Trump administration scrubs data on gender-based bullying from school
civil rights survey
[September 05, 2026]
By SHARON LURYE and ANNIE MA
The Trump administration this week quietly released an update to a major
survey on civil rights in schools that was scrubbed of all data related
to nonbinary students or bullying based on gender identity.
The numbers come from the Education Department's Civil Rights Data
Collection, a federal survey of nearly every public school in the
nation. The release this week covers the 2023-2024 school year, when the
survey included “nonbinary” as a gender category alongside male and
female.
However, an Associated Press analysis shows that in every column for
information related to gender identity, the numbers were replaced with a
code indicating “Suppressed in Compliance with Executive Order.” That
refers to an executive order that President Donald Trump signed on his
inauguration day calling for the federal government to define sex as
only male or female.
The government also suppressed the number of allegations of harassment
or bullying on the basis of gender identity in schools, information
about whether the districts had written policies prohibiting such
harassment, and any links to those policies.
Those questions in the data collection are designed to capture the
experiences of transgender and nonbinary students — whether they
experience harassment, participate in sports or face overly harsh
discipline, said Seth Galanter, a senior fellow at the Edley Center on
Law and Democracy and a former attorney with the Education Department's
Office for Civil Rights under the Biden and Obama administrations.
Only school districts that already collected data on trans and nonbinary
students were required to report it to the federal government, Galanter
said, and roughly 1,800 out of the more than 13,000 U.S. school
districts reported data in the last collection.
“We're losing the granular experience of those kids,” Galanter said.
“They exist in the world, their schools acknowledge their existence, but
we now no longer have any way to have any kind of local, state or
national picture about these kids and what their school experience is
like.”
In a written statement, the Education Department said the Office for
Civil Rights would be releasing more data in coming weeks. It also said
the Trump administration is “realigning the functions of OCR to align
with its statutory mandate.”
The White House has targeted efforts to accommodate trans students
The data suppression reflects the Trump administration’s wider efforts
to target protections for transgender and nonbinary students in schools.
The White House has repeatedly clashed with schools and colleges over
accommodations for transgender students, with the Justice Department
this week announcing a federal lawsuit against the school system in
Kansas City, Kansas, over its policies on transgender students.
It's also one of many instances in which the administration has removed
data related to gender from government resources.
The Williams Institute, an LGBTQ+ law and policy research center based
at the UCLA School of Law, has identified around 360 cases where the
Trump administration removed information related to sexual orientation
or gender identity from federal data collections, ranging from Medicare
surveys that asked about discrimination in doctors’ offices to data on
homeless youth.
The author of the Williams Institute’s report, Lauren Bouton, said the
Office for Civil Rights could have used the data to identify schools
that have a problem with bullying of nonbinary students and then require
them to follow an action plan to improve. “No one’s being held
accountable to these kids,” Bouton said.
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The headquarters of the U.S. Department of Education, March 12,
2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File)
 The Civil Rights Data Collection is
one of the country’s most important and comprehensive sources of
data related to educational opportunity in public schools. As
required by federal law, the Office for Civil Rights collects
information from every school in the country on topics like
discipline, corporal punishment, bullying and harassment, and access
to advanced coursework.
The lack of transparency around the most recent update could erode
public trust the government has worked to build for its civil rights
data, said Ivy Morgan, director of research and data at EdTrust, a
Washington, D.C.-based think tank that advocates for educational
equity.
“The way this data was released is part of a long-standing pattern
that we have observed for the last two years,” Morgan said. “This
administration just does not care about data, doesn’t care about
research, doesn’t care about evidence. And it particularly doesn’t
care about that information when it is helping us understand the
experiences of students and people who are marginalized in our
society.”
The survey went to schools shortly before Trump took office
Preparations for the latest data collection began under President
Joe Biden’s administration, and Morgan said the attempt to gather
data on nonbinary and trans students was one of the most
comprehensive efforts to date from the federal government. The
survey went out to schools a month before Trump was inaugurated.
While Trump had previously announced his administration would remove
questions related to gender identity, it was unclear whether that
would affect the 2024 data or only future surveys.
The last time that the data collection was updated, under the Biden
administration, it came with a detailed report on trends in
educational equity and opportunity, including findings that Black
and Latino students were far more likely than white students to
attend schools where the majority of teachers were not certified and
were far less likely to have access to advanced math courses in high
school.
This year, the new data came out with no accompanying report. There
was no official announcement from the Education Department that new
data had arrived. The only indication of the change was a single row
added to the department’s list of data tables. As of Friday, the
homepage of the data collection website listed 2021-2022 data under
the heading “What’s New?”
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