The Epoch Times calls it a school discipline crisis, and the phrase fits what many parents and teachers say they are living every day. Suspensions are down in many districts, yet violence, disruption, and fear are rising. In place of traditional discipline, roughly one in three school districts, serving about 19 million students, now rely on “restorative justice” practices that were promoted for almost a decade by federal civil rights guidance tied to funding.
For parents like David Rein in Newburgh, New York, the result has been painful. His middle school son was shoved around on the bus, ordered where to sit, and had his glasses broken. Months later, Rein learned that several other students had been bullied in similar ways. The tormentor never apologized and faced no real consequence under the district’s restorative justice approach. As Rein put it, “I can understand a get-out-of-jail free for a first offense, but if it happens over and over and over again, it’s not restorative. It’s abusive to society.”
Stories like this are driving a national fight over what school discipline should look like, who it protects, and whether new Trump administration policies will fix the problem or make it worse.
What Restorative Justice Is Supposed to Do
Restorative justice began in the criminal justice world and was adapted for schools by civil rights activists who were worried about the school to prison pipeline. Britannica describes it as an approach that focuses on repairing harm, rebuilding relationships, and emphasizing empathy and understanding rather than punishment.
We Are Teachers, a national education group, defines school-based restorative justice as a practice built on empathy, respect, and accountability that encourages students to understand the impact of their actions, take responsibility, and actively participate in a healing process. Their example contrasts two mornings for the same student. In the traditional discipline version, a student who had a rough morning at home shows up late, is reprimanded, gets into a fight in the cafeteria, and ends up in juvenile detention, missing class and gaining a record. In the restorative version, the same student is greeted warmly, staff notice his distress, help him talk through a small conflict with a peer, and involve him in a community project that improves his mood and relationships.
Districts that embrace this approach often build an entire structure around it. The Newburgh district advertises “restorative circles” where everyone involved in an incident sits together to talk and be heard. Many systems have full-time restorative staff and program directors. Newburgh’s program director earns more than $121,000 per year. New York City has spent about 97 million dollars on restorative justice employees over the past decade.
On paper, the goal is to reduce suspensions, especially for black and Hispanic students, who have historically been punished at higher rates. National Education Association materials argue that traditional discipline is “nourished by implicit biases and institutionalized racism,” and restorative practices are promoted as a way to make discipline more fair.
How Federal Policy Helped Create the New Discipline Regime
The current landscape did not appear by accident. In 2014, President Barack Obama’s administration issued a “Dear Colleague” letter warning that K–12 schools could lose federal funding if their suspension rates showed racial disparities. Districts were ordered to track discipline by race and reduce what was called “disparate impact,” even if local demographics or behavior patterns were complex.
States were later required to calculate “risk ratios” by comparing suspension rates for black and white students. If the risk ratio was too high, districts could be forced to divert part of their special education funding into efforts to reduce disparity. In Florida’s Alachua County, for example, the state education department told the district in 2022 that its suspension risk ratio for black students exceeded the state target of 3.0. As a result, 15 percent of its special education grant had to be spent on reducing that ratio, regardless of where in the district the suspensions were actually happening.
Even after the first Trump administration rescinded the Obama letter in 2018, many school systems kept restorative justice procedures in place. Complex flow charts, therapy language, and group dialogues continued to guide discipline in place of straightforward detention, suspension, or expulsion.
In 2023, the Biden administration effectively brought the Obama guidance back through a joint letter from the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. That letter promised to “confront the issue of race discrimination in student discipline,” reinforcing pressure on districts to avoid racial gaps in suspensions.
The Numbers: Suspensions Down, Violence Up
Supporters and critics of restorative justice agree on one thing. Discipline trends have changed dramatically.
In some places, suspension rates are clearly down. California, for example, has seen suspensions of black students fall by 38 percent over twelve years, even though black students are still suspended more than three times as often as white peers. In Wisconsin, a 2017 report by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty found that as restorative justice policies pushed suspension numbers down, concerns about school climate and safety increased. Teachers reported feeling “unsatisfied and even fearful.”
Behind the walls of “calm” suspension data, more troubling measures are rising. The most recent FBI report on crime in schools shows that criminal incidents on learning campuses more than tripled in four years, from 100,810 incidents in 2020 to almost 330,000 in 2024. Assault was the most common category, with more than 538,000 incidents over a five-year period, followed by larceny and theft with more than 234,000 incidents. The National Center for Education Statistics counted 857,500 violent incidents at public K–12 schools during the 2021–2022 school year.
Real life examples are often disturbing. In Newburgh, New York, a large school fight spilled off campus and gunshots were fired, yet parents say there was no clear public explanation of how the students were disciplined. A teacher in the same district was attacked, and again, parents say the response was handled “behind closed doors.”
The Manhattan Institute has documented cases where restorative approaches seemed to fail completely. In one incident, students who harassed a Jewish teacher with Nazi salutes were sent to a mediation room but were not removed from class. The teacher later sued. In Texas, a student who walked around school with a bag of dead cats was not reported to police because of restorative policies. That same teenager later murdered nineteen students and two teachers in the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.
There are more recent cases as well. In Staten Island, an eight-year-old was sent to a mediation room rather than punished after allegedly stabbing a staff member with a pencil and threatening classmates. In San Diego, a middle school boy was not disciplined for repeatedly groping students because administrators feared violating policies protecting special education students.
In Arizona, the backlash has started to move the other way. In Fort Mohave, an eight-year-old boy brought a loaded handgun to school, pointed it at a teacher, then handed it to another student. He was arrested and charged with multiple felonies, including misconduct involving weapons and threatening an educational institution. Educators in the state say behavior has grown more aggressive and disrespectful while consequences have weakened. “There’s been a breakdown in family structure and society,” one teacher said. “You could not speak to your teacher disrespectfully, or you’d go to the principal. That happens every day now, and there’s no consequence.”
Strict Rules and Their Costs
Not every response to the discipline crisis has been lenient. Some schools and districts have gone in the opposite direction, building very strict environments that keep order at a high cost.
NPR profiled Paramount Schools of Excellence, a charter network in Indiana praised for calm classrooms and strong test scores among low income students and students of color. Paramount’s CEO describes the schools as quiet and “calm, collected.” Federal and state data show how they achieve that peace. For every 100 general education students in the network, there were about 45 suspensions in the 2024–2025 school year, compared with a statewide average of 10. For students receiving special education services, there were about 73 suspensions per 100 children, compared with 22 for the state as a whole.
Supporters, including many parents, like the orderly environment. One mother with five children at a Paramount school said, “I like that they’re strict. You walk into Paramount, their kids are sitting at the desk. Their kids are doing what needs to be done.” She believes that even when her son with autism is suspended, some accountability is necessary so he does not use his disability as an excuse to hurt other students.
For other families, however, the system is punishing children for behavior related to disability and leaving them academically behind. One student with ADHD was suspended for “horseplaying,” fighting, and not following rules. His mother points out that impulsivity is part of his diagnosed condition and asks, “Why is he getting in trouble for what ADHD looks like?” After at least ten suspension days and weeks of remote instruction at home, she worries he is falling further and further behind.
Special education expert Federico Waitoller argues that suspensions are a “Band-Aid.” They give adults breathing room but do not teach students what to do instead. “You are not teaching anything,” he says. “You are saying, ‘Do not do this,’ but you are not telling the student what to do, how to do it, and giving them the supports to do it.”
This is the heart of the rub against strict discipline policies. They can produce calm hallways and higher test scores for some students, but they often fall hardest on children with disabilities, those in foster care, and other vulnerable groups. Federal data show that black girls are 8 percent of student enrollment but 14 percent of suspensions. Black boys are 8 percent of enrollment but 18 percent of suspensions. Black boys with disabilities and black girls with disabilities are among the most frequently punished students in the country.
The New Trump Approach to School Discipline
Against this backdrop, President Donald Trump has moved to put his stamp on school discipline for a second time.
Earlier in his presidency, he rescinded the Obama guidance that pushed restorative practices and disparate impact analysis. In April 2025, he went further, signing an executive order called Reinstating Common Sense School Discipline Policies. The order labels previous efforts to reduce racial disparities in discipline as “school discipline based on discriminatory equity ideology.” Linda McMahon, the Trump Education Secretary, argues that earlier policies “placed racial equity quotas over student safety,” and encouraged schools to “turn a blind eye” to bad or violent behavior.
A separate pair of executive orders, numbered 14280 and 14281, direct the Education Department and the Attorney General to issue new guidance that reflects the administration’s skepticism of race conscious reform. The orders threaten districts with the loss of federal funds if they do not comply. They also remove “disparate impact” analysis from federal civil rights enforcement, making it harder to challenge discipline policies that produce unequal results even if they are neutral on their face.
In another sweeping move, the Supreme Court recently allowed Trump to move ahead with dismantling the Department of Education itself and authorizing large scale staff cuts. That decision will further weaken the Office for Civil Rights, which was already hit with budget reductions and office closures.
Supporters of the Trump approach see these moves as a necessary reset. White House spokesperson Liz Huston describes the administration’s goal as “restoring safety and order in American classrooms by ensuring school discipline policies are based on objective behavior, not DEI.” She says Trump is “promoting academic excellence and prioritizing the needs of students, parents, and teachers.”
Advocacy groups such as Moms for Liberty echo this. Co-founder Tiffany Justice calls restorative justice “horrible,” complaining that children are forced to “sit in a kumbaya circle with their abuser and talk about what role they played as the victim.” The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty welcomes the recent rise in suspensions in their state, arguing that “softer, woke discipline policies are not a positive force.” The Manhattan Institute calls for “immediate, structured support to reset expectations, restore order, and protect instructional time.” Tom Bennett of the nonprofit researchED sums up this view bluntly. “If children do not behave, then nothing else is going to be achieved. No child flourishes in chaos.”
At the state level, Republican leaders in several places are moving in the same direction. Within the last two years, eleven Republican-led states have passed or proposed laws that promote traditional discipline and stronger teacher authority. West Virginia’s Senate Bill 199, known as the School Discipline Bill, declares that teachers “stand in the place of the parent” while students are under their care and gives them broad control over discipline from the time students arrive at school until they return home. Governor Patrick Morrisey argued that empowering teachers is necessary for a “world class education system” and “safe learning environments.”
Skeptics Warn of Civil Rights Rollbacks
Civil rights advocates, researchers, and progressive educators see the same Trump orders very differently. To them, the new rules are not restoring order, they are rolling back decades of work to protect black, Latino, disabled, homeless, and foster youth from unfair punishment.
Education researcher Dan Losen, who has tracked discipline data in California for twenty years, argues that recent reforms were grounded in solid evidence. He points out that a major Texas study found 60 percent of students had at least one disciplinary incident between sixth and twelfth grade. In other words, there is no simple split between “good” and “bad” kids. Losen says that when schools suspend fewer students and use better interventions, test scores go up, graduation rates rise, and crime goes down. He is especially critical of attacks on social emotional learning and behavior modification, which he describes as basic tools for teaching coping skills, self regulation, and anger control.
Kathryn Wiley, writing about the Trump executive orders, calls them a “dangerous regression in education equity.” She notes that black girls and boys are already punished far more often and more harshly than white peers, yet the new policies strip away one of the main legal tools, disparate impact analysis, that allowed advocates to challenge unequal discipline practices. She argues that the orders try to invert civil rights logic by describing race conscious efforts to reduce disparities as a new form of discrimination against white students.
Wiley compares this strategy to “Massive Resistance” after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, when white politicians in the South used exclusionary discipline and other tactics to block school integration. She warns that cutting data collection, closing Office for Civil Rights offices, and freezing investigations will leave many students of color unprotected. Cases that were close to resolution are now stalled, and districts that had admitted problems are no longer being held accountable.
Critics call the new guidance “administrative bullying,” meant to scare districts into dropping restorative practices and equity programs even when the legal authority behind the orders is shaky. They stress that executive orders are not the same as laws passed by Congress and argue that many of the Trump directives will be challenged and possibly struck down in court.
States and Communities Seek Their Own Balance
While Washington fights over guidance and executive orders, states and local communities are experimenting with their own discipline reforms.
California has been a leader in limiting exclusionary discipline. After years of advocacy, lawmakers barred schools from suspending or expelling students in grades six through twelve for “willful defiance,” a catch-all category that once covered minor issues such as refusing to spit out gum or put away a phone. The law notes that suspension can cause learning loss, missed meals, and long term harm. It cites research showing that suspended or expelled students are five times more likely to drop out and enter the school to prison pipeline. The law pushes schools toward restorative justice and “positive behavior interventions and supports” instead.
Similar efforts have occurred in red states. Losen points out that places such as Ohio and Texas have eliminated suspensions for disruption or defiance in the early grades, not as a left wing experiment but as a response to data and research.
Some advocacy groups are trying to make restorative justice more effective rather than abandoning it. The People’s Think Tank for Education Justice highlights models in Chicago, North Carolina, California, and Illinois in which parents act as mediators in peace centers and restorative circles. They argue that for restorative practices to work, schools must build “authentic partnerships” with black and brown parents and students and use the approach to transform school culture, not just individual behavior.
Other states are wrestling with where to draw the line between criminal behavior and ordinary misbehavior. In Arizona, State Superintendent Tom Horne says threats against schools should be felonies and argues for strong penalties. Representative Rachel Keshel, also a Republican, warns that treating all disruptions as felonies goes too far. She has proposed a bill to reduce some “disruption of an educational institution” charges to misdemeanors for minors. She agrees that an eight-year-old with a loaded gun represents a serious threat that may justify felony charges, but she wants flexibility to distinguish between extreme cases and typical middle school conflict.
Advocates like Wiley urge local communities to stay engaged no matter which way federal policy blows. She calls on parents and citizens to demand alternatives to harsh exclusion, build coalitions with civil rights and youth groups, monitor state and local policy changes, and remind school boards that executive orders are not the final word.
What Everyone Agrees On
The debate over school discipline is sharp and emotional. One side sees restorative justice as a failed experiment that has weakened consequences, empowered bullies, and endangered teachers and students. The other side sees Trump’s new rules as a step backward toward unequal punishment, racial injustice, and a quieter version of segregation.
Yet buried in the arguments are some shared assumptions. Policy experts at the American Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute, special education researchers, and grassroots activists all agree that classrooms cannot function in chaos and that no child thrives where violence and disruption are normal. At the same time, they agree that simply suspending and expelling more students does not solve deeper problems, especially when those punishments fall hardest on children who are already vulnerable.
The Epoch Times is right to describe a crisis in school discipline. Violence and criminal incidents are rising. Teachers feel unsafe and unsupported. Parents are angry about both lenient and overly harsh responses. The Trump administration has offered one answer, centered on restoring traditional punishment and weakening equity rules. Supporters welcome the change as long overdue. Skeptics warn that it will damage civil rights and undo years of progress.
What happens next will likely be decided less by distant agencies and more by school boards, principals, teachers, and parents who choose what to demand in their own communities. Whether they lean toward restorative justice, stricter rules, or a blend of both, they will face the same hard question. How do we build schools where students are safe, teachers have authority, and discipline is both firm and fair for every child who walks through the door.
