Removing Consequences From Schools Didn’t Help Black Students — It Endangered Them

In January of 2014, the United States Department of Education and the Department of Justice issued a joint “Dear Colleague” letter to every public school district in the country. The letter did not have the force of law, but it carried the unmistakable weight of the federal government’s enforcement apparatus, and its message was clear: school discipline policies that resulted in racial disparities in suspension and expulsion rates would be treated as potential violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, regardless of whether the policies themselves were facially neutral. If Black students were suspended at higher rates than white students, the school district could face a federal investigation. The letter did not say that schools must eliminate suspensions. What it said, in practice, was that schools would be punished for the outcomes of their discipline policies even if those policies were applied without racial animus — and school administrators, understanding the threat precisely, responded by eliminating suspensions.

What followed is one of the most thoroughly documented policy failures in modern American education, a failure that harmed precisely the students it was designed to protect, and a failure that the education establishment has been remarkably reluctant to acknowledge because doing so requires admitting that the progressive consensus on school discipline was not merely wrong but destructive. The students who paid the highest price were overwhelmingly Black. They were not the students who were no longer being suspended. They were the students who sat next to them — the quiet ones, the studious ones, the ones who came to school to learn and found, increasingly, that learning was impossible because the classroom had been surrendered to chaos in the name of equity.

The Disparity That Started It All

Let us be honest about what the discipline reformers were responding to, because the disparities were real and they demanded attention. The Government Accountability Office, in a comprehensive 2018 report, confirmed what researchers had documented for decades: Black students were suspended at rates roughly three times those of white students. Black boys were the most disproportionately affected group, followed by Black girls, who were suspended at higher rates than white boys. These disparities persisted even when controlling for school poverty levels and other demographic factors.

The question that the discipline reform movement refused to ask, or asked and then refused to accept the answer to, was whether these disparities were entirely the product of racial bias in discipline application, or whether they also reflected, at least in part, genuine differences in the rates of disruptive behavior — differences that might themselves be traced to the social and economic factors that disproportionately affect Black students. The GAO report carefully noted that its analysis could not determine the extent to which disparities reflected bias versus differences in behavior. But the reform movement was not interested in careful distinctions. It had a narrative, and the narrative was that the disparities were caused by racism, full stop, and the solution was to eliminate the disparities by eliminating the discipline.

“The assumption that any racial disparity in discipline must be caused by racism is itself a form of the soft bigotry of low expectations — it assumes that Black children cannot be expected to follow the same rules as everyone else.”
— Max Eden, Manhattan Institute, 2019

What the Research Found

The RAND Corporation, in one of the most rigorous evaluations of restorative justice practices ever conducted, studied the implementation of restorative practices in Pittsburgh Public Schools from 2015 to 2018. Pittsburgh had been among the most aggressive adopters of discipline reform, replacing suspensions with restorative circles, peer mediation, and other alternative approaches. The RAND findings were devastating for the reform movement: while suspension rates did decline, the reduction in suspensions was associated with decreases in math and reading achievement, particularly for Black students, and particularly in the schools that implemented restorative practices most aggressively.

Let that sink in. The policy designed to help Black students produced worse academic outcomes for Black students. The policy designed to close the achievement gap widened it. The policy designed to make schools more equitable made them less effective — and the students who bore the cost were not the policy’s architects, who sent their own children to private schools or to suburban public schools where discipline was still enforced, but the low-income Black students who had no choice but to sit in classrooms where order had been abandoned.

Steinberg and Lacoe, in their comprehensive review of discipline reform research published in Education Next, found a consistent pattern: policies that reduced suspensions without providing adequate alternative consequences and supports led to increased classroom disruption and decreased academic achievement. The problem was not the aspiration — no serious person defends the overuse of suspension as a disciplinary tool, or the documented racial bias that infected some discipline decisions. The problem was the implementation: the wholesale removal of consequences without replacing them with anything that actually worked.

The Teachers Who Left

Max Eden, in his 2019 research for the Manhattan Institute, conducted something that almost no one else in the discipline reform debate had bothered to do: he asked teachers what was actually happening in their classrooms. The findings were stark. In New York City, where discipline reform had been aggressively implemented, teachers in schools serving predominantly Black and Hispanic students reported dramatic increases in classroom disorder after suspension restrictions were imposed. Teachers reported being cursed at, threatened, and physically assaulted by students who understood that there would be no meaningful consequences for their behavior. They reported that restorative circles were being used not as genuine accountability mechanisms but as empty rituals that students gamed and administrators mandated for appearance.

The teacher attrition data tells the story that surveys only hint at. High-need schools — the schools serving the most disadvantaged students, the schools where discipline reform was most aggressively implemented — experienced the highest rates of teacher turnover. Experienced teachers, the ones with options, transferred to schools where they could still teach, or left the profession entirely. They were replaced, when they were replaced at all, by inexperienced teachers who lacked the classroom management skills to maintain order in an environment that had been stripped of structural supports. The students who suffered most from the loss of experienced teachers were, once again, the Black students in the most challenging schools.

And here is the part of this story that should make everyone involved in discipline reform pause and reckon with what they have done: the people who most vocally demanded that discipline be maintained in their children’s schools were Black parents. Poll after poll, survey after survey, showed that Black parents overwhelmingly wanted safe, orderly schools with clear behavioral expectations and meaningful consequences for disruption. A 2018 Education Next survey found that Black respondents were more likely than white respondents to support maintaining traditional discipline policies. These parents understood, with the clarity that comes from living in communities where disorder has real and immediate consequences, that a school without discipline is a school where their children cannot learn.

What Was Lost in the Narrative

The discipline reform movement was driven by a narrative that cast the issue in simple moral terms: racist teachers and administrators were suspending Black children for minor infractions, feeding the school-to-prison pipeline, and destroying young lives over trivial offenses. This narrative was not entirely wrong — there were documented cases of disproportionate punishment, of Black children being suspended for offenses that would have earned a white child a warning. Those cases were real and they demanded redress.

But the narrative erased a more complex reality: that the majority of suspensions in high-need schools were not for minor infractions. They were for behaviors that genuinely disrupted the educational environment — fighting, verbal abuse of teachers and peers, property destruction, and patterns of persistent defiance that made instruction impossible. The narrative erased the fact that the victims of these behaviors were overwhelmingly other Black students. It erased the voices of Black teachers, many of whom had been raised in the communities they served and understood the cultural context far better than the white progressive advocates driving the reform. And it erased the fundamental premise of education itself: that a classroom requires order, that order requires expectations, and that expectations without consequences are wishes.

Evidence-Based Discipline That Actually Works

The answer to the question of school discipline is not a choice between the old regime of excessive, racially biased suspensions and the new regime of no consequences at all. It is a third path that the ideologues on both sides have obscured: evidence-based disciplinary models that are both fair and effective, that address racial bias without abandoning behavioral standards, and that create the conditions in which all students — including and especially the most vulnerable — can learn.

Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), when implemented with fidelity, has been shown to reduce both suspension rates and behavioral incidents while improving academic outcomes. The key word is “fidelity” — PBIS is not a slogan or a mission statement. It is a structured, tiered system that establishes clear behavioral expectations, teaches those expectations explicitly, reinforces positive behavior, and provides escalating interventions for students who struggle. It does not eliminate consequences. It contextualizes them within a framework of support.

Functional Behavioral Assessment — the practice of identifying the underlying causes of a student’s disruptive behavior before assigning consequences — addresses the legitimate concern that some students are punished for behaviors rooted in trauma, disability, or environmental stress. But it does so within a framework that maintains accountability: the student receives support for the underlying issue AND faces consequences for the behavior. These are not contradictory responses. They are complementary ones.

Implicit bias training for teachers and administrators can address the documented tendency to perceive identical behaviors as more threatening when exhibited by Black students. But bias training is a supplement to discipline, not a substitute for it. A teacher who has been trained to recognize her own biases still needs the authority and the institutional support to remove a student who is making learning impossible for the other twenty-five children in her classroom.

The Trump administration rescinded the 2014 Dear Colleague letter in 2018, and the Biden administration did not reinstate it. This was a quiet acknowledgment, by administrations on both sides, that the policy had not worked. But rescinding a federal guidance letter does not undo the cultural transformation it catalyzed. School districts that adopted permissive discipline policies have been slow to reverse them, in part because the ideological infrastructure that supports those policies remains intact in education schools, advocacy organizations, and media coverage. The narrative persists even as the evidence against it accumulates.

What is needed now is not a return to the pre-2014 status quo, which was genuinely flawed, but a clear-eyed commitment to disciplinary systems that honor two truths simultaneously: that racial bias in school discipline is real and must be monitored and corrected, and that orderly classrooms are a prerequisite for learning, not an obstacle to equity. The children who are sitting in classrooms right now, this morning, trying to learn while the child beside them disrupts the lesson with impunity — those children are overwhelmingly Black, overwhelmingly low-income, and overwhelmingly without the option of transferring to a school where expectations are enforced. They deserve adults who love them enough to demand order on their behalf, even when demanding order is politically inconvenient. That is not conservatism. That is not a defense of racism. That is a defense of the children who have no one else to defend them.