Of the many unconstitutional, illegal and unilateral actions by President Barack Obama and his senior officials, one stood out for me: an edict instructing all public school administrators that federal law mandates that students be disciplined so as to ensure racial equity.

As someone who has spent much of my professional life litigating against race-based decision making by governments, I was outraged. Furthermore, before my wife Lis and I entered law school together, she was a public school teacher and knew—as her new book Thursday’s Children reveals—that maintaining discipline in the classroom, regardless of the offending student’s race, was job one.