Restoring Teacher Authority: Understanding and Undoing the Department of Education’s Campaign Against School Discipline

Introduction

Effective classroom instruction requires an environment where teachers can focus primarily on instruction and where students can focus more on their teacher and less on any mischievous disruptions or distractions from their peers. For decades, teachers had a simple and straightforward way to enforce order: set clear behavioral expectations and send disruptive students to the principal’s office for a consequence if they violated them. The principal would then support the teachers’ discretion and issue a detention or an in- or out-of-school suspension, establishing clear norms for behaviors that would and would not be tolerated in classrooms.

Unfortunately, American public education is a decade into an experiment that hamstrings teachers’ authority to draw and enforce clear behavioral lines. The Obama Department of Education embraced – and then enforced – a radical critique and overhaul of school districts’ discipline policies. The critique, which originated in the fringes of left-wing ideology, held that all disciplinary disparities were an artifact of implicit bias from teachers or “institutional racism” within schools. On this premise, the Department of Education under presidents Barack Obama and Joseph Biden leveraged civil rights enforcement to prevent teachers from utilizing their own best judgment in issuing consequences for unruly or disruptive behavior.

Teacher polling and academic studies have demonstrated that school districts that shifted toward more lenient, so-called “restorative justice”-based approaches saw a substantial increase in school disorder and a decrease in student learning outcomes. In response, on April 23, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 14280, “Reinstating Common Sense School Discipline Policies” (The White House, 2025a). The order tasked the Department of Education to take appropriate enforcement action against school districts that violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by factoring race into school disciplinary practices and tasked the Department of Education and Attorney General to coordinate with governors and state attorneys general to prevent racial discrimination in discipline.

While the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights can and should investigate school districts who have unlawfully injected racial stereotyping into school discipline or who have made it a policy through implicit quotas to treat students differently based on race, ultimately, states and local school districts must take action to undo lenient disciplinary initiatives and restore moral authority to teachers in their classrooms. For a nationwide restoration of teachers’ authority to maintain order in the classroom to occur, policymakers must understand the radical origin of restorative justice, what this approach actually entails for teachers, the fallacious arguments behind it, the administrative coercion used to spread it, and the toll it has imposed on students and teachers.

The Radical Origin of Restorative Justice

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 59% of American public schools implemented “restorative practices” in school discipline in 2022 (National Center for Education Statistic, 2024). Twelve years earlier, this practice was an official policy in only one school district, Oakland Unified School District in California, spearheaded by the efforts of an organization called Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth (RJOY). RJOY was founded by Fania Davis, who had been a member of the Communist Party in the 1950s (Davis, 2019, p. 93).

According to Davis, “healing interpersonal harm requires a commitment to transforming the context in which the injury occurs: the socio-historical conditions and institutions that are structured precisely to perpetuate harm” (Davis, 2019, p. 35). Prior to her work, “restorative justice” had been predominantly a re-entry technique for convicted prisoners. Davis was troubled by the “whiteness” of the field, and pushed to redefine restorative justice as a tool to reduce racial disparities in school discipline, and to provide educators, “particularly those who are white,” with “ongoing trainings and professional development opportunities that include modules on unlearning racism [and] whiteness” (Davis, 2019, p. 94).

Davis’s initial pilot program, launched in 2008, may have remained fringe if not for “the important motivation to adopt restorative justice district-wide as official policy in 2010 … the legal imperative to address racial disparity in school discipline” (Davis, 2019, p. 51). She noted that shortly after that board resolution broadened restorative justice to a district-wide practice, the U.S. Department of Education launched an investigation into Oakland based on its racially disparate rates of school discipline, and that to settle, Oakland “agreed, among other things, to use restorative justice to reduce the disparate rate of arresting, suspending, and expelling black students compared to their white counterparts” (Davis, 2019, p. 51).

Before turning to the story of how the Department of Education spread restorative justice nationwide, it is necessary to examine what “restorative justice” looks like when it is implemented in a classroom. Restorative justice has enjoyed broad popularity amongst education advocacy groups because its ideals of attempting to address the root causes of misbehavior and repair harm caused by student misbehavior sound like an obvious and altruistic element of good teaching. In practice, however, restorative justice removes the most certain tool teachers have at their disposal for maintaining order: sending a student to a supportive principal’s office to impose a consequence. Instead, it requires teachers to demonstrate that they have taken multiple measures before referral, and prejudices administrators against issuing consequences.

Restorative Justice: A Case Study in “Best Practices”

In the 2020-2021 school year, the Fayetteville Public School district in Arkansas launched an initiative to use “restorative practices” to reduce school suspensions and racial disproportionality in school discipline. The training guide given to teachers and administrators explained that “restorative practices are effective at addressing the disproportionality of discipline on students of color” and provide “new tools to replace outdated and ineffective methods of punishment and suspension” (Fayetteville High School, 2020).

According to the manual, teachers should not offer simple injunctives to enforce physical boundaries between students, but rather “affective statements” regarding how a student touching a girl should be addressed. Instead of “don’t touch her,” a teacher should say, “I feel really uncomfortable when I see you touching [student name.] I value all students feeling safe and secure. Would you be willing to talk about what is going on between you two?” Such statements should not be made publicly to “call out the student in front of their peers,” but rather should be made directly and quietly to the student (Fayetteville High School, 2020). In approaching a misbehaving student, the teacher “should pay close attention to the importance of social identities (race)” (Fayetteville High School, 2020).

If misbehavior persists, educators are encouraged to engage in a “restorative circle … ritual” (Fayetteville High School, 2020). In these rituals, educators are encouraged to “be vulnerable. If your feelings were hurt, the students should know that.” Circles should be arranged in an “actual circle in seats of equal height or on the ground to dispel any sense of hierarchy” (Fayetteville High School, 2020). The circle should not “reprimand or embarrass” an offending student, nor should the teacher “try to convince others of a particular point of view,” but rather to “keep the circle open to multiple opinions and perspectives” on the incident in question” (Fayetteville High School, 2020).

Before sending a student to the principal’s office to issue a consequence for misbehavior, a teacher is first “REQUIRED to address the student behavior using Restorative Language” and provide documentation of a restorative intervention to the administrator in a behavioral referral (Fayetteville High School, 2020). The administrator is then “REQUIRED to have a conversation with the student to get their side of the story,” and then ask the student to fill out a reflection form that asks the student what he “[feels] is an] appropriate consequence for your actions” (Fayetteville High School, 2020). After the reflection form is completed, the administrator is “REQUIRED to convene a meeting between the student and the teacher to resolve the issue and restore the relationship between the teacher and student” (Fayetteville High School, 2020).

Such policies would obviously achieve the immediately stated aims of reducing both disciplinary consequences and the racial rates of issuing such consequences. If teachers and administrators are required to take student racial identity into account when enforcing behavioral expectations, in the context of a school district that has a stated goal of changing its rates of discipline, then it is only reasonable to expect that they will treat students of different races differently when enforcing the rules. More importantly, the “restorative” approach intentionally lowers the moral status of the teacher from that of an authority figure to that of a victim by requiring her to explain that she felt hurt by the student’s behavior and mandating that every misbehaving student has the right to justify his actions for the administrator to weigh against the teachers’ account.

These policies did not spread naturally by the demand of everyday educators. Indeed, these policies were predicated on an unjust indictment that teachers’ subjective judgement could not be trusted in school discipline because of implicit bias, and they were spread through federal administrative coercion wielded by the Obama Department of Education.

Debunking the “School-to-Prison Pipeline” Myth

Two years after investigating the Oakland Unified School District and requiring it to adopt restorative justice policies, President Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan issued a Dear Colleague Letter on Title VI for school discipline to pressure school districts to decrease the use of school suspensions. Citing federal statistics that African American students were suspended at three times the rate of white students, Duncan declared that “racial discrimination in school discipline is a real problem today” (Duncan, 2014). The disparity, he claimed, was not caused by “differences in children; it’s caused by differences in training, professional development, and discipline policies. … It is adult behavior that needs to change” (Duncan, 2014). Duncan declared that the “over-use of suspension” has “taken a terrible toll on students, families, schools and communities,” and noted that “suspended students are less likely to graduate on time – and are more likely to repeat a grade, drop out of school, and become involved in the juvenile justice system” (Duncan, 2014). Therefore, racially biased disciplinary decision-making by teachers and administrators created a “school-to-prison pipeline” that “must be challenged every day” (Duncan, 2014).

The argument for the existence of the “school-to-prison pipeline” can only be sustained by ignoring readily available data, the obvious confounding variable of student behavior that connects suspensions to dropping out of school, and rigorous empirical examinations into school discipline published after the 2014 DCL was issued. While the role that racism might play cannot be definitively disproven, the weight of the evidence suggests that a very substantial share of the disciplinary disparity is attributable to aggregate differences in student behavior. Students from a single-parent household are twice as likely to get suspended, and black students are nearly three times as likely to come from a single-parent household (Egalite, 2016). A study of Michigan Child Protective Service records showed that black students were twice as likely to be subjected to a state investigation into child maltreatment, such as parental abuse or neglect, which must necessarily manifest in classroom behavior (Jacob & Ryan, 2018). Nationally representative studies show that black students were nearly three times as likely to say they’ve been in a fight at school (15.5% vs. 6.5%) and nearly twice as likely to say they arrive late to class “sometimes” or “often” (Petrilli, 2018).

Advocates for reducing school discipline claim that “students of color do not misbehave more than their white peers, but are often disciplined for subjective infractions, such as disrespect for authority” (NAACP, 2017). But the data do not bear this out; a 2018 study of disciplinary data in Louisiana showed that African American students were suspended relatively more frequently for the “objective” offense of fighting (467,074 vs. 125,606 incidents) than the “subjective” offense of disrespecting authority (393,442 vs. 131,529 incidents) (Barrett et al., 2018).

Several empirical studies have examined racial disparities in school discipline with a more fine-toothed comb and found that after controlling for proxies for behavior history, the racial disparity in school discipline vanished. A 2014 study used national longitudinal survey data to incorporate prior teachers’ perceptions of behavior and mothers’ reports of children’s behavior, and found that race ceased to be a statistically significant factor, concluding that “differences in rates of suspension between racial groups thus appear to be a function of differences in problem behaviors that emerge early in life and that materialize in the classroom” (Wright et al., 2014). If teacher racial bias were responsible for disciplinary disparities, one could perhaps expect that white teachers would discipline black students more frequently than black teachers. But a 2017 study of disciplinary data from North Carolina found that “black students with greater exposure to black teachers were more likely to receive exclusionary discipline than are their peers who take fewer classes with black teachers, in both middle and high school” (Lindsay & Hart, 2017). A 2010 study of 381 elementary school classrooms found that “Black students were as likely to receive [disciplinary referrals] in classrooms with white teachers as with Black teachers” (Bradshaw, 2010).

Several statewide studies that control for school characteristics and past student behavior have found no evidence that black students are disciplined more harshly for misbehavior. A 2011 study of discipline in North Carolina schools found that within individual schools, “black and white students are equally likely to be suspended and receive the same suspension lengths conditional on observed behavior” (Kinsler, 2011). As for school administrator decision-making, a 2014 study of an unnamed midwestern state found that, after controlling for prior behavior, race was not a statistically significant factor in disciplinary consequences (Skiba, 2014). Similarly, a 2017 study of data from Arkansas found that race ceased to be a statistically significant factor in administering discipline after they controlled for school characteristics and previous student behavior (Anderson & Ritter, 2017).

The statistical correlation cited by Duncan regarding the increased likelihood that students who get suspended have of dropping out is confounded by an obvious factor: student behavior. A student who misbehaves in school is simply more likely to have academic problems and subsequently drop out than a student who never misbehaves in school. Researchers have attempted to address this confounding variable in several ways and found a marked decrease in the statistical association. A 2018 study of a school district in California found no negative academic effect for a single suspension in the same quarter of the academic year (Hwang, 2018). Researchers in Arkansas tried to assess the effect of school discipline by matching student behavior records and assessing academic outcomes based on whether a student was assigned an in-school or out-of-school suspension. They discovered a small but statistically significant increase in academic outcomes (.004 standard deviation growth in math and .01 standard deviation growth in English Language Arts) and scores for the students who received out-of-school suspensions (Anderson et al., 2017).

These data and studies all accord with common sense. Student behavior will vary by student background; given substantial societal inequities, teachers responding firmly and consistently to student misbehavior will not produce disciplinary parity across racial groups. Unfortunately, by the time many of these studies were published, the Obama Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights had conducted a wide-ranging campaign to undermine teacher discretion in issuing consequences and to promote a “restorative” approach to school discipline.

How a 2014 Dear Colleague Letter Shifted Schools Towards Lenient Discipline Policy

Duncan’s speech taking aim at traditional discipline and blaming teachers and administrators for the so-called “school-to-prison pipeline” was accompanied by a Dear Colleague Letter that fundamentally transformed the role of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). Traditionally, OCR only investigated and remedied complaints of disparate treatment, i.e., when a student is disciplined differently because of his or her race. In 1981, then ED Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Clarence Thomas wrote, “where there is evenhandedness in the application of discipline criteria, there can be no finding of a Title VI violation, even when black students or other minorities are disciplined at a disproportionately high rate” (Heriot & Somin, 2018). The 2014 Dear Colleague Letter, by contrast, applied a “disparate impact” standard to its school discipline investigation, under which even “if a 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 could be a civil rights violation (Lhamon & Samuels, 2014).

Schools under investigation for Title VI discrimination in school discipline could face the loss of federal funding if they do not “voluntarily” settle to resolve the complaint. As a 2018 GAO report documented, all closed OCR investigations that were conducted under the Obama Administration ended with an agreement to implement new policies “designed to reduce exclusionary discipline [suspensions],” with the goal of “addressing [racial] disparities in school discipline” (GAO, 2018). The American Association of School Administration (AASA) noted that these investigations were a “powerful lever in influencing districts to reduce out-of-school time [suspensions] for students even if teachers, parents, or students preferred that the specific child be removed from class” (AASA, 2018). The AASA found that these investigations were

unprecedented, intimidating, and costly [and] teachers and principals discussed feeling undermined and scared by the interview process. Several high-performing teachers were so shook-up after the interviews they questioned whether they should remain in the teaching profession. There was a notable decline in morale after these investigations concluded that did not fade. (AASA, 2018)

Internal guidance given to OCR investigators required them to open district-wide investigations into any individual allegation of disparate treatment if the district-wide data showed that students of a particular race were disciplined “at or above the current … national average” (OCR, 2014). The conclusion of these investigations was essentially ordained from their commencement: after establishing that a disparity existed, OCR investigators were then instructed to determine whether there are “comparably effective alternate policies or practices” available to the district (OCR, 2014). Given that investigators were told that “removing students from a classroom not only prevents them from accessing educational instruction, but also may send them on a school-to-prison pipeline,” schools could only resolve these invasive investigations by agreeing to the terms outlined by OCR (OCR, 2014).

Investigators were told that policies that had “subjective criteria and discretion in the administration of discipline procedures [were] not per se illegal or violative of Title VI,” but that “subjectivity and discretion in the process should, however, ‘raise a red flag’” (OCR, 2014). Investigators were further instructed to examine not only major consequences, such as suspensions, but also minor disciplinary decisions, such as in-class time-outs, loss of recess privileges, and even instances where teachers were referred to the principal’s office and no action was taken. Such attention was necessary because in any decision “the administrator … is relying solely on the referring teachers’ perceptions, which only exacerbates the discrimination” (OCR, 2014).

Furthermore, investigators were told that “OCR must ensure that ‘the school’s written discipline policy explicitly limits the use of out-of-school suspensions … to the most severe disciplinary infractions that threaten school safety or to those circumstances where mandated by Federal or State law” (OCR, 2014). Resolution agreements required districts to collaborate with a consultant to “develop strategies for teaching, encouraging, and reinforcing positive student behavior that do not require engagement with the discipline system;” collect and evaluate all disciplinary data, including office referrals that did not yield a consequence; establish a discipline review team to review a random sample of disciplinary decisions; and “require that the district establish that any remaining racial disparities in the administration of discipline are not the result of unlawful discrimination” (OCR, 2014). Monitoring of these agreements was to be “very detailed and long-term,” and any further changes to the disciplinary process were to be reviewed by OCR (OCR, 2014).

These investigations proceeded at times without any knowledge of school board members. For example, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, school board members declared that they were not aware that their district had been under federal investigation, and when the district signed its resolution agreement, the superintendent stated simply: “We have to. It’s not optional” (Johnson, 2018).

During the first Trump Administration, this author issued a public records request to understand the scope and scale of the Obama Administration’s school discipline investigations. Based on the data, the author estimated that approximately 350 school districts – serving about 10 million students – had been investigated for school discipline when OCR was utilizing these investigations to pressure schools to decrease the use of traditional discipline (Eden, 2018). AASA found that 36% of school superintendents reported changing their discipline policies in response to either the Dear Colleague Letter or to direct pressure from OCR (AASA, 2018). Another 25% said that they were not sure whether their change in policy was attributable to federal, state, or local pressure (AASA, 2018).

The High Cost of Lax Discipline

As school districts shifted away from consequence-based school discipline, reports rolled in from school districts across the country that the new system was resulting in an increase of classroom disorder and school violence. In response to complaints from their teachers, local teachers’ unions serving teachers in districts that shifted toward a more lenient system of discipline commissioned surveys to inform the public of the negative consequences. In 2013, when the Santa Ana Unified School District in California moved to decrease reliance on suspensions in favor of a “Positive Behavior Intervention System” (PBIS) – which requires teachers to take and document measures taken to reward good behavior in order to decrease reliance on sending students to the principal’s office – two-thirds of teachers complained that the new system was not working, and 71% said that the district was going in the wrong direction (Terrell, 2013). “We have a thing here for every negative thing you say to a child, you are supposed to say five good things,” one teacher told local news, “but when a kid says (expletive) to your face, how am I supposed to come up with five good things to say?” (Terrell, 2013).

In 2014, a teachers’ union survey in East Baton Rouge Parish Public Schools in Louisiana found that 60% of teachers said they saw an increase in violence or threats from students, and that 41% said that they don’t feel safe at work, after the district pressured administrators to prioritize “counseling” over disciplinary consequences (Chawla, 2014). “It’s gotten to the point where you just show up everyday mentally preparing to be disrespected and cursed out by kids,” a teacher told local news. “Kids who you would never think would do it, are now. It’s just common place because so many are doing it and they see they can get away with it” (Chawla, 2014). In 2015, as the Portland School District in Oregon announced a policy shift to reduce exclusionary discipline by 50% and reduce disproportionality in discipline by 50% by implementing restorative justice, 47% of teachers felt that the new consequence system was inadequate to curb misbehavior, and 34% said that their school environment was unsafe (Frazier, 2015). In 2016, as the Hillsborough County School District in Florida shifted to curtail consequences, two-thirds of teachers said the new policies did not make schools more orderly, and only 28% said they felt supported by administrators when they made a disciplinary referral (Sokol, 2016). In 2019, a nationally representative poll of elementary teachers found that 70% believed that disruptive behavior had increased over the past three years, and researchers suggested that “it may be that teachers are suffering a little bit in silence because of some of the efforts to stem discipline referrals and suspensions” (Manasiev, 2019).

In 2016, University of Pennsylvania researchers Matthew Steinberg and Joanna Lacoe noted that, due largely to the novelty of the policy shift, academic researchers knew little about the effects of school districts attempting to curb suspensions or implement restorative justice (Steinberg & Lacoe, 2016). In 2017, they published a first-of-its-kind study on the impact of a ban on suspensions for non-violent classroom misbehavior in the Philadelphia School District. They noted that before the ban, truancy had been decreasing steadily and had reached 25%. After the ban, it skyrocketed to 40%. They estimated that the suspension ban reduced academic achievement by 3% in math and 7% in reading after three years of implementation (Steinberg & Lacoe, 2017).

Boston University’s Dominic Zarecki investigated the effects of suspension bans in four major California school districts. He found significant negative effects for math achievement, sufficient enough to take the median student in those districts down from the 50th percentile in achievement to the 39th percentile after three years of implementation (Zarecki, 2021). In 2019, RAND published a randomized control trial study on the implementation of restorative justice in Pittsburgh Public Schools. Students reported that their teachers’ classroom management abilities deteriorated, that students were less respectful and supportive of each other in class, that bullying increased, and that more instructional time was lost to distractions. They also found significant negative academic effects in math for middle school students, black students, and students in predominantly black schools (Augustine et al., 2018).

Further studies and teacher surveys are unlikely to be readily forthcoming due to the massive disruption that the COVID lockdowns had on schools. There have been no shortage of reports that student behavior has further deteriorated in the wake of the pandemic. According to a survey by Education Week, 72% of educators said students were misbehaving more in 2024 compared to the fall of 2019, with 48% of teachers saying that students were misbehaving “a lot more” (Stephens, 2025). At the same time, a substantial share of teachers report that their schools have shifted further from traditional discipline to school suspensions since 2019. In 2024, 44% of teachers say that their schools use out-of-school suspensions less (compared to 14% who said their schools used them more), whereas 48% of teachers said they use restorative justice more (compared to 8% who said they use it less) (Stephens, 2024).

How to Restore Teacher Authority and Classroom Order

The Obama Administration leveled a universal threat to all school districts based on their disciplinary statistics under a “disparate impact” enforcement regime. On the same day that President Trump issued his executive order on school discipline, he also issued an executive order titled “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy” to eliminate the use of “disparate impact” in civil rights enforcement across the federal government (The White House, 2025b). School districts cannot, therefore, be presumed guilty of racial discrimination in discipline simply based on changing trends in disciplinary statistics. But this does not leave the Trump Administration without options for leading a restoration of teacher authority in school discipline.

As the Trump Administration sends power over education back to the states, it can encourage state legislatures to pass laws bolstering teachers’ authority over their classrooms and offering parents greater transparency into how safe and orderly classrooms are. And the Trump Administration can leverage traditional, disparate treatment, OCR investigations to uproot discipline policies that classify or treat students differently based on race.

Below are three examples of school districts whose implementation of restorative justice provides reasonable grounds for investigation.

Fayetteville, Arkansas

While Title VI would not prohibit a school district from adopting restorative justice as such. The latitude that school districts have in determining their school discipline policies is circumscribed only by state law, and the federal mandate that they do not treat students differently on the basis of race. The Fayetteville school district’s restorative justice manual facially encourages teachers to treat students differently on account of race by instructing them that they should take student identities such as race into account in handling student misbehavior. This provides strong evidence of a disparate treatment violation, which – if corroborated through further investigation – would provide the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights with fair grounds to demand that the school district adopt a stricter disciplinary code that’s applied evenhandedly, regardless of student race (Fayetteville High School, 2020).

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Milwaukee Public Schools provides a resource to its teachers titled “6 Best Practices to Address Disproportionality,” which embraces racial stereotyping that violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act (Milwaukee Public Schools, 2025). For example, it promotes professional development materials regarding “Components of School Climate through and Anti-Racist Lens,” which tells teachers that they must work on “Understanding Whiteness,” It reads,

… Whiteness is everywhere around us. Educational practices have been rooted in Whiteness and coming from a lens of Whiteness for years. Educators should reflect on which elements of Whiteness they see in education, which they participate in, and which elements they can work to dismantle (Milwaukee Public Schools, 2025).

It asks, “What are specific steps we can take to de-center Whiteness in our educational practices,” and tells teachers to progress through six “Stages of White Racial Identity Development” (Milwaukee Public Schools, 2025).

Seattle, Washington

Seattle Public Schools has established a “Racial Equity Team” tasked with developing “policies and programs that will further racial equity in your school with a focus on reducing and eventually eliminating disproportionality in discipline” (Seattle, 2021). These teams conduct their work by promoting a “racialized educator identity lens” and by addressing “whiteness and privilege in schools” (Seattle, 2021).

School districts like Seattle Public Schools and Milwaukee Public Schools clearly violate Title VI in two ways. First, by setting an explicit goal of reducing or eliminating disproportionality, they set up implicit or explicit racial quotas for disciplining students -- a practice that is unlawful. As Judge Posner wrote, “Racial disciplinary quotas violate equity in its root sense. They entail either systematically overpunishing the innocent or systematically underpunishing the guilty. They place race at war with justice” (People Who Care v. Rockford Board of Education, 1997). Second, in the process of doing so, these school districts directly promote negative racial stereotyping towards their white teachers.

These facially discriminatory public documents provide the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights with clear opportunities for investigations that pressure these districts into voluntary resolution agreements. OCR can use these agreements to accomplish several policy objectives: (1) prohibit school districts from direct initiatives that aim to equalize disciplinary outcomes by race; (2) discontinue all training and professional development materials that divide or characterize teachers and students by race; and (3) direct the school district to administer annual, anonymous open-ended response surveys to teachers (to be made publicly available) regarding student behavior and the character of support they receive from their administrators when they send office referrals.

Such investigations and resolutions will be controversial, as advocates of so-called “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” would certainly label them as efforts to roll back alleged progress on “racial equity.” But the Department of Education could use this buzz to its advantage by establishing a teacher hotline, similar to the EndDEI Portal that it launched in February 2025 (Department of Education, 2025). Teachers could report cases where teachers have witnessed administrators treat students differently on the basis of race, or if teachers have been admonished or reprimanded in any way for sending a student to the principal’s office based on the student’s race. Secretary McMahon could use speeches, social media, and interviews to defend and promote the authority of teachers to issue consequences for student misbehavior. This would be a popular, pro-teacher stance, as 80% of teachers believe that suspending students helps to ensure a safe school environment and sends a valuable signal to parents about a child’s behavior, and 85% of teachers believe that temporarily removing disruptive students helps well-behaved students learn (Griffith & Tyner, 2019).

Since President Trump issued his executive order on school discipline, two states have passed laws intended to reinforce the rights of teachers to discipline unruly students. Texas passed a bill repealing a suspension ban on early elementary students and permitting administrators to issue longer suspensions for persistent disruptive behavior (H.B. 6, 2025). West Virginia passed a bill giving teachers greater discretion to remove disruptive students, stipulating that “the principal shall support the teacher in the discipline of the students,” and that the “teacher may not be reprimanded” if their decision to remove a student is legal and in accordance with school policy (S.B. 199, 2025).

More states should follow suit by passing laws that explicitly reinforce the authority of teachers to remove unruly students, and to mandate that school administrators support teachers in issuing disciplinary consequences. Additionally, states should mandate that their State Education Agencies provide for annual teacher surveys on discipline and safety, asking teachers whether and to what extent their administrators support them in issuing disciplinary consequences and providing them with an anonymous forum to describe the behavioral and safety conditions in their schools. School districts should then be required to provide parents with the results of this survey, so that they have a real and honest window into the conditions at their children’s schools. School boards that have adopted measures to either decrease reliance upon disciplinary consequences or that have established a complex mechanical framework to manage student behavior should revisit and streamline their code of conduct to increase the discretion and authority afforded to teachers.

Conclusion

The decade-long experiment with discouraging teachers from being able to exercise the authority to issue consequences for student misbehavior was rooted in a radical ideology and false empirical claims. Students deserve classrooms where effective order is maintained, and teachers deserve the respect from their administrators necessary to be a strong source of authority over their students. President Trump’s executive order, “Reinstating Common Sense School Discipline Policies,” was a strong step in the right direction (The White House, 2025a). But ultimately, as education is being sent back to the states, state legislators and local school boards must take sustained measures to restore moral authority to the adults in the classrooms.