Unsteady Guidance: Shifts in Federal School Discipline Policy From Obama to Trump

• In Event: The Evolving Landscape of State and Federal Education Policy

Abstract

We analyze three shifts in discipline policy during the Obama and Trump administrations, using data from a larger study of educational civil rights policy at the federal level from 2017-2020. We examine how the discipline-policy agendas of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches overlapped and diverged between 2014 and 2019, and the accompanying changes within the advocacy coalitions in federal education policy. We find that USED guidance was the main form of policymaking, though it was also unstable because unlike regulations or legislation, it is easily reversed. Congressional action to expand the United States Department of Education (ED’s) authority to enforce Title VI of the Civil Rights Act (CRA) would provide more stable protection of students’ civil rights in discipline.

Authors

• Kathryn A. McDermott, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

• Sarah McCollum, University of Georgia

• Elizabeth H. DeBray, University of Georgia

• Erica Frankenberg, Pennsylvania State University

• Genevieve P. Siegel-Hawley, Virginia Commonwealth University

• Janelle T. Scott, University of California - Berkeley