Removing Consequences From Schools Didn’t Help Black Students — It Endangered Them

In January of 2014, the United States Department of Education and the Department of Justice issued a joint “Dear Colleague” letter — an official warning sent to every public school district in the country (U.S. DOE & DOJ, Office for Civil Rights, 2014). The letter did not have the force of law. But it carried the unmistakable weight of the federal government’s enforcement apparatus. Its message was clear — school discipline policies that resulted in racial disparities in suspension and expulsion rates would be treated as potential violations of Title VI — the section of the Civil Rights Act that bans discrimination in federally funded programs — regardless of whether the policies themselves were applied equally on paper.

If Black students were suspended at higher rates than white students, the school district could face a federal investigation. The letter did not say that schools must eliminate suspensions. But in practice, it meant schools would be punished for the outcomes of their discipline policies even if those policies were applied without racial bias. School administrators understood the threat precisely. 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 overwhelmingly Black. They were not the students who were no longer being suspended. They were the students who sat next to them — the quiet ones, the studious ones, the ones who came to school to learn and found, increasingly, that learning was impossible because 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, because the disparities were real and they demanded attention.

The Government Accountability Office, in a comprehensive 2018 report, confirmed what researchers had documented for decades (GAO-18-258, 2018) —

• Black students were suspended at rates roughly three times those of white students
• Black boys were the most disproportionately affected group
• Black girls were suspended at higher rates than white boys
• These disparities persisted even when controlling for school poverty levels and other demographic factors

The question the discipline reform movement refused to ask — or asked and then refused to accept the answer to — was straightforward. Were these disparities entirely the product of racial bias in how discipline was applied? Or did they also reflect, at least in part, genuine differences in rates of disruptive behavior? Differences traceable to the social and economic factors that disproportionately affect Black students.

The GAO report carefully noted that its analysis could not determine the extent to which disparities reflected bias versus differences in behavior (GAO-18-258, 2018). But the reform movement was not interested in careful distinctions. It had a narrative, and the narrative was that the disparities were caused by racism, full stop, and 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 one of the most rigorous evaluations of restorative justice — a discipline approach that replaces punishment with guided conversations between offenders and those they harmed — ever performed. They studied Pittsburgh Public Schools from 2015 to 2018 (Augustine et al., RAND Corporation, RR-2840-NLSB, 2018). Pittsburgh had been among the most aggressive adopters, replacing suspensions with restorative circles, peer mediation, and other alternatives.

The RAND findings were devastating for the reform movement —

• Suspension rates did decline — the policy achieved its stated goal
• The reduction in suspensions was associated with 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

Let that sink in. The policy designed to help Black students produced worse academic outcomes for Black students. The policy designed to close the achievement gap widened it. The policy designed to make schools more equitable made them less effective. And the students who bore the cost were not the policy’s architects, who sent their own children to private schools. They were the low-income Black students who had no choice but to sit in classrooms where order had been abandoned.

Steinberg and Lacoe, in their comprehensive review of discipline reform research published in Education Next, found a consistent pattern (Steinberg & Lacoe, Education Next, Vol. 17, No. 1, 2017) —

• Policies that reduced suspensions without providing adequate alternative consequences led to increased 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

Top 5 Solutions That Are Already Working

1. Restorative Justice in Chicago Public Schools (United States). Chicago implemented restorative justice — dialogue circles, peer mediation, and community conferencing — across 73 high schools. The critical difference from the failed reform models 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. The key lesson is that restorative practice works when it supplements consequences rather than replacing them (University of Chicago Education Lab/NBER; Brookings, 2023).

2. Perry Preschool Program (Ypsilanti, Michigan). Perry Preschool addressed discipline problems at their root — before children ever reached the school-to-prison pipeline. Disadvantaged 3- and 4-year-old African American children received daily classes and weekly home visits. Fifty years later, only 31% had ever been arrested, compared to 51% in the control group. The participants’ own children were 30+ points less likely to be suspended. The return was $12.90 for every dollar invested (Heckman et al., Journal of Public Economics, 2010).

3. Black Homeschooling Movement (United States). Black homeschooling surged from 3.3% to 16.1% during the pandemic, driven in large part by parents rejecting the discipline systems that targeted their children. Black homeschool students scored 23 to 42 percentile points above Black public school students on standardized tests. The movement represents a direct parental response to the suspension crisis — families removing their children from systems that treated them as problems rather than students (NHERI, 2015; Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey, 2020).

4. Becoming a Man — BAM (Chicago, expanded to Boston and Los Angeles). BAM is a school-based, CBT-grounded group counseling and mentoring program for at-risk young men in high-violence neighborhoods. Four randomized controlled trials found that violent crime arrests dropped 45-50%. Graduation rates rose 19%. The benefit-cost ratio ranged from 5-to-1 to 30-to-1. BAM works because it teaches self-regulation — the skill that prevents the behavior that triggers suspension in the first place (Heller et al., QJE, 2017; University of Chicago Crime Lab, 2019).

5. Mississippi Literacy Reform (United States). Mississippi’s literacy reform connects to the suspension crisis through a documented causal chain. Children who cannot read become disruptive. Disruptive children get suspended. Suspended children drop out. Mississippi broke that chain by mandating phonics-based instruction and rising 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 (NAEP, 2022-2024; The Conversation, 2024).

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 (GAO, 2018)
• 65% vs. 50% — Black vs. white parent support for traditional discipline. The people closest to the problem wanted consequences, not chaos (Education Next, 2018)
• Worse — Math and reading scores for Black students in Pittsburgh after restorative justice was implemented most aggressively (RAND, 2018)
• Wider — The achievement gap after the policy designed to close it (Steinberg & Lacoe, 2017)
• 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, documented, 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. And calling that holding facility “equitable” does not make it so. It makes it a lie — and the children trapped inside it know it is a lie, even if the adults who put them there refuse to admit it.