Federal School Civil-Rights Data Collection Changes for 2025-26
The federal government has approved the next nationwide Civil Rights Data Collection for public schools, expanding some questions about student access and treatment while changing how several gender-related measures will be recorded.
The Office of Management and Budget approved the 2025-26 collection on July 20, 2026, under Control Number 1870-0504. The U.S. Department of Education posted the school- and local educational agency forms on July 22. The submission period is expected to begin in December 2026.
The collection covers every federally funded public local educational agency and school subject to the program. That includes traditional public school districts, charter schools, juvenile-justice facilities, alternative schools and schools primarily serving students with disabilities.
What schools will report
The Civil Rights Data Collection is a recurring federal survey, not an entirely new system. Most of the data elements collected for 2023-24 will continue in 2025-26. Schools and districts will still report aggregate information about enrollment, access to educational programs and services, staff and school climate, with much of the data disaggregated by race or ethnicity, sex, English-learner status and disability.
The Education Department identifies several new and optional reporting areas for 2025-26. They include the type and setting of instruction, including remote instruction; students served in non-LEA facilities; restraint and seclusion involving those students; threat-assessment teams and referrals; bilingual-education teachers; and enrollment in data-science classes.
The forms also continue or organize measures involving athletics, gifted and talented programs, advanced courses, dual enrollment, mathematics, science, computer science, internet access, discipline and school climate. Together, those data can help officials, policymakers and researchers examine whether student groups have comparable access to programs and whether discipline or school experiences differ across groups.
Gender-related measures will change
The revised collection removes the nonbinary category from a number of specified reporting elements, including some enrollment, English-learner, disability, discipline and educational-access measures.
That does not mean all nonbinary reporting disappears. The technical guidance says schools that already disaggregate enrollment data to include nonbinary students must report those data for certain enrollment-related fields and for other measures that retain the category. As a result, nonbinary information will not be collected through one uniform measure across every part of the dataset.
The 2025-26 materials also remove the question asking for reported allegations of harassment or bullying based on gender identity. They remove related questions about whether a local educational agency has a written policy prohibiting that conduct and about links to such policies.
These changes may make some access and treatment patterns easier to examine while limiting direct comparisons of gender-identity-related harassment and policy data across reporting cycles. The CRDC is an evidence and oversight tool; its results alone do not determine whether a school or district violated federal law.
What districts should do now
Districts and covered schools should review the 2025-26 forms, confirm the staff members responsible for the collection and verify which schools and facilities are included in their reporting universe.
The federal CRDC Resource Center provides the new school and LEA forms, data specifications and preparation materials. State guidance, including Iowa’s, directs education agencies to identify district contacts and review locally tracked information before the survey opens.
Because submissions are expected to begin in December 2026, districts should compare the federal data elements with their student-information, discipline, course-enrollment and school-climate systems. Some information may need to be assembled from more than one local source.
What families and researchers should expect
Families will not see the new nationwide dataset immediately. After submissions, the Education Department will conduct review and data-quality work before broader public analysis is available.
The eventual data could support comparisons of access to advanced courses, athletics, gifted programs, computer and data-science classes, discipline and school climate across student groups. Interpretation will depend on the definitions used, local reporting practices and the quality of the submitted data.
The central accountability question is whether the revised collection gives civil-rights officials and researchers enough comparable information to identify unequal access and treatment across the full range of students and opportunities, including areas where the 2025-26 forms narrow the categories being measured.
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