One of the first public school students I worked with was a boy three grade levels behind academically. Though he had a kind heart, he also had a long disciplinary history, including repeated suspensions through elementary school and one or two lunch periods a week spent as detention in the school office. He deserved it, too—he wasn’t being punished because he was black.
But that’s what the Obama administration’s notorious 2014 guidance encouraged educators to think: if black kids were disciplined disproportionately, racism was likely the reason, not actual differences in student behavior.
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Thankfully, the Trump administration has put an end to this policy. Last month, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights issued new guidance on school discipline and Title VI. It charges schools with two fundamental obligations: establish disciplinary systems that create safe, well-ordered learning environments; and ensure students are not treated differently in discipline because of race, color, or national origin. The guidance follows a larger shift in federal civil rights policy. In July, the Department removed disparate-impact provisions from its Title VI regulations generally. The Department’s Office of Civil Rights also opened investigations into school districts in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, over allegations that the districts were considering race in disciplinary decisions.
The administration is taking the right approach. A student’s race should not change the consequences he faces. Schools should not over-discipline or under-discipline a student in order to keep their numbers racially balanced.
In addition to basic fairness, colorblind discipline offers another potential benefit: it might help schools begin understanding student behavior better, by applying insights from behavioral science.
My student accumulated all his disciplinary history before Obama’s 2014 guidance. His struggle wasn’t racial but behavioral. The first time I put work in front of him, he started throwing classroom objects and slamming desks. This behavior followed a pattern: if teachers gave him assignments that he could not do, he misbehaved, an adult removed him—and the work disappeared. The consequence that teachers and administrators had used to punish him became his most reliable way to escape difficult tasks.
These traditional disciplinary actions clearly hadn’t met with success. Repeated suspensions had not taught him to read. They also had not stopped him from throwing things. On the contrary, he realized that throwing things got results. And suspending him less, because he was black, obviously wouldn’t have solved the problem, either.
Behavioral science offers a different way to think about discipline. It suggests: begin with what purpose the behavior serves.
My student’s pattern was clear, so I broke the pattern by changing the response to his behavior. I told him he would still be responsible for completing his assignments. Getting sent out was no longer going to let him escape doing it.
I also had to recognize something important. He was three grade levels behind. Holding him accountable for work he had never been taught to do would not have been an effective intervention. He needed a teacher who could teach him.
At first, when he did even a small amount of classwork, I praised him. I remember the look he gave me the first time I did. It was as though positive attention for applying himself was something new.
After 2014, federal policy discouraged suspensions and encouraged restorative practices, trauma-informed approaches, social-emotional learning, and mental-health supports. But if we don’t know why a student is misbehaving, how can we be confident that these approaches would change his behavior?
As my colleague Carolyn Gorman and I have written, disciplinary responses—whether traditional ones like suspensions or alternative methods like restorative practices—can backfire if they deliver exactly what the student was seeking, such as escape from difficult work. I’m sure that if my student had engaged in disruptive behavior after schools began adopting restorative justice and trauma-informed practices, the school administration would have classified him as a student in distress, put him in a restorative circle, and told me to lower my expectations. But none of this would have helped him.
And that’s why the latest DOE guidance is so important. Schools need to be willing to do more than just count suspensions, assign labels to behavior, and refer students elsewhere for help. Teachers and administrators must be willing to examine their own behavior, too. They must teach expectations, identify missing academic or behavioral skills, respond consistently, and track whether the student improves.
The measure of a discipline system should be whether students’ behavior—and their lives—actually get better. (And my student’s life did get better. He learned to read. He graduated from high school and went on to college, the first in his family to do so.) By restoring a colorblind approach to student discipline, the Trump administration has given schools an opportunity to respond to behavior, not race.