A First Look at the 2023–24 Civil Rights Data Collection: New Data and a Missing Count of Nonbinary Students

Executive Summary

In August 2026 the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) released the 2023–24 Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), the mandatory survey of every public school and district in the country and the most comprehensive civil rights dataset in American education. This release covers 97,094 schools and 17,591 local educational agencies (a count that, as in every CRDC, includes charter schools that are counted as their own districts as well as districts) and, on most counts, looks like a normal cycle: data on enrollment, course access, discipline, harassment, restraint and seclusion, staffing, all disaggregated by race, sex, disability and English-learner status. It adds a number of items not previously published, including FTE counts of teachers certified in four shortage areas, data science classes, and credit recovery; reinstates first- and second-year teacher counts, teacher absenteeism and teacher retention, last published in 2017–18; and returns teacher counts by race, last collected in OCR's sample surveys of the 1960s and 1970s, now reported by race and sex.

It also removes something. The 2021–22 CRDC had been the first CRDC to count nonbinary students, and the 2023–24 collection was designed to extend that count to disciplinary incidents, harassment and many other topics the survey covers. The public file blanks all instances of nonbinary students: every one of the 776 nonbinary columns carries a single reserve code, −10, defined in OCR’s user’s manual as “Suppressed in Compliance with Executive Order 14168.” This brief gives a first look at what the 2023–24 release contains, sets out what the 2021–22 data recorded about nonbinary students — the only such public count the federal government has ever produced in the CRDC, and the baseline against which the 2023–24 suppression should be read — and closes with what the change means for the people who rely on these data, and for what the country can know about the experiences of nonbinary students in its public schools. Readers interested only in the release should read the first section of the data brief linked below; those interested in the nonbinary question should read the section titled “The Category That Disappeared.”

Download the full brief from here.