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

The U.S. Department of Education, under the Trump administration, recently released an updated version of the Civil Rights Data Collection survey. This survey, which encompasses nearly all public schools across the nation, had previously included data on nonbinary students and gender-based bullying in its 2023-2024 report. However, the new update has notably omitted all information pertaining to these specific groups.

Instead, the data has been replaced with a code signaling "Suppressed in Compliance with Executive Order." This order, signed by President Donald Trump on his first day in office, mandates the federal government to define sex as solely male or female.

The suppression extends beyond just the numbers related to gender identity. It also includes data on allegations of harassment or bullying based on gender identity, whether districts have policies against such harassment, and links to those policies. These questions were included in the data collection to gauge the experiences of transgender and nonbinary students, including their encounters with harassment, their participation in sports, and the severity of disciplinary actions against them.

Seth Galanter, a senior fellow at the Edley Center on Law and Democracy and a former attorney at the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights under the Biden and Obama administrations, explained that only school districts that had already been collecting data on trans and nonbinary students were obligated to report this information to the federal government. Out of the over 13,000 U.S. school districts, approximately 1,800 complied with the request in the most recent collection.