An Obama administration guidance, sidestepping law to serve an albeit well-meaning social agenda, may have deepened the very injustice it was meant to correct. Haven’t I heard this one before?
New York City public schools, where Mayor Bill de Blasio’s implementation of an Obama-era guidance that discouraged teachers from suspending minority students, have become host to more and more violent and disrespectful student behavior since the guidance was issued in 2014.
A new study from the Manhattan Institute scholar Max Eden, “School Discipline Reform and Disorder,” analyzes data from five years of public school discipline reform—and finds that a nearly 50-percent decrease in New York City’s school suspension rate corresponded to a reportedly diminishing “school climate,” a descent into chaos, according to yearly survey responses from students and teachers.)
New York City’s uptick in classroom disorder followed then-Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s 2014 “Dear Colleague” letter warning school districts that racially disparate suspension rates would trigger a federal investigation. The 2015-2016 school year showed the first notable effects of Mayor de Blasio’s reforms to curb suspension rates along racial lines in accordance with Duncan’s guidance. In that year, Eden reports, there were 15,857 fewer suspensions than two years previous, when Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s discipline reform, which predated the “Dear Colleague” letter, took effect. Unsurprisingly, 2015-16 also had a higher percentage of teachers—yearly climate survey respondents from 636 schools, serving 376,716 students— reporting declines in “order and discipline.” And student respondents to school climate surveys reported declines in “mutual respect,” along with increases in physical fighting, drug use, and gang activity.
Minority students, the very group the federal guidance aimed to serve, disproportionately suffer under de Blasio’s reforms:
“School Discipline” zeroes in on data from New York City schools, but its broader implications are undeniable: At inner-city schools forced by federal guidance to cut back on suspensions, students struggle to succeed in increasingly chaotic classrooms. Ruling out a clear-cut consequence for disruptive misbehavior, even in the well-intended interest of keeping kids in school at whatever the cost, creates an unstable school climate—a disservice to all students. Tellingly, the data show that a declining number of suspensions does not correlate to a deteriorating school culture as neatly as the removal of suspension as a disciplinary tool does—but don’t take it from me:
The fact that the mere existence of a dependable consequence for misbehavior would maintain order makes intuitive sense to all of us who’ve lived in a structured society. The federal guidance, a reinterpretation of existing law to promote the administration’s goals, makes less sense.
Duncan’s letter determined that a school would be guilty of “unlawful discrimination” if its disciplinary policy is “neutral on its face—meaning that the policy itself does not mention race—and is administered in an evenhanded manner but has a disparate impact, i.e., a disproportionate and unjustified effect on students of a particular race.”
It arose from a stated departmental agenda to tackle the school-to-prison pipeline, couched in statistical proof that children who are suspended from school are more likely to drop out of school and land in prison—and this pipeline, Duncan posed, is rooted in teachers’ racism. Black students were three times as likely to be suspended in 2011 because of, Duncan said, “differences in training, professional development, and discipline policies. It is adult behavior that needs to change.”
But, per Eden’s analysis, where teachers’ practices have changed, student behavior has worsened. In absence of a disciplinary tool, a consistent consequence to discourage disruptive behavior, chaos reportedly consumes increasingly many classrooms. Other students’ unchecked disruptive behavior, meanwhile, proves to be a foremost detractor from classroom learning and daily progress. Hardworking and well-behaved students suffer for the administration’s overcorrection.
Statistical evidence that black students receive disproportionately more suspensions drove Duncan’s rule—and the thinking behind the guidance pinned this perceived injustice on teachers’ and administrators’ implicit bias. The reforms try to get out ahead of unconscious racism by cutting back teachers’ authority to maintain order in their classrooms. But they also, in practice, appear to have undercut the already strained structure of the institutions the Department of Education is supposed to support.
A once-size-fits-all federal guidance too often sabotages the progress it was intended to advance. Controversial Title IX guidance on campus sexual assault adjudication effectively undermined the statute’s original intent to promote gender parity. Similarly, EEOC’s “ban the box” policy, concealing a job applicant’s prior criminal activity from a potential employer, has reportedly led to increases in discriminatory hiring.
These top-down prescriptions consistently ignore complex social factors. Nuanced complications of the human experience that, I’ll generously venture, a federal agency guidance writer who prides himself on his capacity to empathize with the downtrodden would discern if he spent time among the population his policies purport to serve.
Undoing the disciplinary guidance, a letter from Secretary Duncan, would take no more than a follow up letter from Secretary DeVos. Her proven commitment to helping individual families and communities pursue excellence through educational opportunities, unimpeded by ham-handed federal intervention, should guide her here. Particularly when the guidance’s rescission would restore to schools and districts the power to structure classroom environments and school culture to suit their communities’ success. And encouraging individuals to report civil rights violations to the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights—as DeVos has done—will help ensure that complaints are treated in light of their nuanced social context, and not merely preempted and, frankly, flattened by a one-size-fits-all policy.
Blaming suspension rates for racially disparate social outcomes diminishes the significance of the guidance’s premise in institutional racism. The guidance, and district-level disciplinary reforms likewise premised, misuses its own conceptual motivation. Racially disparate suspensions are discriminatory and unlawful, all else being equal. Did Duncan’s Education Department really believe all else was ever equal?
If they did, they can’t have been paying attention. And their inattention, as Eden’s findings illustrate, has imperiled at least New York City’s hundreds of thousands, and, nationally, most likely millions more, minority students’ academic progress—hobbling whole populations of precisely those students the guidance purported to serve.
