The federal government should not be telling schools what their discipline policies will and will not be. Ideally, those decisions would be made by freely operating educators and families in a system of school choice. Absent that, schools and districts ought to be able to make their own decisions, and the feds should only intervene if there is significant evidence of discipline driven by racial or other group-based animus.
That is not how the Obama and eventually the Biden administrations saw things. They declared that if discipline policies had “disparate impact”—any group was disciplined out of its proportion of the overall student population—a school or district was suspect. This made every public school in America a potential target of federal scrutiny and incentivized dubious—and possibly dangerous—discipline policies.
President Trump’s executive order (EO), issued yesterday, largely undoes that stance, which is a clear move in the right direction. What is not clear is the degree to which Trump will try to dictate policies of his own. The EO calls for new guidance from various departments about discipline policies that steer clear of “discriminatory-equity-ideology-based school discipline and behavior modification techniques.” This could just mean ending disparate-impact avoidance, but it could also constitute a prohibition on approaches such as “restorative justice” that might be bad in practice but are not Washington’s business.
It is also not the federal government’s job to create “model school discipline policies.” Nonetheless, the EO calls for creating model policies that “are rooted in American values and traditional virtues.” A model, presumably, will not be imposed, but nowhere among the specific, enumerated powers in the Constitution is there warrant to even create that.
It is definitely an improvement to get away from the Obama/Biden approach to school discipline. But it will be a lost opportunity to let federalism work if the Trump administration exchanges one imposition for another.
And speaking of opportunities, Trump also released a new EO on college accreditation yesterday. Andrew Gillen discusses it here and finds it promising.
