How School Bureaucracy Traded Classroom Order For Endless Excuses

This piece is part of MI x DW, a collaboration that brings Daily Wire readers exclusive commentary and research from the Manhattan Institute’s world-class team of scholars.

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The school year has started for nearly half the country, and most teachers are nervously expecting misbehavior. “Students have become apathetic toward school rules,” one teacher told EdWeek Research Center in a recent survey, “and feel emboldened to disrespect or clearly ignore their teachers.” If students feel emboldened, it’s because they’ve learned they’ll likely get away with it. Consequences depend on conditions other than their behavior.

The Trump administration just issued guidance suggesting they want to fix that. On August 18, the Department of Education sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to states and school districts reminding them that discipline serves a purpose, and that school policies can’t intentionally “favor nor disfavor” students based on race. It’s the right message, but the administration is up against bureaucracy.

Discipline doesn’t exist solely to dole out punishment. Rules and procedures are necessary to maintain safe schools and orderly classrooms, which are prerequisites for learning. Discipline is also instructional. Children aren’t born with perfectly mastered patience, restraint, punctuality, and respect — skills and attitudes necessary for the adult world. Like any skill, those behaviors are learned by practice and shaped by consequences. School rules, or codes of conduct, make adults’ expectations for students predictable. Enforcement makes the consequences predictable when expectations aren’t met.

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Over the past decade, the upsides of predictable discipline have taken a backseat to the perceived harms of punishment. In 2014, federal policy made discipline partly conditional on aggregate racial statistics after black students were found suspended and expelled at higher rates than white students, prompting questions about whether schools applied discipline fairly. Different rates of exclusionary discipline alone don’t prove discrimination; differences result from many factors, including differences in misbehavior rates. But schools were nonetheless threatened with federal investigations if their race-neutral policies, not intended to discriminate, produced a “disparate impact.” Administrators were motivated to reduce reported incidents, but misbehavior still happened.

Federal guidance accelerated and formalized a state-level shift to limit discipline. Illinois, for example, required districts with the highest reported rates of exclusionary action among students of color to submit a corrective action plan for how they’d change their practices. A later state law restricted suspensions and expulsions and, in the name of equity, required schools to consider discipline case by case — meaning identical behavior could draw different responses. A school’s aggregate numbers and administrators’ discretion became part of every disciplinary decision, making it harder to respond directly and consistently to what students actually did.

Reforms did not reliably help the students they were designed to benefit. The new guidance highlights research from Philadelphia: in the most disadvantaged schools, students who’d previously been suspended but were spared under the new policy didn’t perform better academically; their never-suspended peers performed worse. Discipline imposes both costs and benefits on misbehaving students, but not responding to misbehavior imposes costs alone on students coming to class ready to learn. Those students have faced increasing school violence and disorder.

Discipline was replaced with a “wellness” bureaucracy that made codes of conduct unruly, which the administration’s guidance doesn’t explicitly address. Research in Education Administration Quarterly found that between the 2013-14 and 2015-16 school years in Maryland, districts added more than five response options to the average student offense, often special education referrals. Identifying the “root cause” behind behavior was sold — often through commercially available curricula — as the way to make consequences irrelevant.

Fueled by federal education dollars and Medicaid, districts continue to spend billions nationally on restorative justice, social-emotional-learning, mental health initiatives, and trauma-informed practices, investing in these programs and elaborate faddish frameworks rather than enforcing straightforward rules schools already had.

“Identification” is not the same as correction. Naming a student’s distress or adversity may help a teacher understand why he misbehaved; it does not, itself, teach the student to act any differently. Often, “wellness” solutions replace consequence with reward for misbehavior, like escape from classwork and a counselor’s attention. A school leader quoted in the new guidance described how students not suspended “amp up their behavior in order to see how much they’ll get away with without consequence.”

Perceived racism, trauma, or distress all became reasons that schools were either required to excuse misbehavior or chose to do so. Schools began asking whether something outside the classroom explained the conduct, without first asking whether something inside did, such as whether the work was too hard or the instructions weren’t made clear. The default assumption became: consequences aren’t the response, and behavior expectations don’t need to be met.

Excuses do not advance equity. Lowering expectations based on a student’s circumstances — like their race or home hardship — is soft bigotry. Conversely, consistent discipline tells students that adults believe they’re capable of overcoming their challenges and meeting the standard. All kids deserve that.

The “Dear Colleague” letter suggests equity requires holding every student to the same expectation and following through when it isn’t met. It doesn’t require removing all punishment. Clear, consistently enforced rules reduce ambiguity and discretion, which raise the risk of bias. While discretion can allow sympathy and judgment, excessive discretion leads to unpredictable outcomes. Predictability can productively constrain both students and teachers.

Student well-being, meanwhile, doesn’t hinge on ignoring misconduct but rather on responding to it. The mental health industry promotes the idea that “you can’t teach if you’re not addressing mental health.” But safety and structure are invaluable supports to children’s well-being, which means orderly classrooms should come first. Support should help students meet the standard, not excuse them from it.

The administration is right to bar discipline from favoring or disfavoring students by race. Enforcement shouldn’t be based on aggregate statistics, as in the past decade; local discretion, even-handed, should generally be the preference. The administration should further reassess federal funding for school-based “wellness,” which works against fair and consistent discipline. The wellness bureaucracy confuses rules, undermines teacher authority, lowers accountability in the education system, and delivers services without parental consent. It often makes students feel worse. Discriminatory equity ideology is poorly hidden among these programs, particularly “trauma-informed” practices.

As for districts, a sound discipline policy should be short, public, and have predictable, proportionate consequences. Schools can acknowledge discrimination, adversity, and distress without telling a student that ordinary expectations don’t apply. Unfinished work is made up, not excused. A disruptive student is removed until he is ready to follow the rules, and he must finish the work missed during his time out of class. Students — and parents — should know the rule and the consequence, and teachers should know that administrators will support its enforcement. Schools cannot credibly assume students, parents, and teachers are fully aware of expectations with codes of conduct that sprawl over dozens of pages.

Rule enforcement works. Phone bans are a lesson. Policies are often proportionate and clear: the rule gets broken, the phone gets taken. The largest study of phone bans to date found that in-class use fell from 61% to 13% after restrictions took effect. Clear policies were adopted, schools implemented them, teachers enforced them, and students adjusted. Kids have not mysteriously become unable to follow school rules. They just need expectations consistently upheld.

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Carolyn D. Gorman and Jennifer Weber are fellows at the Manhattan Institute.