This article was written by Lily Altavena and published by Chalkbeat on July 10th, 2026. 

Did student behavioral issues worsen after the pandemic? How many students have been suspended or expelled in recent years, and what proportion of those students have disabilities? How many enroll in Advanced Placement courses — and where?

The federal data that could help answer these questions is now six months late. It’s not entirely clear what the hold up is, but it’s one of many data sets that the federal government hasn’t updated amid widespread layoffs at the U.S. Department of Education.

Researchers, advocates, and civil rights attorneys say the Office for Civil Rights data for the 2023-24 school year is critical, not only because it provides a national picture around pressing education issues such as discipline, but because it also digs into district by district data in a consistent way.

The Education Department estimated it would be available to the public by December 2025. In an interview with Chalkbeat reporters in late June, Assistant Secretary Kimberly Richey, said the release of the national civil rights data will come “later this summer.”

And the department appears to have already reviewed the data. A press release Friday cited the unreleased 2023-24 numbers as reason to open more than a dozen investigations into school districts, because their submissions to the data collection “contained responses that suggest that districts might not be addressing staff on student sexual misconduct appropriately.”

That’s just one possible use for the Civil Rights Data Collection, or CRDC, which the department typically conducts every two school years.

The information represents a wellspring of statistics about a variety of important topics. The CRDC has long been a tool for proponents of school equity to understand how well students of color, students with disabilities and other historically disadvantaged groups are faring in schools across the country, particularly when it comes to expulsions, suspensions and arrests.

While some states collect some of this data, it’s not always consistent or readily accessible to the public. Jennifer Rainville, an education attorney with the South Carolina Appleseed Legal Justice Center, said in her state, disciplinary data isn’t publicly broken down by disability status. Parents can make a public records request, but few might take that extra step.

Rainville often cites statistics from the last batch of data, including that South Carolina suspends more preschool students than any other state, based on the most recent CRDC. Seeing disciplinary actions broken down by race and disability status helps inform broader policy and bolster arguments for reform, she said.

The last time the data was released was by the Biden administration in 2023, with numbers from the 2020-21 school year.

“We are disciplining kids at a high rate, and so it’s important to know what those kids look like,” she said. “Having the breakdown of that is important to know exactly where we’re falling short, right, because we are falling short.”

Academics also rely on the data due to its consistency. It is “the only source of information” covering every school and district in the nation using the same definitions, said Daniel Losen, senior director for education at the National Center for Youth Law.

“It’s vitally important,” he said. “It really gives you a good sense of what’s going on.”

A lot has changed in education since the last data collection, including the aftermath of the pandemic, a rise in school cell phone bans, and a continued plunge in academic achievement. Researchers are particularly interested in disciplinary data from the years immediately after students returned in-person, in which teachers reported a surge in disruptive behavior.

While the 2020-21 data showed suspensions and bullying had plunged, it reflected a time when about 88% of schools were providing a combination of in-person and remote instruction due to the pandemic. In 2020, the Education Department delayed the CRDC scheduled for the 2019-20 and moved it to 2020-21.

“There are lots of really basic questions that we have limited insight into, because we haven’t gotten any data since really the times that schools were, you know, deep in the weeds of the pandemic,” said Erica Frankenberg, an education professor at Penn State.

Advocates are watching not only for the data’s release but for how the administration might interpret the numbers. In an executive order last year, President Donald Trump discouraged schools from considering whether students of color are subjected to disproportionate levels of discipline.

The Office for Civil Rights, which administers the data, has been at the center of a flurry of action. The department announced in June that some of the work in that office would be shifted to the Department of Justice, as part of an interagency agreement. The agency has been slowly shifting more and more work out of the department.

However, in announcing the agreement, a senior department official said civil rights data collection would continue under the Education Department.