Three decades ago, schools across the country began bolstering discipline to deter juvenile crime. Zero-tolerance policies were introduced, school law enforcement budgets swelled and suspensions, expulsions and student arrests multiplied.
These punishments, though, are applied unequally. Across the country, hundreds of thousands of students of color, like Trah’Vaeziah, bear the brunt. Black students are almost four times as likely to receive an out-of-school suspension and twice as likelyto be arrested as their white peers, according to federal data. The pattern starts early: Even black preschool students are more than three times as likely as their white peers to be suspended from school.
Harsh discipline can backfire, especially when meted out arbitrarily. It may reinforce bad behavior, or encourage students to drop out, creating what sociologists call the “school-to-prison-pipeline.” A suspension increases the likelihood of dropping out by 77 percent, and the incarceration rate of high school dropouts is 63 times higher than that of college graduates, studies show.
“There’s no doubt that as we’ve escalated security and punishment strategies within schools over the past 25 years that this has had a disparate impact on youth of color,” said Aaron Kupchik, a sociology and criminal justice professor at the University of Delaware. “They are more likely to be seen as problematic, and to be policed and disciplined in schools even when they show similar behaviors as white students.”
Flooded with about 1,500 complaints related to racial discrimination in school discipline between 2011 and 2017, the Obama administration made the issue a priority. Relying on the doctrine of “disparate impact,” which emerged in the 1970s and holds that differential treatment by race amounts to discrimination whether or not there is overt or intentional bias, the Department of Education opened sweeping investigations into disciplinary disparities, from large school districts such as Minneapolis and Oakland to smaller ones like Bryan, Texas, where Trah’Vaeziah goes to school. It pushed investigators in its regional offices to broaden probes of individual incidents to look for systemic discrimination.
But under Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the Trump administration is taking a more hands-off approach. DeVos has indicated that she may soon reverse Obama-era guidelines on disparate impact and school discipline, and her hires have signaled this policy shift. Kenneth Marcus, tapped to lead the civil rights office, has argued that disparate impact analysis has significant legal limitations. And Hans Bader, an attorney adviser at the department, has accused the Obama administration of using disparate impact to create “racial quotas.” DeVos is also decentralizing decision-making, giving regional offices more control over investigations.
Quietly, the pullback is already happening. In a June 2017 internal memo leaked to ProPublica, one of DeVos’ top officials ordered investigators to limit proactive civil rights probes rather than expanding them to identify systemic patterns, as the Obama administration had often done in school discipline cases.
Since then, the Education Department has closed at least 65 school discipline investigations opened under Obama, including the Bryan probe, without any mandated reforms, according to an analysis of federal data received by ProPublica through a records request. In at least 50 cases, the department attributed the shutdowns to “moot” allegations or insufficient evidence or details. That was its explanation for letting Bryan off the hook, even though federal investigators there had uncovered numerous examples of black students being punished more harshly than whites for the same offenses.
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