Department of Education to No Longer Require School Discipline Policies That Discriminate on the Basis of Race

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—The Department of Education issued guidance Tuesday urging schools to neither favor nor disfavor students based on race when it comes to discipline, reversing Obama-era guidelines.

The department also announced new civil rights investigations into two school districts that allegedly used race-based disciplinary policies.

“For too long, the Left’s pursuit of ‘equity’ has perversely required schools to discipline students differently, based on their race; it has prevented teachers from keeping their classrooms safe, put students in harm’s way, and severely compromised student learning opportunities,” Kimberly Richey, assistant secretary for civil rights, said in a statement first provided to the Daily Signal.

“Today’s guidance clarifies Title VI’s legal requirements and ends these harmful practices,” Richey added. “[The Office for Civil Rights] will vigorously enforce Title VI to ensure that schools’ disciplinary systems are neutral and fair, and that they operate in a nondiscriminatory manner.”

The ‘Dear Colleague’ Letter

Tuesday’s “Dear Colleague” letter provides guidance based on President Donald Trump’s April 2025 executive order titled “Reinstating Commonsense School Discipline Policies.”

Trump’s order claimed that previous administrations misinterpreted Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Department of Education and the Department of Justice had issued a “Dear Colleague” letter in January 2014 stating that schools could still violate Title VI, and therefore lose federal funding, if their disciplinary programs led to adverse outcomes for students of certain races—despite not intentionally discriminating on the basis of race.

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A 2018 report from the Federal Commission on School Safety found that, due to the 2014 letter, “schools ignored or covered up—rather than disciplined—student misconduct in order to avoid any purported racial disparity in discipline numbers that might catch the eye of the federal government.”

“As a result, students who should have been suspended or expelled for dangerous behavior remained in the classroom, making all students less safe,” Trump’s order stated.

This echoed the finding of a 2020 Heritage Foundation report, which concluded that “adopting racial quotas in school discipline is not only illegal and unjustified, it is counterproductive.”

The “Dear Colleague” letter sent Tuesday urges all schools receiving federal funding to “establish a disciplinary system that creates a safe and well-ordered learning environment” and to “ensure that students are not treated differently based on race, color, or national origin in matters of discipline or otherwise.”

The letter follows the Department of Education’s announcement last month that it was reversing several disparate impact provisions from various agency regulations.

The Investigations

The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights also opened two Title VI investigations into school districts that allegedly required personnel to consider race when making disciplinary decisions.

The office is investigating reports that the administration in Fayetteville, Arkansas, directed teachers to “take students’ racial identities into account when issuing discipline as part of an effort to bring about ‘restorative justice’ to address ‘the disproportionality of discipline of students of color.’”

It is also investigating a Milwaukee, Wisconsin, school district in which leaders reportedly “derided school policies that appear to be neutral as reflecting systemic ‘whiteness,’ seemingly encouraging school officials to consider race in disciplinary practices.”