How States Can Restore School Safety & Order

The Department of Education (ED) recently announced another inter-agency agreement to send responsibility for federal school safety programs to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). These programs will undoubtedly be better managed by HHS than by ED, which has a tragic track record of leveraging its policy authority to make schools less safe. However, shifting management of federal programming alone will have a limited effect on conditions inside classrooms.

For classrooms to be more orderly and schools to be safer, states must step up to undo the damage done by ED, and AFPI recently published a model policy to help states charter a safer course.

Under the Obama and Biden Administrations, ED acted as a national school board, attempting—and largely succeeding—to reset school discipline policy in districts across the country. As I detail in my report, Restoring Teacher Authority, ED’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) pushed an approach called “restorative justice,” which tries to replace traditional consequences for misbehavior with things like “healing circles,” which was initially introduced to American schools and championed by a communist activist.

OCR used the “disparate impact” theory of civil rights enforcement to engineer a nationwide shift in school discipline policy. If students of different races were disciplined at different rates, schools could face federal investigation and loss of federal funding—even if all students were treated fairly and without prejudice. Schools were pressured to reduce overall reliance on measures like detentions and suspensions in favor of a “restorative approach.” Almost unheard of in the late 2000s, by 2022 59% of school districts reported using these softer punishments.

On April 23, 2025, the Trump Administration issued two landmark executive orders.

The first, titled “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy,” did away with the federal government’s reliance on disparate impact in investigating and addressing civil rights issues. The second, titled “Reinstating Common Sense School Discipline Policies,” called on the Department of Education and other agencies to highlight more effective approaches to school discipline. Under these executive orders, the federal government can no longer—as it once did—coerce school districts to adopt its preferred policies.

The problem is that, even without federal coercion, the notion that “restorative justice” is safe and effective has become conventional wisdom amongst school administrators, despite evidence it harms academic achievement and leads to a rise in classroom disruption and school order. States must step in. But many states value local control in education, making a heavy-handed approach like developing a stricter model code of conduct and requiring school districts to adopt it most likely a non-starter.

AFPI’s model policy focuses on promoting school safety transparency for parents, and empowering teacher voice in identifying problems and proposing solutions. If teachers are stifled and parents are left in the dark, nothing will be done to address persistent safety issues. If teachers are empowered to raise serious concerns directly to parents, so they can work together to address them, things will change for the better.

There are two immediate fixes which would improve the currently broken disciplinary system in schools:

First, state education agencies should implement an annual survey on student behavior and safety of teachers, featuring both standardized questions as well as open-ended free response questions. This would provide teachers with an anonymous outlet to describe honestly the conditions in their classroom. School districts would then be required to post the results of these surveys in a prominent location on their websites. This would serve to provide transparency to parents, giving them a direct window into what’s really going on in their children’s classrooms.

Second, school districts should be required to conduct an annual review of their school discipline policies, conducted in part by a panel of teachers. Districts would have substantial freedom in designing their own discipline policies, but the state would set a few parameters. For example, any assault on a teacher must result in a law enforcement referral. School districts shall attempt to streamline their discipline policies to minimize the number of mandatory restorative-style interventions they conduct before sending a student to the principal’s office, and principals should act on the presumption that teachers are exercising good judgment and never punish teachers for sending a student to their office.

These solutions would restore teachers to the position of the primary moral authority in the classroom. The Obama-era approach was to accuse teachers of implicit bias and try to hamstring their ability to issue disciplinary consequences. The America First approach puts teachers first.

No one knows how to manage their classrooms better than they do.