New Report Offers Path Forward After Obama-Era Education Policies

Understanding the pitfalls of the 2014 “Dear Colleague Letter” can yield school safety improvements

NEW YORK, NY – In the wake of the rescission of a 2014 Department of Education “Dear Colleague Letter” (DCL), school districts across the country have an opportunity to rethink their approach to fostering orderly learning environments and improving school safety. In a new report from the Manhattan Institute, senior fellow Max Eden leverages recent data to explore the outcomes of Obama-era school safety policies, identifying previously unseen pitfalls and offering guidance for improvement.

The DCL, which the Trump administration rescinded in December 2018, asserted that disparate outcomes among racial groups in rates of suspensions and expulsions were the result of adult bias rather than differences in student behavior. To reduce suspension and expulsion rates, guidelines recommended that schools adopt “restorative” rather than “exclusionary” disciplinary methods—encouraging students to mediate conflict through healing circles and dialogue.

New evidence suggests, however, that progressive discipline policies, which are still in effect in many schools today, have damaged day-to-day learning conditions for students and teachers. Eden’s main findings include:

• The most rigorous social science suggests that adult bias plays, at most, a minimal role in disciplinary “disproportionality.” Differences in discipline are driven largely by differences in student behavior, and these differences are driven largely by social and economic factors.
• Recent, robust research has reduced estimates of the negative effects that school suspensions have on students.
• There is little basis for claims that “restorative” or “positive” approaches to student misbehavior work, and there is a growing cause for concern that the recent shift away from traditional discipline is doing more harm than good.

Click here to read the full report