US Education Department Tells Schools Not to Alter Discipline Policies to Close Racial Gaps
The U.S. Department of Education issued guidance this week directing schools not to modify student discipline policies for the purpose of reducing racial disparities, a move civil rights advocates say will make it harder to address documented patterns showing Black students face harsher punishment than their peers.
The department’s office for civil rights said in a letter that a school’s decision to change discipline policies specifically to avoid or reduce racial disparities constitutes race discrimination, and that policies amounting to “racial balancing” are impermissible regardless of intent. The guidance instructs schools to ensure students are not treated differently because of race, effectively barring discipline reforms explicitly designed around closing gaps between racial groups even when those gaps are well documented in federal data.
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Education Department civil rights data has consistently shown Black students disciplined at disproportionately high rates relative to their share of student enrollment. A 2023 department report found Black public preschool children received out-of-school suspensions at nearly twice the rate their enrollment numbers would predict. The same report found Black boys nearly twice as likely as white boys to receive an out-of-school suspension or expulsion in K-12 public schools, while Black girls were nearly twice as likely as white girls to receive in-school suspensions, out-of-school suspensions or expulsions.
Wednesday’s guidance follows the department’s decision last month to eliminate several “disparate impact” regulations that for decades prohibited policies and practices with discriminatory effects, regardless of whether that discrimination was intentional. Disparate-impact doctrine has served as a primary legal tool for challenging facially neutral policies, including discipline rules, that produce unequal racial outcomes in practice — a framework the new guidance effectively narrows in the discipline context specifically.
The move fits within a broader pattern of actions President Donald Trump has taken against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives during his second term, which he has characterized as discriminatory against white people and men. Civil rights advocates argue the administration’s approach is reversing decades of progress by dismantling practices designed to support marginalized groups rather than addressing the root causes of disparities directly.
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Eric Duncan, director of P-12 policy at education equity advocacy group EdTrust, criticized the new guidance as counterproductive. “You cannot address racial disparities in school discipline by telling schools to ignore race,” he said, adding that Black students have long faced some of the harshest discipline in the country’s schools. Duncan’s organization has previously argued that discipline reforms aimed at reducing racial gaps, such as revised suspension thresholds or expanded restorative justice programs, require schools to track and respond to racial data precisely because colorblind policies have historically failed to close the disparities on their own.
The guidance does not carry the same binding legal force as a formal regulation, but it signals how the department’s office for civil rights is likely to evaluate discipline-related complaints and investigations going forward. School districts that have implemented discipline reforms explicitly framed around reducing racial disparities may now face increased scrutiny or federal civil rights challenges under the administration’s revised interpretation of anti-discrimination law.
The guidance builds on years of contested federal policy in this area. The Obama administration issued joint guidance in 2014 encouraging schools to examine racial disparities in discipline data and consider alternatives to suspension and expulsion, a framework the first Trump administration rescinded in 2018 following arguments that it pressured schools to under-discipline students of color to avoid disparate-impact findings. The Biden administration did not fully restore the 2014 guidance, leaving districts to navigate a patchwork of state and local policies on the issue even before this week’s more explicit directive from the department’s civil rights office.
Civil rights attorneys say the practical effect of the new guidance will likely play out through complaint investigations rather than immediate policy mandates, since the office for civil rights primarily exercises its authority by responding to complaints filed against individual districts rather than issuing binding nationwide rules. Advocacy groups on both sides of the debate are expected to closely track how the office applies the guidance in upcoming cases, given the wide range of discipline policies — from suspension-reduction targets to implicit bias training for administrators — that could plausibly fall under the department’s expanded definition of impermissible racial balancing.
