The US Department of Education has told schools not to consider students' race when developing or applying disciplinary policies, warning that attempts to reduce racial disparities in suspensions and other punishments could amount to unlawful discrimination.
The department issued the guidance on August 18 through a “Dear Colleague” letter from the Office for Civil Rights. It says schools must apply discipline based on student conduct rather than trying to produce similar disciplinary outcomes across racial groups.
The department has described efforts to adjust disciplinary practices because one racial group receives more suspensions or expulsions than another as “racial balancing.” Its guidance says schools must stop considering race in disciplinary policies and practices, except in extraordinary circumstances that meet the constitutional standard of strict scrutiny.
The move follows a broader change in the federal government's interpretation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits racial discrimination in education programmes receiving federal funding.
In July, the Education Department removed several disparate-impact provisions from its Title VI regulations. Those provisions allowed demographic disparities to be considered when determining whether a policy had discriminatory effects, even when there was no evidence that the policy was intentionally discriminatory.
The department said the previous approach had effectively pushed schools towards considering race in order to address disparities. The Trump administration has argued that Title VI should focus on intentional discrimination rather than statistical differences in outcomes.
The new guidance has drawn criticism from civil rights and education groups because racial disparities in school discipline remain significant.
Federal civil rights data shows that Black students are disciplined at disproportionately high rates. A 2023 Education Department report found that Black public-school preschool children received out-of-school suspensions at nearly twice their share of enrolment.
Education advocacy organisation EdTrust criticised the new guidance, arguing that schools cannot address racial disparities by simply being told to ignore race. The organisation said the data shows that Black students continue to face some of the harshest disciplinary outcomes.
The department has also opened Title VI investigations into two school districts, in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, over alleged consideration of race in disciplinary practices. In one case, officials are accused of directing teachers to consider racial disparities in discipline; in the other, investigators are examining claims about policies described as reflecting “systemic whiteness.”
The policy marks a significant shift from the approach taken by the Biden administration, which had encouraged schools to examine disciplinary data for racial disparities and consider whether apparently neutral policies produced discriminatory effects. The Trump administration has moved to eliminate that framework from federal civil rights enforcement.
