The Obama Administration coerced schools nationwide to overhaul their discipline policies. Former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said the racial disparity in school suspensions wasn’t a reflection of problems in our society, but the result of “racial discrimination” in our schools.
So he issued a threat: Even if your school rules are totally fair and administered totally fairly, we may come after you if your discipline numbers aren’t racially balanced.
The Department of Education opened investigations into hundreds of school districts serving millions of students, leaving schoolhouse chaos in its wake.
Duncan thought he had a universal replacement for traditional discipline: “positive behavioral intervention supports” (PBIS). Rather than punish misbehavior, teachers should take a softer feel-good approach. A new paper by the Wisconsin Institute of Law and Liberty compares academic performance in Wisconsin schools that implemented PBIS with those that didn’t. The results don’t look good.
It appears the discipline shift has hurt academics. Controlling for a host of other variables, the study finds that PBIS schools had lower reading and math achievement than those that stuck with traditional discipline. The negative effects were most noteworthy in suburban schools.
Why? Here’s a hypothesis: replacing traditional discipline with the feel-good approach foisted on schools by Obama’s Department of Education doesn’t work for many schools. That’s not just our opinion, it’s what teachers think. The Department of Education forced Oklahoma City to overhaul its discipline policies to the point where principals told teachers not to issue disciplinary referrals “unless there was blood.”
About two-thirds of Oklahoma City teachers said that they needed greater enforcement of tradition discipline to teach effectively. Only a quarter believed in PBIS.
Philadelphia banned suspensions for non-violent misbehavior without federal coercion. A recent study from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute shows that achievement plummeted and truancy skyrocketed. Another study found that despite years of being told that suspensions don’t work, more than 80% of Philadelphia teachers believe that they do.
A Manhattan Institute report published last spring found that after New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio aggressively limited suspensions, student surveys suggested that violence and disrespect rose dramatically — most dramatically in schools serving higher shares of poor and minority students.
In one of those schools, where the share of teachers who said discipline was maintained dropped from 86% to 19%, a student was stabbed and killed in history class. Notable, the latest state data says that this school had only 10 suspensions.
Assaults on teachers are on the rise. In Syracuse, the district attorney forced the schools to reverse course after a teacher was stabbed. The district attorney in St. Paul called the rise of teacher attacks a “public health crisis.”
Guns, drugs, and assaults on teachers are up substantially in Charlotte. In Durham, assaults increased more than 50% last year.
Recently the Center for American Progress hosted an event to make the case for Obama’s discipline policy, featuring the “Chief of Equity” from the District of Columbia Public School system.
But last year, the Washington Post revealed that district’s much-touted 40% decline in suspensions was fake. Principals just took suspensions off the books, telling kids to go home but not reporting it to the central office.
Apparently, the best case study one of the nation’s leading liberal think tanks can put forward is a school district that committed systematic fraud rather than adopt this policy.
Yet the Obama administration’s threatening “Dear Colleague” letter still stands in full force. Just a few weeks ago, the Department of Education forced Milwaukee to overhaul its discipline policy. School board members didn’t even know that there was an investigation. Although no school district has been willing to challenge it, it’s likely that Obama’s unprecedented overreach into school discipline wouldn’t stand up in court.
But no legal challenge is needed. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos can end this policy with a stroke of a pen. Taken together, the studies on New York City, Philadelphia, and Wisconsin suggest that while Obama’s discipline directive hit our nation’s most vulnerable students the hardest, the damaging effects also extend to the suburbs.
There should be little wonder why: when you stop trusting teachers, when you undermine their authority in the classroom, bad things are bound to happen. School districts should be the ones to determine what discipline policies work best for their staff and students, not a federal agency in D.C.
There’s no doubt that the left will smear DeVos for taking action. But she hasn’t let that stop her before. She must rescind Obama’s dangerous school discipline directive.
Will Flanders is a Research Director at the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, where Natalie Goodnow is a Research Fellow.
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