In January 2014, the U.S. Department of Education and the Department of Justice sent a joint “Dear Colleague” letter. This official warning went to every public school district in the country. The letter did not have the force of law. But it carried the clear weight of the federal government’s power to enforce rules.
Its message was clear. School discipline policies that led to racial gaps in suspension rates would be treated as possible civil rights violations. This was true even if the policies were written to be fair on paper.
If Black students were suspended more often than white students, the district could face a federal investigation. The letter did not say schools must end suspensions. But in practice, schools would be punished for the results of their discipline policies. School leaders understood the threat. They responded by eliminating suspensions.
What followed was a massive, well-documented policy failure. It hurt the very students it was meant to protect. The education establishment refuses to admit this. Admitting it would mean their progressive consensus was not just wrong. It was destructive.
The students who paid the highest price were far more often Black. They were not the students who were no longer being suspended. They were the students who sat next to them. They were the quiet ones who came to school to learn. They found that learning was impossible. 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. The disparities were real and they demanded attention.
The Government Accountability Office confirmed this in a 2018 report. Black students were suspended at rates about three times those of white students. Black boys were the most affected group. Black girls were suspended more often than white boys. These gaps persisted even when accounting for school poverty levels.
Suspension Rates — Black vs. White Students
U.S. Government Accountability Office, GAO-18-258, 2018
The reform movement refused to ask a key question. Were these gaps entirely due to racial bias? Or did they also reflect real differences in rates of disruptive behavior? These differences could be traced to social and economic factors that affect Black students far more often.
The GAO report noted it could not determine how much was bias versus behavior. But the reform movement was not interested in careful distinctions. It had a narrative. The narrative was that the disparities were caused by racism, full stop. 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 conducted a rigorous study of restorative justice. This discipline approach replaces punishment with guided conversations. They studied Pittsburgh Public Schools from 2015 to 2018. Pittsburgh had been among the most aggressive adopters. It replaced suspensions with restorative circles and peer mediation.
The RAND findings were devastating for the reform movement. Suspension rates did decline. The policy achieved its stated goal. But the reduction in suspensions was linked to decreases in math and reading achievement. The decline was sharpest for Black students. Schools that implemented restorative practices most aggressively saw the largest academic declines.
The policy designed to help Black students produced worse academic outcomes for Black students, widening the achievement gap it was meant to close.
Let that sink in. The policy designed to help Black students resulted in worse academic outcomes for them. The policy designed to close the achievement gap widened it. The policy designed to make schools more equitable made them less effective. The students who bore the cost were not the policy’s architects. Those architects sent their own children to private schools. The cost was borne by low-income Black students. They had no choice but to sit in classrooms where order had been abandoned.
Steinberg and Lacoe reviewed discipline reform research in 2017. They found a consistent pattern. Policies that reduced suspensions without providing other consequences led to more classroom disruption. Academic achievement decreased in schools with the most aggressive reforms. The problem was not the aspiration. It was the wholesale removal of consequences without replacing them with anything that actually worked.
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1. Restorative Justice in Chicago Public Schools. Chicago put restorative justice in 73 high schools. The key difference is that Chicago kept consequences in place while adding restorative alternatives. Suspensions dropped 18%. Arrests fell 19% overall and 35% on school grounds. Black students saw the largest benefits. Restorative practice works when it supplements consequences rather than replacing them.
2. Perry Preschool Program. This program in Ypsilanti, Michigan addressed discipline problems at their root. Disadvantaged 3- and 4-year-old African American children got daily classes and weekly home visits. Fifty years later, only 31% had ever been arrested. That compares to 51% in the control group. The participants’ own children were far less likely to be suspended. The return was $12.90 for every dollar invested.
3. Black Homeschooling Movement. Black homeschooling surged during the pandemic. It was driven by parents rejecting discipline systems that targeted their children. Black homeschool students scored 23 to 42 percentile points above Black public school students on tests. The movement is a direct parental response to the suspension crisis.
4. Becoming a Man — BAM. This is a school-based counseling program for at-risk young men in high-violence neighborhoods. Four trials found that violent crime arrests dropped 45-50%. Graduation rates rose 19%. The program works because it teaches self-regulation. That is the skill that prevents the behavior that triggers suspension.
5. Mississippi Literacy Reform. Mississippi’s literacy reform connects to the suspension crisis. Children who cannot read become disruptive. Disruptive children get suspended. Mississippi broke that chain by mandating phonics-based instruction. The state rose from 49th to 21st in national reading scores. Black students posted among the largest gains ever recorded. When children can read, they engage. When they engage, they do not get suspended.
The Bottom Line
The numbers tell a story that no political narrative can override.
- 3× — The rate at which Black students were suspended compared to white students.
- 65% vs. 50% — Black vs. white parent support for traditional discipline. The people closest to the problem wanted consequences, not chaos.
- Worse — Math and reading scores for Black students in Pittsburgh after restorative justice.
- Wider — The achievement gap after the policy designed to close it.
- Zero — The number of discipline reform architects whose children attended the schools they disrupted.
The discipline reform movement did not fail because its diagnosis was wrong. Racial bias in school discipline is real and worth addressing. The movement failed because it confused the elimination of consequences with the elimination of bias. The students who paid the price for that confusion were the same Black children the movement claimed to protect.
A school without discipline is not a school. It is a holding facility. Calling that holding facility “equitable” does not make it so. It makes it a lie. The children trapped inside it know it is a lie. The adults who put them there refuse to admit it.