Over the past 15 years, California civil rights advocates have looked to data to best explain the harms of disciplinary practices in public schools.
The numbers over time show certain groups of students are far more likely to be suspended or expelled than their peers. For these children of color, the disabled, kids in foster care, and homeless youth, being pushed out of classrooms can have lifelong consequences.
In 2023, after a decade of efforts to reform school discipline practices in the state, Sacramento lawmakers passed a law that prohibits the suspension or expulsion of 6th through 12th graders on the basis of “willful defiance,” a catch-all term that can include behaviors as minor as refusing to spit out gum or to put away phone during class.
“Suspending pupils can significantly harm children, leading to learning loss, missed school meals, and have countless other harmful social and material consequences,” the law states. It goes on to cite recent findings by university researchers that “suspended or expelled pupils are five times more likely to drop out of school and to fall into the so-called school-to-prison pipeline.”
Since taking effect last year, all schools have had to find alternative approaches, such as restorative justice and “positive behavior interventions and support,” that help keep kids in school.
The 2023 law and years-long local reform efforts have seen some signs of success. Suspensions of Black students in California have decreased by 38% over the past 12 years, state education data shows, although Black students are still suspended at a rate more than three times that of their white peers.
The Obama and Biden administrations encouraged such efforts, urging schools to use disciplinary measures that disproportionately affect students of color only as a last resort.
Now, those reforms are under threat by the Trump administration. On April 23, Trump signed an executive order titled Reinstating Common Sense School Discipline Policies. It described previous efforts to reduce suspensions among students of color as, “school discipline based on discriminatory equity ideology.”
Linda McMahon, Trump’s Department of Education secretary, weighed in, stating that previous policies “placed racial equity quotas over student safety — encouraging schools to turn a blind eye to poor or violent behavior in the name of inclusion.” More specifics on the new policies have yet to be released.
An April letter released by the U.S. Department of Education’s civil rights office stated falsely that public schools relied on “social-emotional learning” and culturally-responsive instruction “to veil racially discriminatory policies.” The office warned K-12 schools and colleges they could risk the loss of federal funding if they continued such approaches. It also created a web portal for the public to report occurrences the administration has deemed “discriminatory,” though that effort is on hold as a result of a lawsuit filed in March by the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Education Association. Last week, the Supreme Court allowed Trump to proceed with a plan to dismantle the entire Department of Education, authorizing the mass firings of agency employees.
Dan Losen, a longtime researcher who has tracked California school discipline data for the past two decades, helped drive state reform efforts, by publishing his studies on school discipline inequities, and outlining more equitable approaches.
Now senior director for education at the National Center for Youth Law, he is preparing a new report that documents the state of school discipline reform in California, looking at both the years before and after the pandemic. The forthcoming report finds signs of progress, as well as concerns including data on how often homeless and foster youth are suspended from classrooms.
In an interview, Losen talked about how schools might adjust to the new executive order, the most surprising thing about Trump’s executive order and why he remains optimistic about efforts to reduce racial disparities in school suspensions.
This conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity and length.
How would you rate California’s progress on school discipline reform since you first started producing those reports on the topic over the past two decades?
California is clearly one of the states that has made real strides in terms of discipline reform, though clearly not enough, in my opinion.
As a nation, there was a lot of progress over the past decade. We’ve seen red states do away with suspensions for disruption or defiance, similar to what California eventually did K-12. For example, Ohio and Texas both passed laws to eliminate it through 2nd or 3rd grades.
California deserves a lot of credit for developing access to data. We are now seeing the racial breakdowns and students with disabilities in a lot of places, but in California, we have data on kids experiencing homelessness and kids in the foster system as well. We now know the kids who are suspended most frequently are the kids in the foster care system.
Trump’s executive order rolls back guidance created during the Obama and Biden administrations that aims to reduce school suspensions, particularly as they affect students of color. Do you think what the current education secretary is promoting takes us back to an earlier era?
A lot of discipline reform efforts were in response to what started in the 1980s, with the War on Drugs and theories like “broken windows,” where you enforce every little thing. All this got infused into school districts, but this effort to embrace harsher and harsher discipline was never based on research.
It did resonate with people who thought you’ve got to kick out the bad kids so the good kids can learn — as if there were really good and bad kids. One of the best studies done on this tracked every student in Texas and found about 60% of all kids that they tracked from sixth grade to 12th grade had at least one disciplinary incident. So in other words, the majority of us are the bad kids.
What’s the difference between then and now?
A big difference is that the research backs up the reality that for the most part, most suspensions can be avoided, and replaced with more effective interventions. We were only able to do good research because there was data that contributed to the ability to speak truth to misconception.
Most schools recognize that when you suspend fewer kids, your test scores go up, your graduation rates go up and crime goes down. There’s a certain embrace of not knowing that is really dangerous, that is actually a telltale sign of authoritarian society, not a democratic one.
“We see a lot of additional attacks where anything that is about fairness and about being sensitive and caring or empathetic is in the crosshairs.”
How will Trump’s executive order play out in schools?
I think there will be a temporary lull as people try to figure out what it means. We are still waiting on clarification from Linda McMahon. The good news is that Trump cannot change the laws, only Congress can do that. And he cannot redefine what equity, or behavior modification means — but he’ll keep trying.
The executive order is flawed and confusing and on shaky ground for a myriad of reasons. Much of what Trump is trying to accomplish through them is illegal for one or more reasons. Other efforts aimed at bullying states and districts to change state and local policy may violate the Constitution.
Some of his other executive orders and some new Office of Civil Rights directives have already been stopped by litigation, at least temporarily. However, there are also examples of states and districts trying to follow the executive orders even if they aren’t required to do so at this point in time. In those states, there’ll be fewer opportunities to bring in any kind of protection from the federal government.
What surprised you the most in the most recent executive order?
One of the things I think should get more attention is these very strange attacks on things like “behavior modification.” This is a core principle of psychology. Why are they defining “school discipline policies or practices” as behavior modification, or attacking social-emotional learning, which is part of the state plans in more than 30 states?
It is just so bizarre that they would go after teaching kids coping skills and how to reduce their anger responses, self-regulate and those sorts of things. We see a lot of additional attacks where anything that is about fairness and about being sensitive and caring or empathetic is in the crosshairs. We’re really living in an absurd moment in time.
Why do you remain hopeful that this Trump directive on school discipline won’t ultimately be successful?
What gives me some faith and hope is that it’s obvious that there’s no “there” there. Everyone knows, even the Republicans who won’t say anything, everyone knows the emperor has no clothes.
There might be some districts that get afraid and decide to fire their school psychologist or something. But for the most part, these are not going to be enforceable. They can say behavior modification is discriminatory, but they’re not going to be able to carry that out in any kind of legal way. They’re not going to be able to withhold money from a district for having social-emotional learning.
These are good sort of practices for all kids when they’re done well. I do think people who are educators are going to recognize what it is, which is nonsense.
What have we lost in terms of federal oversight on racial discrimination in schools?
All the agencies that collect and report education data had huge budget cuts, but they also closed seven out of 12 offices for the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Education. They’re not just attacking information, but they’re trying to change and turn civil rights and the concept of what is fair on its head.
There are cases that were about to have a resolution where the district had admitted, at least without saying they violated the law, that they might have contributed to a racially hostile environment. Now there’s nothing happening because the Office of Civil Rights stopped protecting children from racial discrimination. That’s illegal and a story that needs to be told.
