Obama-Era Guidance Undermined Its Own Aims

An Obama administration guidance, sidestepping law to serve an albeit well-meaning social agenda, may have deepened the very injustice it was meant to correct. Haven't I heard this onebefore?

New York City public schools, where Mayor Bill de Blasio's implementation of an Obama-era guidance that discouraged teachers from suspending minority students, have become host to more and more violent and disrespectful student behavior since the guidance was issued in 2014.

A new study from the Manhattan Institute scholar Max Eden, "School Discipline Reform and Disorder," analyzes data from five years of public school discipline reform—and finds that a nearly 50-percent decrease in New York City's school suspension rate corresponded to a reportedly diminishing "school climate," a descent into chaos, according to yearly survey responses from students and teachers.)

New York City's uptick in classroom disorder followed then-Education Secretary Arne Duncan's 2014 "Dear Colleague" letter warning school districts that racially disparate suspension rates would trigger a federal investigation. The 2015-2016 school year showed the first notable effects of Mayor de Blasio's reforms to curb suspension rates along racial lines in accordance with Duncan's guidance. In that year, Eden reports, there were 15,857 fewer suspensions than two years previous, when Mayor Michael Bloomberg's discipline reform, which predated the "Dear Colleague" letter, took effect. Unsurprisingly, 2015-16 also had a higher percentage of teachers—yearly climate survey respondents from 636 schools, serving 376,716 students— reporting declines in "order and discipline." And student respondents to school climate surveys reported declines in "mutual respect," along with increases in physical fighting, drug use, and gang activity.

Minority students, the very group the federal guidance aimed to serve, disproportionately suffer under de Blasio's reforms: