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

The U.S. Department of Education and the Department of Justice sent every public school district a joint “Dear Colleague” letter in January 2014. The document served as an official warning. Although it carried no force of law, the letter wielded the federal government’s full enforcement power. Its message stood clear: discipline policies that produced racial gaps in suspension rates would be treated as potential civil rights violations, even if written to appear perfectly fair on paper.

A district risked federal investigation if Black students were suspended more often than white students. The letter never required schools to end suspensions. Practice brought a different reality, however, as leaders grasped the precise threat of punishment for discipline outcomes and eliminated suspensions in response.

Massive and well-documented, the policy failure that followed hurt the very students it was meant to protect. Admitting as much would expose their progressive consensus as not merely wrong—it was destructive, which is why the education establishment refuses to do so.

Overwhelmingly Black students paid the highest price. They were not the ones whose suspensions had ended. The burden instead fell on classmates sitting beside them—the quiet ones and the studious ones. These students had come to school to learn, only to find learning more and more impossible once chaos overtook the classroom 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.

A detailed 2018 Government Accountability Office report confirmed patterns researchers had tracked for decades. Black students were suspended at roughly three times the rate of white students. Black boys formed the group hit hardest by the imbalance, while Black girls faced suspension more often than white boys. The gaps remained after controls for school poverty levels and other demographic factors.

The discipline reform movement refused to ask—or asked only then to reject the answer to—a straightforward question. 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?

Although the GAO report carefully noted that its analysis could not determine how much of the disparity reflected bias versus differences in behavior, the reform movement took no interest in careful distinctions. It embraced a single narrative—the disparities were caused by racism, full stop—and sought to eliminate those disparities simply by ending 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 carried out one of the most rigorous evaluations of restorative justice ever performed — the discipline approach that replaces punishment with guided conversations between offenders and those they harmed. RAND examined Pittsburgh Public Schools from 2015 to 2018 and focused on a district that ranked among the most aggressive adopters, swapping suspensions for restorative circles, peer mediation, and other alternatives.

Suspension rates declined, meeting the policy's stated goal, but RAND found no statistically significant effect on academic achievement or any significant relationship between how intensively a school implemented restorative justice and how its students performed.

The policy designed to help Black students never delivered the academic improvements its architects had promised. RAND found no significant gains from restorative justice at all. Those bearing the costs were not the architects, who sent their own children to private schools. The low-income Black students instead had no choice but to remain in classrooms where order had been abandoned.

Steinberg and Lacoe reviewed discipline-reform research in Education Next and identified a consistent pattern: policies that reduced suspensions without adequate alternative consequences produced more classroom disruption, while academic achievement declined in schools that pursued the most aggressive reforms. The aspiration was never the problem. The real difficulty arose when consequences were removed wholesale and nothing effective replaced them.

Top 5 Solutions That Are Already Working

1. Restorative Justice in Chicago Public Schools. Chicago introduced restorative justice—dialogue circles, peer mediation, and community conferencing—across 73 high schools. What distinguished the effort from earlier failed reforms was straightforward: consequences stayed in place while restorative alternatives were added. Suspensions dropped 18%, arrests fell 19% overall and 35% on school grounds, and Black students saw the largest benefits. Restorative practice works, in other words, when it supplements consequences rather than replacing them.

2. Perry Preschool Program. In Ypsilanti, Michigan, the Perry Preschool Program tackled discipline problems at their root, long before children entered the school-to-prison pipeline. Daily classes plus weekly home visits went to disadvantaged 3- and 4-year-old African American children. Fifty years later only 31% had ever been arrested, compared with 51% in the control group, while participants’ own children faced suspension far less often. Every dollar invested returned $12.90.

3. Black Homeschooling Movement. During the pandemic Black homeschooling rose sharply as parents turned away from discipline systems that singled out their children. Black homeschool students scored 23 to 42 percentile points higher than their public-school peers on standardized tests. Families responded to the suspension crisis by withdrawing their children from systems that viewed them as problems instead of students.

4. Becoming a Man — BAM. BAM delivers school-based group counseling and mentoring grounded in CBT to at-risk young men in high-violence neighborhoods. Violent-crime arrests dropped 45-50% across four randomized controlled trials while graduation rates rose 19%, and the benefit-cost ratio ranged from 5-to-1 to 30-to-1. It works because it teaches self-regulation—the skill that prevents the behavior that triggers a suspension in the first place.

5. Mississippi Literacy Reform. Mississippi’s literacy reform ties into the suspension crisis through a documented causal chain. Children who cannot read often grow disruptive, and that behavior frequently leads to suspension followed by dropout. The state broke the pattern by requiring phonics-based instruction, moving from 49th to 21st in national reading scores, with Black students posting among the largest gains ever recorded. Reading ability brings engagement, and engaged students are far less likely to face suspension.

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.
• 65% vs. 50% — Black vs. white parent support for traditional discipline. The people closest to the problem wanted consequences, not chaos.
• No significant change — Math and reading scores in Pittsburgh after restorative justice, per RAND.
• Unresolved — Whether discipline reform narrows or widens the achievement gap.
• Zero — The number of discipline reform architects whose children attended the schools they disrupted.

Racial bias in school discipline is real and worth addressing, but the discipline reform movement did not fail because its diagnosis was wrong. 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 but rather a holding facility, and labeling that facility “equitable” does not alter the situation—it upholds a lie instead. The children trapped inside know that truth. Adults who put them there refuse to admit it.