As told through the lens of civil rights issues, learn how research can help reporters interrogate the impact of new and proposed policies. Plus, experts share strategies for interpreting research and other lessons to help with coverage.
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Federal civil rights laws protect students from discrimination, but the way those laws are interpreted and enforced can change dramatically from one administration to the next.
Since President Donald Trump returned to office, his administration has overhauled federal policy around race and diversity programs and taken aim at protections for LGBTQ+ students that the Biden administration worked to expand. It has also sought to shrink the U.S. Department of Education, including its Office for Civil Rights.
For reporters trying to understand what these changes mean for students, research can provide critical context. But it doesn’t always move at the same speed as policy.
“It is tricky because so many of these developments are happening in real time and very quickly,” said Julie Park, a University of Maryland professor who studies racial equity and college admissions. “We might not be able to say, ‘OK. We know with this policy [that] this is the impact immediately.’ But we can connect the dots.”
To do so, reporters can draw on years of research about the students, school environments or underlying disparities a new policy is expected to affect. The goal isn’t to find a study that predicts exactly what will happen next, but to understand what is already known, what remains uncertain and what reporters should watch as changes are implemented.
This guide uses research on LGBTQ+ students in K-12 schools and race and equity in higher education to illustrate that approach. It also offers broader lessons for finding and interpreting research, understanding its limits and using it alongside other reporting to investigate a shifting civil rights landscape.
Scholars have spent years studying how school policies, practices and climates shape the experiences of LGBTQ+ youth.
A 2025 meta-analysis reviewing 26 studies found that strategies designed to support LGBTQ+ students – including enumerated policies, gender and sexuality alliances, inclusive curricula and staff training – were associated with less bullying and victimization and greater feelings of safety among the overall student population. While those associations were modest, they were stronger among students from sexual and gender minorities.
“We have really clear scientific consensus about what makes a difference for creating safe and supportive environments where all students thrive and do well in school – psychosocially, emotionally, in terms of their behavioral health, in terms of their academic achievement and attainment,” said Stephen Russell, an Arizona State University professor who has long studied adolescent development, sexual orientation and gender identity.
“What’s so disturbing and undermining for young people is that the rollback is of precisely the things that make a difference.”
A 2026 review by Laura Baams, a co-author of the 2025 meta-analysis, shows how existing evidence can be used to analyze newer restrictions affecting LGBTQ+ students.
Baams examined how restrictive policies could affect processes that decades of research have found are particularly important during adolescence, including identity development, autonomy, relationships with peers and adults, and a sense of belonging.
Take policies requiring school staff to notify parents when a student asks to use a different name or pronouns at school. Developmental research suggests that schools can provide a setting in which adolescents explore or disclose aspects of their identities before they are ready to discuss them with their parents.
Other studies have found that even one supportive teacher or other adult at school can make a meaningful difference for LGBTQ+ students, Russell said.
This research can’t establish what will happen under a particular parental notification policy, but it points reporters toward questions to investigate when the policy takes effect. Does the policy change when and to whom students disclose their identities? Does it affect their relationships with teachers or other trusted adults? Where do students turn for support instead? Do measures such as school safety, bullying, attendance or belonging change?
One key caveat Baams identifies: LGBTQ+ students with other marginalized identities may experience overlapping restrictions differently. Gay students of color, for example, may be affected by policies limiting discussion of both LGBTQ+ identities and race or racism.
The 2023 Supreme Court decision restricting colleges’ use of race in admissions changed a key strategy some selective institutions used to build racially diverse student bodies – and has since become a basis for the Trump administration’s efforts to restrict race-conscious policies and programs beyond admissions.
As colleges reconsider how they pursue diversity and expand access, research can help reporters investigate what those admissions approaches actually accomplish, and for whom. One important distinction is between race and class, which Park stressed are closely related but not interchangeable.
“We absolutely need programs to help low-income students, first-generation students, etc.,” she said. “But we should not assume that those programs are going to advance racial equity or do the same type of things that a race-conscious program would do.”
Reporters should interrogate the criteria that remain in admissions, and examine whether the experiences those criteria reward are equally accessible to all applicants.
A 2025 study co-authored by Park and Dominique Baker, an associate professor at the University of Delaware, looked at disparities in one such part of the college application: extracurricular activities.
Analyzing more than 6 million Common Application submissions, the researchers found differences along both racial and socioeconomic lines. White, Asian American and higher-income students reported more activities and more top leadership roles.
Black, Latino, Indigenous and lower-income students were similarly likely to hold top leadership roles when they participated, but they reported fewer activities to begin with. The researchers said the participation gap likely reflects uneven opportunity and financial resources.
The study doesn’t advocate for the removal of extracurricular activities from consideration or for colleges to require standardized testing. Instead, it shows how unequal access to opportunities can become embedded even in portions of an application that may appear more holistic.
That’s particularly relevant as schools reconsider how they evaluate applicants. If a college stops considering race explicitly, what factors take on greater importance instead? If it gives more weight to socioeconomic disadvantage, who does that approach reach? If extracurricular activities, essays or recommendations become more important, reporters should explore whether research shows any disparities in those areas.
Whatever the topic, a few basic practices can help reporters put research in context without overstating what it shows.
A newly published study shouldn’t automatically be treated as though it invalidates years of previous findings, Russell said.
Look for systematic reviews, meta-analyses and consensus reports to understand where the weight of evidence lies. Ask not only what a study found, but how it fits with what researchers already know.
Park likened watching the debate over considering standardized testing in college admissions to watching a game of ping pong, with various studies cited to support opposing positions. But studies that may seem to offer conflicting evidence aren’t always measuring the same thing.
Whether test scores predict academic performance, for instance, is a separate question from whether a testing policy affects access to college. The findings can also depend on how researchers define success and what they expect an admissions policy to achieve.
Ask what a study is actually evaluating – test scores, graduation, school safety, enrollment, earnings, student belonging – and whether that outcome answers the question your story is tackling.
Not every relevant issue is well-suited for a study designed to provide a clear measure of whether something “works.” Programs serving racially minoritized or first-generation students may have existed for decades without a randomized controlled trial or formal impact evaluation, Park said.
“Even when there isn’t a neat and tidy study, are there other ways to capture what this program means to the people who needed it or benefited from it for years?” Park said.
Qualitative or observational studies can still provide valuable insight into how a program operates or how students experience it.
The same principle applies when data exists but is incomplete or difficult to work with. Baker, whose research explores how higher education policy shapes access and success for minoritized students, warned that focusing only on questions with clean, available data can “foreclose some other potential stories” about issues that may be just as consequential.
Ask what a study or dataset leaves out. Who isn’t captured? What were researchers unable to measure but wish they could have? Where is the evidence base thin? (The 2025 meta-analysis of LGBTQ-supportive school strategies, for example, found relatively little research on staff training.) Are researchers looking broadly enough to capture effects beyond the population a policy or program was designed to target?
On the last point, Russell highlighted findings that suggest strategies designed to make schools safer and more supportive for LGBTQ+ students benefit other students, too. He said policies, staff training and other visible commitments can signal more broadly that a school is supportive of its students.
“I think that it is intuitive for us to imagine, like, ‘Oh, we’re talking about the gay kids,’” Russell said of these policies. “We’re actually not. We’re talking about everybody’s kid.”
Consider also whether findings are disaggregated enough to reveal variation within broad categories. Enrollment data following changes to race-conscious admissions show different trends for Black and Latino students – distinctions that can be obscured when they’re grouped together as “students of color,” Park said.
Research can provide important context, but how reporters frame a story matters, too.
Baker’s research on news coverage of student debt found that journalists writing for the country’s largest newspapers had themselves attended a relatively small set of colleges and universities, one factor that can contribute to a narrow view of higher education.
“I really do think that this idea that Harvard equals college is a problem,” Baker said. “I think it is seriously limiting our conceptions of what major challenges are within higher education and what potential solutions could occur.”
The problem isn’t simply that elite institutions aren’t representative. Focusing on them can distort reporters’ understanding of the sector itself.
Baker pointed to college endowments as one example. Repeated exposure to institutions with billions of dollars can leave people with the impression that colleges generally have that kind of wealth, when most do not.
Policy debates tend to center elected officials, institutional leaders and advocates. Reporters can broaden that lens by seeking out people who experienced the policies or programs at issue, including those who participated in them years earlier.
Park noted that coverage of the standardized testing debate has paid relatively little attention to alumni of color. Their experiences could help reporters examine how admissions policies shaped not only who entered college, but what happened afterward.
The same approach can help when a longstanding program is eliminated or changed. Who used it? What role did it play? What do former students or participants know that current institutional leaders can’t tell you?
Campus newspapers can also help reporters find those perspectives and spot changes at individual institutions before they appear in academic research.
Baker urged reporters to pin down what legal authority a federal action actually carries before examining how schools and colleges respond to it.
“An executive order is not a law,” Baker said, noting that some schools have nonetheless treated them as such.
She also cautioned reporters against dismissing proposals that seem too far outside recent precedent to become reality.
“If I have a knee-jerk reaction of, ‘Oh, well, that can’t happen.’ Why do I think that can’t happen? What are the conditions under which it could happen?” Baker said.
Rather than treating plausibility as a yes-or-no question, ask what barriers stand in the way and how institutions are responding in the meantime.
Broad language doesn’t always tell readers what a policy means in practice.
Park cautions against saying the Supreme Court simply “banned affirmative action” in 2023, for instance. The decision restricted colleges’ ability to consider an applicant’s race in admissions, but it didn’t prohibit every effort to increase racial or socioeconomic diversity.
She also urged reporters to distinguish among policies that are “race-based,” meaning they explicitly use race in determining eligibility or treatment; “race-conscious,” meaning they take racial disparities into account but don’t necessarily treat individuals differently based on race; and “race-neutral,” meaning they don’t explicitly use race to make decisions.
When it comes to labels like “merit,” “DEI,” “woke,” “social justice” or “diversity,” Baker urged reporters to press sources on what they mean rather than allowing the label itself to explain a policy or controversy. Instead of writing that a school eliminated a “DEI program,” tell readers what the program did, whom it served and what specifically changed.
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