The Trump administration took aim at another keystone in public education, this time looking to shake up how schools handle discipline.
It’s not the disparate rates of punishment levied against racial minority children that concerns this White House, though. Rather, it’s the years-long attempts to make school discipline more fair that earned ire.
An executive order signed by President Trump last week frames as discrimination an Obama-era policy to correct disparities in school discipline that end in Black students being disproportionately removed from the classroom.
The new order purports that Obama’s policies made schools less safe by incentivising them to sweep student misconduct under the rug.
Experts in education policy and school discipline told EdSurge that the executive order, vague on details, goes against evidence that discipline is unequally applied to Black students, and that alternatives to removing students from school are actually best for learning.
An Unsurprising Development
Chris Curran, director of the Education Policy Research Center at the University of Florida’s College of Education, says that he’s not surprised by the executive order given how education has become front-and-center in today’s culture wars.
The modern tussle over school discipline began with a 2014 call from the Obama administration for exclusionary discipline, where the student is removed from the classroom or school, to be used as a last resort. It referenced data that shows students of color — Black students, in particular — and students with disabilities are disproportionately suspended or expelled.
Then, during and after the pandemic, there were “lots of calls from teachers and principals, and some evidence at scale, too, that there’s been some increases in perceived misconduct within the schools,” Curran says. That builds on “claims that even very extreme things like school violence and school shootings have in some ways been a result of lack of school discipline.”
What was surprising to Curran was that the Trump administration would seek to develop a blanket national policy for how schools handle discipline — something that historically has been left to schools. A national code of conduct or discipline model, he explains, “would be sort of a divergence from a lot of traditional roles that the federal government has played within school discipline broadly.”
Rachel Perera, a fellow for the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, says she was surprised by the executive order, given that Trump’s decision to try to sunset the Department of Education was framed as a move to give back power over education to states and districts.
The new executive order purports to end an Obama-era policy aimed at reducing disparities in school discipline. But Trump rescinded that policy during his first term, Perera points out, and the Biden administration’s directive on the same topic was widely criticized for being so vague that it provided no guidance at all.
The executive order also frames attempts to address disparities in school discipline as unfair.
“There’s such compelling evidence in education research that racial discrimination contributes to racial disparities,” Perera explains. “[The Trump administration is] saying fairness is discrimination against white kids, or Asian kids in some instances, and there’s no basis in research or facts. This is an ideology of white grievance that they’re trying to promote through a number of avenues, including now apparently school discipline.”
What Does the Data Say?
Richard Welsh, an associate professor of education and public policy at Vanderbilt University, says a major problem with the executive order is that it conflates school safety with school discipline.
School safety refers to incidents involving weapons and physical harm, he explains, whereas school discipline involves behavior like being defiant.
Research shows that adults are more likely to perceive the behavior of Blacks students as more deserving of punishment. Welsh’s own research has found that even when the pandemic limited how much time students physically spent on campus, Black students were still disproportionately removed from class.
“It’s very important how we frame problems in educational equity because I think that will drive the type of solutions that we look for,” Welsh says. “This executive order is an example of how we wouldn’t want to frame problems in school discipline, where discipline is seen as race- neutral. It confuses who are the victims of discrimination, bias, and being treated as others in the classroom.”
Welsh says that the most pressing issue schools have faced over the past few years is chronic absenteeism.
While suspension may be warranted in some cases, Welsh says his mantra generally is that students should remain in school — where they can receive counseling or other support to get to the root of their misbehavior — as often as possible.
Emily K. Penner, an associate professor of education in the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine, has conducted research suggesting that teacher attitudes, rather than student misbehavior, may influence the high rate at which Black students are sent out of class for discipline.
She likewise says that the school officials she works with are most urgently trying to find solutions to the chronic absenteeism that worsened during the pandemic. Any use of exclusionary discipline, where students are removed from class or the school entirely, runs counter to their goal of getting students to return to campus, Penner says. It also has the same effect as absenteeism, which is reducing their time spent learning.
“A lot of the things kids are dealing with are mental health challenges,” Penner explains, “and exacerbating that with less time in the classroom and with negative interactions with adults is not necessarily in the best interest of the kid in terms of getting them back on track and learning with their classmates.”
Solution Without a Plan
Curran says any system that scrutinizes schools’ data opens the possibility that some will try to game the system, as the executive order accuses.
“For a school to lower their disparities and suspensions, that takes a lot of resources,” he says, which could include professional development for teachers or additional staff. “Unfortunately, we didn’t necessarily couple the resources with the push to change policy in some cases, or in many cases.”
Perera says that the Obama-era guidance from 2014 was controversial in part because it failed to outline what schools should do as an alternative to suspensions. States that similarly issued laws requiring schools to try other means before suspending students created a burden, she adds, by not setting aside money for schools to make those alternatives possible by hiring more counselors or student behavioral specialists.
“My hypothesis is policy- and decision-makers got the message that suspensions are harmful to Black, indigenous, students with disabilities,” Perera says, “so [suspensions were] removed without sufficient thought to: What do you do instead, and how do you transition to less punitive practices?”
Culture War Crosshairs
Researchers have found that harsh punishments that remove students from school don’t work.
Welsh says the harsher approach to misbehavior favored by the Trump administration has already been put in place in states like Alabama, Louisiana and West Virginia, which increased the level of discretion teachers have in removing a student from their classroom.
“I wouldn’t put [more punitive discipline] as something that is probably coming from a federal catalyst as much as it could just be that the federal government is institutionalizing and spreading what has been kind of a momentum in several states in the post-pandemic era,” Welsh says.
Curran says that results from his survey of Florida parents, which is being prepared for publication, shows they favor getting tough on student misbehavior, including using school suspensions.
The executive order is part of broader culture wars, he says, over what “common sense” means in practice for school discipline and education.
One bit of evidence for that idea? The order uses the term “discriminatory equity ideology” to describe an earlier approach to school discipline.
“I don’t know if that’s a purposeful co-opt of the term ‘DEI’ or not, but ironically it points to this connection to this broader conversation around DEI and issues of equity in schools,” Curran says.
The vagueness of Trump’s executive order leads Penner to believe that the administration wants schools to draw their own conclusions about what complying would mean.
“They like to tell people that they need you to change,” she says, “but then they don’t tell you how, because they hope that you’ll pick something that you’re the most scared of.”
While imperfect, she says, schools have been trying for years to shift their disciplinary policies in a way that makes the process more fair.
“I think it would be a mistake to disrupt that work because I do think that schools are right, that getting kids in class more is important,” Penner says, “and giving teachers and students and families and school leaders the supports they need to make that happen in a way that makes the learning environment as supportive of all those people as possible is the thing to pursue. I’m not seeing how this executive order supports that work at all.”