How Did School Discipline Get Dragged Into the Presidential Election?
The outcome of the 2024 presidential election could sway the direction of school discipline policy as each major candidate presents a starkly different view of how schools should approach student behavior problems.
The 2024 GOP platform, which former President Donald Trump has endorsed , calls for Republicans to "overhaul standards on school discipline, advocate for immediate suspension of violent students, and support hardening schools to help keep violence away from our places of learning." The Democrats' 2024 platform, endorsed by Vice President Kamala Harris , highlights Biden administration policies "to prevent disparate discipline of children of color and with disabilities."
The election is happening during a period of worsening student behavior in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has given student discipline some prominence during the 2024 campaign. In a 2023 EdWeek Research Center survey , 70 percent of educators said students had misbehaved more in the previous year than in the fall of 2019. Nearly half of teachers in a Pew Research Center survey released earlier this year ranked their students' behavior as fair or poor.
At the same time, recent research suggests discipline that takes a disparate toll on students of color and students with disabilities is as prevalent as ever. In 2023, nearly 1 in 5 U.S. high school students said they had been disciplined unfairly at school , with male students and students of color being the most likely to perceive disparities in discipline, according to the CDC's biennial Youth Risk Behavior Survey, a nationally representative study of U.S. high school students. And earlier this month, a federal report from the U.S. Congress' investigative arm found that Black girls are subjected to higher rates of exclusionary discipline , including detention, suspension, and expulsion, than other students of color and their white peers.
The recent data reinforce decades of research demonstrating largely the same thing—that students of color and students with disabilities are more likely to be disciplined and face harsher punishments than other students. Whether that issue is the federal government's responsibility to address is up for debate in the 2024 election.
"We have evidence on what the problem is," said Richard O. Welsh, an education policy professor at Vanderbilt University who has researched school discipline and inequality in K-12 schools. "Whether or not we kind of look at that frontally and honestly to help shape the policy solutions is a different question."
The federal role in school discipline has changed depending on the president
The U.S. Department of Education made school discipline a central focus under former President Barack Obama in 2014. In a "dear colleague" letter, the Education Department and the U.S. Department of Justice reminded schools of their obligation to avoid racial discrimination in school discipline under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The letter also warned schools they could be found in violation of civil rights law if they enforced intentionally discriminatory policies or if their policies, intentionally or not, led to disproportionately higher rates of discipline for students in one racial group—known legally as disparate impact.
The Obama administration also argued that schools should incorporate strategies to reduce misbehavior and maintain safe learning that don't involve removing students from classrooms. Such strategies include conflict resolution, restorative justice, counseling, and positive behavioral interventions.
The dear colleague letter, "did a good job explicitly calling attention to racial disparities in school discipline," Welsh said. "They also provided guidance and resources for schools and districts to respond to those disparities. And we did see schools and districts respond."
Following the Obama guidance, more districts adopted restorative justice and anti-expulsion and suspension policies, Welsh said. In a March EdWeek Research Center survey, nearly half of educators said their school uses restorative justice more than they did in the 2018-19 school year. But opponents to the Obama administration's approach, including conservative lawmakers, argued it led to lenient school discipline .
Then came Trump's first term. The Education Department, under the leadership of former Secretary Betsy DeVos, rescinded Obama's guidance in 2018.
"Every student has the right to attend school free from discrimination," DeVos said in a statement at the time. "They also have the right to be respected as individuals and not treated as statistics. In too many instances, though, I've heard from teachers and advocates that the previous administration's discipline guidance often led to school environments where discipline decisions were based on a student's race and where statistics became more important than the safety of students and teachers."
The Trump administration emphasized local autonomy in discipline decisions, arguing that teachers and school leaders shouldn't operate under the federal government's influence on the issue.
In 2023, President Joe Biden's administration changed the guidance again . In a joint letter to education leaders, the Justice and Education departments emphasized that schools could be found in violation of civil rights law if they unfairly disciplined students of color.
The letter stopped short of fully reinstating Obama's 2014 guidance, however. The document does not address disparate impact. Instead, it urged districts to explore their disciplinary data to ensure policies are fairly applied.
"It was more of a waffling response," Welsh said. "They were not as definitive and forceful as the Obama administration. ... It seems as if they're saying, 'This is a problem, but we're not sure exactly how to proceed within the current social and political context.'"
Where Donald Trump and Kamala Harris stand on school discipline
Neither presidential nominee has spoken at length about school discipline—or K-12 issues, in general. But the major candidates' policy proposals and track records could shed light on what they might do if elected.
Project 2025, the conservative policy agenda created by the Heritage Foundation as a roadmap for a conservative president, urges the next president to rescind Biden's guidance and restore the Trump-era approach to school discipline. A number of former Trump administration officials and allies of the former president had a hand in developing Project 2025, but Trump has repeatedly tried to distance himself from the agenda. Still, it wouldn't come as a shock if the president returned to the policy of his first term.
Project 2025 criticizes the use of "restorative justice," a discipline approach that focuses on healing harm by building school relationships and connectedness among students rather than punishment through suspensions, expulsions, or other exclusionary practices.
The document criticizes the Education Department's office for civil rights for "[leveraging] federal civil rights investigations as policy enforcement tools; these investigations could only end when school districts agreed to adopt lenient discipline policies, commonly known as 'restorative justice.'"
The Obama and Biden administrations' emphasis on reducing exclusionary discipline also came under fire during the Republican National Convention in July, when Annette Albright, a former school employee in Charlotte, N.C., blamed the policies for an "uptick in school violence" and praised Trump for reversing Obama's guidance on school discipline and disparate impact.
Albright lost her job as a behavior modification technician at Harding High School in Charlotte after a video of a group of students attacking her went viral in 2016, according to The Charlotte Observer.
"Public schools are the problem," she said in her RNC speech.
Restorative justice has produced mixed results.
One study from the RAND Corporation found that schools using it saw academic outcomes worsen in grades 6-8, though average suspension rates declined and overall school climate as reported by teachers improved. Another study published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence showed no change in school climate.
Still, Welsh said, "a wholesale rejection of restorative practices flies in the face of the evidence that we've been developing in the research literature for the past decade or two, both qualitatively and quantitatively, that tells us that this is something that puts us in a positive direction toward a non-punitive approach."
For his own part, Trump has focused more on school safety than on discipline policy, arguing, with no evidence, that migrants crossing the southern border are bringing gang and drug activity to K-12 schools.
"Our country is being poisoned, and your schools and your children are suffering greatly because they're going into the classrooms, they're taking the seats," Trump said during Moms for Liberty's national summit in August. "They don't even speak English. It's crazy."
Trump has also proposed eliminating the federal Education Department. His campaign has provided little information on what that would mean for different policies under the department's purview, including enforcement of Title VI and school discipline.
There is even less information about what Harris might do about school discipline if elected. The Democratic platform advocates for more attention to the racial disparities in school discipline, and Harris was part of Biden's administration when it issued its 2023 discipline guidance. Harris' running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, last year signed legislation prohibiting suspensions for students in kindergarten through 3rd grade .
Where state policy could have an impact on student discipline
Earlier this year, lawmakers in Alabama and Louisiana enacted laws giving teachers the power to remove students from classrooms for disruptive behaviors. The laws, which have the support of state teachers' unions, aim to address the rise in behavioral problems since the pandemic.
"We're ready to restore some law and order to the classroom," Brian Massey, director of government relations for the Alabama Education Association, told Education Week in June.
While student misbehavior and its impact on teacher morale are important for lawmakers to address, policies like these—called teachers' bills of rights—could be a slippery slope, Welsh said.
"It seems as if our response in this uptick in misbehavior is to give teachers more discretion to discipline students," Welsh said. "That can be a slippery slope in terms of the tensions it might raise between principals and teachers as they navigate misbehavior. But I think the bigger issue is that discretion can be a pathway for further exclusion."
Welsh said he would like to see states focus on efforts to support teachers and students equally, rather than pitting the two groups against each other. Restorative justice practice, positive behavioral intervention and supports, or PBIS, and improved coaching and professional development for teachers can help, he said.
"I'd love to see federal guidance that incorporates and infuses more of the research and evidence," Welsh said. "We've had a surface-level skim of those underlying, deeper issues."
