Donald Trump's attacks on support programs like Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and the Affordable Care Act will disproportionately harm children of color. So how cruel is it that his Administration is now moving to repeal Obama-era school discipline reforms aimed to protect many of those same students from racially-motivated disciplinary practices?
But it gets worse. The Trump Administration’s announcement of its intent to overhaul the disciplinary policy reforms came after Senator Marco Rubio questioned whether or not lax discipline allowed the Parkland, Florida school shooter, Nikolas Cruz, to slip through law enforcement. In fact, Cruz, who is white, had been formally expelled from the school.
Obama’s Rethink School Discipline policies speak to the concept of disparate impact, the disproportionately higher rates of discipline for students in particular racial groups. Federal data reveals that black students are more than three times as likely as their white peers to be expelled or suspended, and that more than 50 percent of students involved in school-related arrests are Blacks and Latinxs.
The Obama era policies required that schools penalizing one racial group at a higher rates must agree to train teachers on cultural competency and implicit bias while also revising their disciplinary policies. Conservatives reject the policies as federal overreach promoting unsafe school environments.
Conservatives reject the policies as federal overreach promoting unsafe school environments.
Trump’s Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is now holding listening sessions to hear from supporters and critics of Obama’s Rethink School Discipline.
Detractors of the Obama Administration approach include Max Eden, senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, who argues that the policies are creating a “school climate catastrophe,” by pressuring schools to keep suspension numbers down. But the Government Accountability Office released a report on the same day as the first listening session, showing that black students are consistently disciplined at higher rates than their peers—only representing some 16 percent of public school students but 39 percent of students who were suspended.
While students of color have been victims of gun violence in school, Blacks and Latinxs are not among those who initiate it. According to Mother Jones, of sixteen school shootings on record since 1989, 62 percent were commited by white males. Blacks and Latinxs account for 14 percent of mass shootings from 1982 to 2018, but none of those shootings took place in a school.
Critics of the Obama-era policies argue that Black students are predisposed to bad behavior, but such a critique is racist. The reality is that such stereotypes contribute to higher rates of punishment for black children.
Government Accountability Office research shows that racial difference still accounts for a significant percentage of disparate treatment in school discipline.
One research study found, for example, that students who engaged in a “stroll” style of walking often associated with Black culture were more likely to be judged by teachers as aggressive or lower achieving academically, whether they were white or Black. Government Accountability Office research shows that racial difference still accounts for a significant percentage of disparate treatment in school discipline even after accounting for factors such as prior disciplinary history or socioeconomic status.
Another critique is that schools either fudge discipline data or don’t report discipline incidents at all to keep discipline rates down. But in New Jersey, the state’s school suspension rate hasn’t changed much in the last five years, and even increased from 4.3 percent to 4.9 percent within the last 2 years.
Folks like Max Eden argue that teacher bias is not the driving force behind school discipline; recent research says otherwise. Efforts by the Trump Administration and Marco Rubio to connect the Obama policy with the Stoneman Douglas shooting are cynical political maneuvers. They ignore successes of the reforms, and scapegoat children of color, putting their lives and livelihoods at risk.
Rann Miller directs the 21st Century Community Learning Center, a federally funded after-school program located in southern New Jersey. He spent 6 years teaching in charter schools in Camden, New Jersey. He is the creator, writer and editor of the Official Urban Education Mixtape Blog. Follow him on Twitter: @UrbanEdDJ.