On June 8, 2021, the Biden administration’s Department of Education published a request for information about the “nondiscriminatory administration of school discipline.” The Department’s background information repeatedly mentions a “school to prison pipeline,” and says that minority-race students get “substantially more school discipline than their white peers and receive harsher and longer punishments than their white peers receive for like offenses.”
Here’s what you need to know:
In 2014, the Obama administration’s Department of Education sent schools nationwide a “Dear Colleague” letter threatening to investigate them if minority students were suspended or expelled at higher rates than white students. As a result, districts began factoring race into discipline. As the Heritage Foundation’s Jonathan Butcher has noted, “Quota-based systems that discipline students differently depending on their race or ethnicity do not take into account critical factors that affect behavior and misbehavior. Examples include the concentration of minority students from single-parent families, as well as the concentration of dangerous neighborhoods near a particular school.”
This 2014 guidance didn’t result in better outcomes for students, teachers, or communities. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Max Eden discovered, “In Oklahoma City, 60 percent of teachers say offending behavior increased since the letter came out (11 percent say it decreased). In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 60 percent say they’ve experienced an increase in violence or threats and 41 percent say they don’t feel safe at work. In Portland, Oregon, 34 percent of teachers say their school is unsafe. In Jackson, Mississippi, 65 percent say their school “feels out of control” on a daily or weekly basis. In Denver, 32 percent of teachers say discipline issues have hurt their personal safety and 60 percent say it has hurt their mental health. In Syracuse, New York, 36 percent of teachers say they have been physically assaulted, 57 percent say they’ve been threatened, and 66 percent say they fear for their safety at school.”
In 2018, the Trump administration’s Department of Education formed a Federal Commission on School Safety and rescinded the Biden-era guidance based on the commission’s advice. The commission’s report says that “fearful of potential investigations, some school districts may have driven their discipline policies and practices more by numbers than by teacher input. School discipline is a complex issue that is affected by local circumstances. For example, there may be other reasons for disparities in behavior if students come from distressed communities and face significant trauma. Local solutions are best suited for dealing with the unique needs of local communities.”
Now is the time to tell the Biden administration that school discipline should not be decided by race, and that local control over these decisions is a better solution.
Comments are due by JULY 23, 2021.
