Education Department delays release of school civil rights data

The Education Department had still not released its 2023-24 Civil Rights Data Collection on July 2, 2026, leaving the latest federal school civil-rights snapshot about six months behind the department’s own deadline. The delay kept parents, educators and advocates from seeing national figures on bullying, harassment, discipline, restraint and seclusion, and disability-related services in public schools.

The Civil Rights Data Collection has been one of the government’s main tools for tracking access to educational opportunity since 1968. It is a mandatory, generally biennial survey that reaches public schools in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, including charter schools, alternative schools, juvenile justice facilities and schools serving students with disabilities. The last release, covering the 2021-22 school year, came out in January 2025 and captured data from 17,704 public school districts and 98,010 public schools.

That dataset goes beyond enrollment counts. It measures access to courses, programs, staff and resources, along with school-climate indicators that can show whether students are being protected or pushed out. Without the next release, it is harder to measure whether students are facing unequal discipline, whether harassment is being documented, or whether disability-related services are reaching the children who need them. The absence also leaves school systems without a current national benchmark as they try to compare their own practices with federal patterns.

The delay has sharpened concern because the Trump administration has moved to shift the Office for Civil Rights, which houses the CRDC team, to the Department of Justice. Eleven education research organizations said in July 2025 that the timeline for the next collection had become “critically short” after the department withdrew a proposed CRDC in February 2025. The department later moved to advance future collections again, but the gap in public reporting had already stretched past the point when families, researchers and civil-rights lawyers expected to see the federal record. The Education Department has said the CRDC remains a key tool for policymakers, researchers, educators, parents and students, but the missing release has left an accountability blackout where timely federal oversight should have been.