The U.S. Department of Education recently announced it was investigating Fayetteville Public Schools in Arkansas, much to the district's surprise.
The reason, according to a department press release: Teachers there "were directed to take students' racial identities into account when issuing discipline as part of an effort to bring about 'restorative justice' to address 'the disproportionality of discipline on students of color.'"
Superintendent John Mulford says the district received notice of the investigation roughly two hours before the department publicly named Fayetteville as a target in its national release.
"We're a little shocked at this point and completely in the dark as to what this is even about," Mulford says.
In the same announcement, the department's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) issued new federal guidance warning school leaders that they should not consider a student's race in discipline matters or they would risk being investigated.
"The hardest part to swallow," Mulford says, is that "ever since I've been here, we've done extensive work around the consistency of our discipline policy … so that it takes away any ambiguity at all." And that, Mulford says, "aligns very well with [federal civil rights law]."
That's why, he says, he's "a little taken aback." For now, he's left to wait for clarity from the department.
The new guidance and the Fayetteville investigation reopen an old and bitter civil rights fight over discipline in the nation's K-12 schools — and what qualifies as discrimination.
Multiple federal investigations have found that discrimination still plagues America's schools, even as it's been illegal for decades, thanks to federal civil rights law.
But what if a school policy seems neutral — until you dig into its impact on students? What if data shows that the policy is disproportionately hurting one group? Is that also discrimination?
In 2014, the Obama administration issued guidance to the nation's schools arguing that discipline data — showing who was being suspended or expelled, for how long and how frequently — often revealed large, potentially discriminatory impacts on students of color.
According to federal data at the time, the guidance said, African American students represented just 15% of students overall but 35% of students suspended once and 44% of students suspended more than once. (NPR has reported that this trend actually begins in preschool.)
An American Psychological Association task force found no evidence that these disparities reflected differences in student behavior; instead, the APA said they "may be due to lack of teacher preparation in classroom management, lack of training in culturally competent practices, or racial stereotypes."
Reflecting on why she sent that 2014 memo, Catherine Lhamon, who ran OCR under Presidents Obama and Biden, tells NPR that given our nation's history, not looking carefully at school discipline rates through the lens of race would have been an abdication.
"The very first desegregation agreements that [OCR] was created by Congress to enforce included requirements that discriminatory discipline practices end," Lhamon says. These practices, she says, are "a feature of discrimination. And it's something that we have seen persist in schools over decades."
