Big cuts at the Education Department’s civil rights office will affect vulnerable students for years to come

The U.S. Department of Education cut its workforce by nearly 50% on March 11, 2025, when it laid off about 1,315 employees. The move follows several recent directives targeting the Cabinet-level agency.

Within the department, the Office for Civil Rights – which already experienced layoffs in February – was especially hard hit by cuts.

The details remain unclear, but reports suggest that staffs at six of the 12 regional OCR offices were laid off. Because of the office’s role in enforcing civil rights laws in schools and universities, the cuts will affect students across the country.

As education policy scholars who study how laws and policies shape educational inequities, we believe the Office for Civil Rights has played an important role in facilitating equitable education for all students.

The latest cuts further compound funding and staffing shortages that have plagued the office. The full effects of these changes on the most vulnerable public school students will likely be felt for many years.

Few staff members

The Education Department, already the smallest Cabinet-level agency before the recent layoffs, distributed roughly US$242 billion to students, K-12 schools and universities in the 2024 fiscal year.

About $160 billion of that money went to student aid for higher education. The department’s discretionary budget was just under $80 billion, a sliver compared with other agencies.

By comparison, the Department of Health and Human Services received nearly $2.9 trillion in fiscal year 2024.

Within the Education Department, the Office for Civil Rights had a $140 million budget for fiscal year 2024, less than 0.2% of discretionary funding, which requires annual congressional approval.

It has lacked financial support to effectively carry out its duties. For example, amid complaints filed by students and their families, the OCR has not had an increase in staff. That leaves thousands of complaints unresolved.

The office’s appropriated budget in fiscal year 2017 was one-third of the budget of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission – a federal agency responsible for civil rights protection in the workplace – despite the high number of discrimination complaints that OCR handles.

Support for OCR

Despite this underfunding, the office has traditionally received bipartisan support.

Former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, for example, requested a funding decrease for the office during the first Trump administration. Congress, however, overrode her budget request and increased appropriations.

Likewise, regardless of changing administrations, the office’s budget has remained fairly unchanged since 2001.

It garners attention for investigating and resolving discrimination-related complaints in K-12 and higher education. And while administrations have different priorities in how to investigate these complaints, they have remained an important resource for students for decades.

But a key function that often goes unnoticed is its collection and release of data through the Civil Rights Data Collection.

The CRDC is a national database that collects information on various indicators of student access and barriers to educational opportunity. Historically, only 5% of the OCR’s budget appropriations has been allocated for the CRDC.

Yet, there are concerns among academic scholars that the continued collection and dissemination of the CRDC might be affected by staff cuts and contract cancellations worth $900 million at the Department of Education’s research arm, the Institute of Education Science.

That’s because the CRDC often relies on data infrastructure that is shared with the institute.

The history of the CRDC

The CRDC originated in the late 1960s as required by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The data questionnaire, which poses questions about civil rights concerns, is usually administered to U.S. public school districts every two years.

It provides indicators on student experiences in public preschools and K-12 schools. That includes participation rates in curricular opportunities like Advanced Placement courses and extracurricular activities. It also provides data on 504 plans for students with disabilities and English-learner instruction.

Although there have been some changes to questions over the years, others have been consistent for 50 years to allow for examining changes over time. Some examples are counts of students disciplined by schools’ use of corporal punishment or out-of-school suspension.

During the Obama administration, the Office for Civil Rights prioritized making the CRDC more accessible to the public. The administration created a website that allows the public to view information for particular schools or districts, or to download data to analyze.

Why the CRDC matters

Our research focuses on how the CRDC has been used and how it could be improved. In an ongoing research project, we identified 221 peer-reviewed publications that have analyzed the CRDC.

Articles focusing on school discipline – out-of-school suspensions, for example – are the most common. But there are many other topics that would be difficult to study without the CRDC.

That’s especially true when making comparisons between districts and states, such as whether students have access to advanced coursework or participation in gifted and talented programs.

The data has also inspired policy changes.

The Obama administration, informed by the data on the use of seclusion and restraint to discipline students, issued a policy guidance document in 2016 regarding its overuse for students with disabilities.

Additionally, the data helps examine the effects of judicial decisions and laws – desegregation laws in the South, for example – that have improved educational opportunities for many vulnerable students.

Amid the Education Department’s continued cancellation of contracts of federally funded equity assistance centers, we believe research partnerships with policymakers and practitioners drawing on CRDC data will be more important than ever.