Updated: This story has been updated to include the correct link to Trump’s executive order.
President Donald Trump is once again changing course on federal attempts to chip away at racial disparities in student discipline, issuing an executive order this week that calls on the education secretary to develop guidance for schools instructing them not to consider race at all when dealing with student behavior.
Trump’s latest action continues to take aim at diversity, equity, and inclusion practices. He says in the order that previous administrations applying “school discipline based on discriminatory and unlawful ‘equity’ ideology” ultimately resulted in “teachers and students ... suffering increased levels of classroom disorder and school violence.”
The order comes as educators have reported an uptick in difficult student behavior following the COVID-19 pandemic, but as racial disparities in the students who face harsher discipline have persisted.
The president’s order directs Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, along with Attorney General Pam Bondi, to develop new discipline guidance for schools, and to take action against any schools that disobey—which could include halting federal dollars.
McMahon in a statement Wednesday criticized previous policies as “encouraging schools to turn a blind eye to poor or violent behavior in the name of inclusion.”
“A student’s success in adulthood starts with how they perform in a classroom, and we should teach our kids to discern right and wrong from a young age,” McMahon said. “Disciplinary decisions should be based solely on students’ behavior and actions.”
In conjunction with other federal agencies, McMahon is expected to submit a report of model school discipline policies “rooted in American values and traditional virtues.” The report will also include detail any nonprofits that receive federal subsidies that promote DEI and its use for dealing with student behavior, and calls on the funds to be terminated.
The order also calls for Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to revise the school discipline code for schools serving military families that the U.S. Department of Defense oversees.
Students who face the highest discipline rates are at the center of the debate. Research has repeatedly shown that students of color and students with disabilities face high rates of exclusionary discipline practices that remove offending students from class—detention, suspension, expulsion, and referrals to the police—compared with their white peers without disabilities. Schools nationwide have adopted policies to try to offset these disparities, including eliminating the exclusionary punishments altogether.
“If we’re going to return to zero-tolerance policies, which it just seems like the administration is encouraging—is going to be pushing—schools and states to do, we know that disparity is going to go up,” said Blair Wriston, senior manager of government affairs at EdTrust, which advocates for policies that tackle school discipline disparities. “We know that kids are going to be removed from the classroom more than they already are because of the color of their skin, or because they have a disability.”
Order comes amid broader crackdown on DEI and cuts to the Education Department
School discipline practices have received increased scrutiny since student behavior worsened following pandemic school closures, with lawmakers in some states enacting laws giving teachers the power to remove students from classrooms for disruptive behaviors—with support from state teachers’ unions.
But those more punitive practices have been shown in research to hurt those students’ school experience and graduation rates, and increase their likelihood of ending up in the criminal justice system.
The research is clear that Black students aren’t misbehaving more, but they’re being treated differently, said Richard Welsh, an associate professor of education and public policy at Vanderbilt University.
Welsh said he was concerned about a conflation of school safety and discipline in Trump’s order.
“While there is some overlap—school climate comes to mind as one of those investments that can both help keep schools safe as well as keep Black students in the classroom—I think it’s two different issues,” Welsh said. “If we continue to conflate it, then I think we’re going to worsen disparities by trying to make schools safe, which is an important policy goal, but that’s a different policy goal from addressing what’s happening in school discipline.”
Trump’s order drew pushback from the nation’s largest teachers’ unions, which argued it ignored the research on school discipline.
“We need a commonsense approach and to give teachers authority, but this fails to create a safe and welcoming environment,” American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said in a statement. “It simply ignores a history where Black and brown students were disproportionately suspended or expelled from school rather than provided the opportunity to thrive.”
Becky Pringle, the president of the National Education Association, said equity strengthens safety in schools.
“Regardless of a student’s race, gender or the language they speak at home, discipline must be fair, not biased,” she said in a social media post. “The well-being of all students depends on creating safe, supportive environments where every child is treated with dignity.”
Dan Losen, senior director for the education team at the National Center for Youth Law, advised educators continue trying to keep students in class and school and not turn to suspension or expulsion.
“We benefit all kids in addressing racial disparities,” he said. “Why would we want to kick out more kids of color or more kids with disabilities or English learners? How does that benefit anybody?”
Trump’s order on discipline comes amid a full-force effort at the federal level to root out diversity, equity, and inclusion in schools and follows major cuts at the U.S. Department of Education, whose staff has already been nearly cut in half in the first months of Trump’s administration.
The reductions have cut deeply into the department’s office for civil rights, which investigates discrimination complaints and collects data on racial disparities in education, and the Institute for Education Sciences, which collects and disseminates data and best practices.
Wriston, from EdTrust, worries that the order from Trump, in tandem with the OCR and IES cuts, will have a seismic effect on student discipline.
“I just fear that those cases are not going to be heard, that OCR is going to be prioritizing other things and just won’t have the capacity to process those,” he said.
Russ Skiba, professor emeritus of school psychology at Indiana University Bloomington, said the order was another case of overreach by the Trump administration.
“It is based on their fondest wishes and their clear attempt to drive the situation through fear and coercion rather than the rule of law. It’s been pretty typical,” he said. “We have expected these attacks on school discipline all along, and they’re here now.”
Student discipline policy has ping-ponged between administrations
Trump’s executive order, which he signed Wednesday, is another example of a school policy that has shifted dramatically under different presidents.
Under Democratic presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, federal agencies warned schools that it would be a violation of federal civil rights laws if their discipline policies—even when applied neutrally—had a disproportionately negative impact on students of color. Trump’s administration argues the opposite—that considering race at all in discipline violates civil rights laws.
Trump’s order also aligns with the conservative policy agenda Project 2025, which called for revoking Biden’s disparate impact policies. It also criticizes the use of “restorative justice,” a discipline approach that focuses on healing harm by building school relationships and connectedness among students rather than punishment through suspensions, expulsions, or other exclusionary practices.
More than a decade ago, the Obama administration’s Education and Justice departments issued a memo to educators on the nondiscriminatory administration of school discipline, part of a larger attempt to address yawning gaps in school outcomes and opportunities between students of color and their white classmates.
That guidance warned schools that they could run afoul of titles IV and VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 if they disciplined students from different racial groups differently for the same infraction. Discipline policies that appear nondiscriminatory on the face may also violate civil rights laws if they have a “disparate impact” on students from a certain race, ethnicity, or national origin, the guidance cautioned, citing court precedents.
Racial justice groups and student advocates praised the Obama-era directive, but conservative lawmakers and organizations said it would lead schools to adopt arbitrary discipline quotas and lead to classroom disruption.
Those tensions came to a head in 2018, when a former student killed 17 people and injured 17 others in a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. Critics quickly noted that the Broward County district, which includes Parkland, used a diversionary program to drive down rates of school-based arrests, a program the Obama administration had highlighted in its discipline resources. They argued that schools may have been able to better intervene with the Parkland gunman, a frequently disciplined former student, if they had stricter disciplinary policies. But a state commission formed to review the shooting found the district’s disciplinary program was not to blame.
Still, a federal school safety commission Trump formed following the shootings in Parkland and Santa Fe, Texas, recommended rescinding the Obama-era guidance and resources, which his first education secretary, Betsy DeVos, later did.
The Biden administration stopped short of reissuing the guidance in May 2023, when it urged school districts to ensure their discipline policies were applied fairly. The guidance, which did not include the phrase “disparate impact” even won praise from some critics of the Obama-era letter.
“While racial disparities in student discipline alone do not violate the law, ensuring compliance with Federal nondiscrimination obligations can involve examining the underlying causes of such disparities,” the Biden administration’s recommendations said.
