For more than 50 years, the Education Department has revealed a host of realities about how students are being treated in every public school across America: which kids are being bullied, which ones are being harassed and which students can access the internet, among other things.The agency's Civil Rights Data Collection is intended to do just that — help keep schools accountable.The latest information, collected about the 2023-24 school year, was supposed to be published last December, according to the Education Department's own deadline.But it hasn't been.The agency hasn't responded to multiple requests from NPR asking what's behind the delay.Federal bureaucracy can be slow, and delays aren't always cause for concern, but advocates are on edge in the midst of recent plans the Trump administration announced to move the Office for Civil Rights — which houses the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) team — from the Education Department to the Department of Justice.That planned transfer follows months of federal action that upends the way students' civil rights have been protected in the past: The Trump administration has cracked down on initiatives related to diversity, equity and inclusion, for example, and prioritized investigating schools that allow transgender athletes to compete in women's sports."This administration has repeatedly applied civil rights law in ways that ignore or dismiss the very real inequities that persist in our education system," says Denise Forte, president and CEO of EdTrust, a think tank focused on addressing education inequity.
The delay in releasing the CRDC data, she says, "raises serious concerns, particularly as this administration seeks to downplay the impacts of racism and economic inequality in public education."A former Education Department employee who worked on the CRDC tells NPR the team is still intact.However, its future is unclear: While the Trump administration has announced the Office for Civil Rights is moving to t...