A Second Look at the 2023–24 Civil Rights Data Collection: Early Findings on Advanced Coursework, Discipline, and School Staffing
In August 2026 the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) released the 2023–24 Civil Rights Data Collection, the mandatory biennial survey of all public schools and districts in the United States. It includes data from 97,094 schools and reports enrollment, course access, discipline, and several other topics, each disaggregated by race, sex, disability and English-learner status. We described the release itself, and what it gained and lost as a measuring instrument, in a first brief. This brief includes early findings related to coursework, discipline and the educator workforce. We primarily compare the collection with the 2021–22 release of last year, using a harmonized file[1] that puts the two data collections on comparable terms. Additionally, we contextualize the enrollment figures in the longer CRDC series since 2011–12.[2]
What We Found
Four findings stand out.[3]
K-12 enrollment declines in public schools. 48.2 million students were enrolled in kindergarten through grade 12 and 1.5 million children were in preschools in public schools. The K-12 enrollment fell by 0.9% (48.6 million in 2021-22), while pre-K enrollment rose by 12% (from 1.4 million).
Students’ access to advanced coursework remains uneven. 45% of high schools offered calculus and 51% offered computer science. In high schools where Black and Latino students are more than three-quarters of enrollment, calculus is offered in 32% of schools — 18 percentage points below schools with less than a quarter of Black and Latino students.[4]
Racial/ethnic disparities in exclusionary school discipline persist. Black boys experience out-of-school suspensions at a rate 2.9 times their share of enrollment and Black girls at 1.9 times theirs. No other group of girls is over-represented at all.
Racial/ethnic diversity of the teaching workforce differs significantly from that of the students they educate. Teachers reported as White are 75% of the workforce and White students 44% of enrollment — 1.7 times their share. Black teachers are at 0.6 times the share of Black students and Latino teachers are 0.4 times the share of Latino students.[5]
[1] Harmonization is what makes the comparison possible. Variable names, universes and definitions change between CRDC collections, and OCR’s own reports compare each collection only with the one before it. A file that records those changes once lets every analysis rest on the same corrections, rather than leaving each analyst to rediscover them.
[2] H-CRDC data is created by the AdvancED Equity team by merging school-level public-use files released by OCR for every wave since the 2011-12. H-CRDC Version 3.0 covers data from seven CRDC collections (2011–12 to 2023–24), with consistent variable names, a data dictionary, and documentation. The file and its documentation will be released publicly, in the coming weeks.
[3] All findings for 2023-24 unless explicitly stated otherwise.
[4] Following OCR’s methodological conventions, a high school is any school or justice facility reporting any of grades 9–12 or ungraded students of high-school age. The CRDC reports enrollment for the school as a whole rather than for grades 9–12 alone, so course-taking rates are computed over the same set of schools for numerator and denominator. They compare groups with one another; they are not grade-specific participation rates.
[5] Teachers by race and sex are reported as headcounts, not full-time equivalents. The item was optional in 2021–22 and not released in the public files, but was required in 2023–24, and 96,929 schools reported it. We take these items up at length in a forthcoming brief.
Download the full brief from here.