What does school discipline look like in the DeVos era?

Gina Womack, writing in The Hill, expresses strong concern that Betsy Devos will abandon the Obama-era initiative to require schools and states to report on how they discipline students and to disaggregate that data by race.

Womack is concerned that a move away from this requirement would enable schools to return to policies that are disproportionately punitive toward students of color.

The DOE’s current Civil Rights Data Collection national survey, derived from school discipline reports, is a critical resource that alerts us to institutional racism pervading every level of our education system. We need that hard data to force administrators and policymakers in our education system to acknowledge the role they play in school-to-prison pipeline. How can we be sure this reporting and research will continue under DeVos?

Anyone who cares about the fate of black kids in our schools should be concerned when DeVos sidesteps a question about the obligation of schools to report how and who they discipline. Our education system needs a leader who is unafraid to tackle systemic racial prejudice and injustice. Our black kids deserve a secretary of Education who cares about them.

Devos’s clear sidestepping of the question, combined with other verbal evasions on federal vs. state issues, indicate the Department of Education may be stepping away from the more active role it took under Obama.

Whether or not you agree with the policies of the Obama/Duncan/King Department of Education (most educators I know believe those results are mixed at best), this should be a cause for concern among those interested in equitable school discipline policies. The Obama administration’s work was far from done; the administration was effective in bringing the problem of racially disproportionate policies to the foreground. They were only on the edge of the cusp of solving those problems; then again, it’s probably not the role of the feds to prescribe exactly what should happen in schools. In a perfect world, the federal government can use their platform to highlight a problem while still allowing schools flexibility to determine how to solve that problem.

But if the feds don’t see it as a problem, is it likely that schools will take steps to solve it?