks," but did not specify what it was referring to. While the reasons behind the delay are unclear, there have been big changes afoot at the Education Department: The Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which oversees the CRDC, cut its staff by half after the second Trump administration took office.
The administration has also announced that it will move OCR to the Justice Department. All of these changes, advocates say, may have contributed to the delay, although a former Education Department employee who recently worked on the CRDC tells NPR that team is still intact at the agency. The employee asked not to be named out of fear of professional repercussions.
In a departure from the past, the Trump administration has been using OCR to prioritize actions such as cracking down on initiatives related to diversity, equity and inclusion, and investigating schools that allow transgender athletes to compete in women's sports. For more than a decade, the CRDC has published the mountain of data it collects along with a simplified, accessible format for public use in a "First Look Report," in addition to dozens of individual data files aimed at researchers. This time, there is no First Look Report — the raw data files are the primary sources of information.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
