directive that was issued on the obama administration and the possibility of the trump administration rescinding the policy. the directive notified schools undergoing federal civil rights negotiations that they risk losing federal funding if they had a higher number of referrals of student. following the shooting in park land, florida, senator marco rubio called on betsy devos to get rid of this directive in the is about an hour. >> thanks to everyone for being here today to discuss this important issue. public schools across the country were put on notice in january of 2014 when the obama department of education issued a dear colleague letter notifying schools that differences in suspension rates among different student groups could be cause for federal investigations. the department forced school districts they investigated to overall their discipline

policies, and that be threat alone catalyzed many changes in other schools across the punt. in the wake of the guidance, suspension rates declined dramatically, but evidence suggests that so too has school safety. survey data, safety data, new stories from across the country suggest that schools have actually become less orderly and less safe leading some experts to ask whether the policy may have left students as advocates intended to help more vulnerable to school violence. indeed, if we are to be serious about the safety of students, we must look at the consequences of failing to actually punish and correct serious wrongdoings by troubled students. to discuss this issue we have an excellent panel of scholars and practitioners. first we'll hear from gail heriot. she is a proffer of law thank you university of san diego.

she clerked for the honorable simon. she also worked as civil rights counsel to the commission on the jude dishary and is an associate dean and professor of law at george mason school of law. she joins usc school's law faculty in 1989. she's a member of the united states commission on civil rights and sits on the board of directors of the national association of scholars and the california association of scholars. and i'd also like to mention, she's the author of a new paper along with her coauthor allison sellman who's in the audience today, the department of basically's initiative, school discipline wrong for students, teachers, and wrong for the law. next we'll hear from max eden. max say senior fellow at the manhattan institute.

before joining the manhattan institute he was a program maenger at the american enterprise institute. he was co-edtor with fred tic hess of the every student succeeds act, what it means for schools, systems, and states. eden's work as appeared in scholarly and popular outlets such as the journal of school choice, earthquakics and finance, washington post and on and on. foaling max's remarks we'll hear from probt pondiscio who is a vice president at the thomas b. fordham institute. he's a former visadviser. he writes and speaks extensively on education and reform issues with an emphasis on literacy, curriculum, teaching and urban education. after 20 years in journalism including senior positions at time and business week, robert became a fifth grade teacher as a struggling south bronx public

school in 2002. he subsequently served as vice president for the core knowledge foundation. finally we'll hear from ms. ford which say clearinghouse organization for parents in washington, d.c. and, that founding led to the successful establishment of the d.c. opportunity sclalship program, a school choice option right here in the nation's capital. virginia is also a founding member of the black alliance for educational option and serves on the d.c. advisory committee for the u.s. civil rights commission. she's also a member of the break through network, the booker t. charter network noption d.c. as well. she currently serves on the board of the milton and rose d. friedman foundation and the arkansas connections academy and she's executive director of the arkansas information network working to make more educational

choices available to arkansas parents. and she's also a visiting fellow here at the heritage foundation. please join me in welcoming our panelists. >> thank you, lindsey, and thank you heritage foundation for sponsoring this symposium. i've got only two minutes so let me concentrate on two points here. first, i suspect a lot of people agree with me that school discipline, that is both the policy and practice, shouldn't be a federal issue. the federal rule under title six of the civil rights act of 1964 should be confined investigating and acting on particularize the allegations of race discrimination. otherwise, discipline is a matter that's best handled at the local level where teachers know their students, know the facts on the ground better than bureaucrats do.

almost everybody's had experience with brewercracy, even when they're he'd tics sound reasonable. by the time they reach the foot soldiers on the ground, they get a bit garbled. that's naturally understood by school districts as don't discipline a minority student unless you're confident that you can persuade some future federal investigator who's judgment have you no reason to trust that it was justified. in turn that's presented to principals at don't discipline a minority stud debt unless you and your teachers jump through the following time-consuming procedural hoops design to document the satisfaction of some future federal investigator who's judgment none of us has any reason to trust of that it was justified. and finally, teachers hear the directive this way. just don't discipline so many students, it will only create

giant hassles for everyone. this is in the nature of brewer rackcracy. of course the obama's administration actual school discipline poly cy was how much worse than i just described. it essentially told schools if your teachers and principals are disciplining proportionally more african-american students than white or asian students, we're coming after you with massive investigations and threats to cut off your funding. under this approach, it's not actual race discrimination that gets schools in trouble, it's having bad numbers. but the law forbids actual discrimination. it doesn't forbid bad numbers. let me say a little bit about the policy here. nobody disputes that african american students are disciplined at higher rates than

white students or asian students nationally. but what if the reason for that is that african-american students misbehave more often and what if the cost of failure to discipline those students falls on their fellow african american students who are trying to learn amid classroom disorder? incidentally, i should point out that white students get disciplined at rates higher than asian students and that boys get disciplined much more than girls and yet no one seems very interested in those bad numbers. it's virtually undisputed that students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to disbehave in schools from stud dprents middle class backgrounds. not sur prytzing there when studies are undertaken they find when socioeconomic disadvantage is controlled for, the

black-white difference shrinks dramatically. but to be fair, it doesn't disappear altogether. an african-american class that's disadvantaged is still somewhat more likely to be displanned than a disadvantage white or asian. that may only be because the most widely used measure of this disadvantage is inadequate. eligibility for the free or reduced-priced lunch program. remember, the child of two french literature graduate studen students at yale might well qualify for a free lunch. in any event, the remaining racial difference does not prove discrimination. the most likely immediate explanation for the racial gap and discipline is that teachers are being honor. for whatever reason, african-americans misbehave in class more than whites and whies misbehave more than asians and boys misbehave more than girls.

by far, the best study in this area is called prior problem behavior accounts for the racial gap in school suspensions. as the title suggests, it found that prior problem behavior, not race, is the best predictor of who will get suspended from school. in other words, the teachers are being completely up front here. they are identifying the students who are actually misbee having and that especially for the worst offenders it tends to be the same kids over and over again regardless of race. once prior behavior is taken into account, race drops out as a predictor entirely. meanwhile, however, the obama administration policy has had two severely negative effects. first, it's caused schools to back away from discipline zwren -- generally with the result of more chaotic classrooms.

second it's led to discrimination where white and asian students on the one hand and african-american students on the other operate under different discipline rules all in order to make the numbers look good. all in all, i'd say we have a ghastly mess on our hands. i would urge the bureau to withdraw that policy. we need to put teachers and principals back in charge. they won't always get right, but they have a much better shot at doing so than the federal government does. now for point two, which i've already alluded to. i've told you why i think this is bad policy, but, as i said, by telling schools that they can credit v their funding cutoff for dispret impact as opposed to discrimination, the obama administration was misstating the law. let me explain that. for the nonlawyers among you, by dispret impact liability, the

government means that it doesn't matter when the teachers are actually treat being students differently based on race. even if it could be demonstrated that the disparities exist solely because african-american students mainly because of increased disadvantage, but solely because after man-american students are misbee having mo hafing more often, the school is still in trouble unless it can improve that its discipline method is necessary. they have to prove, for example, that before suspending a student or punching another student out, they're just giving him a good talking to or taking away his library privileges. wouldn't have been sufficient. that's just not the law. title six, the statute that supposedly is being enforced here outlaws actual race discrimination by federally funded institutions, not disprit impact. the supreme court has repeatedly said so, and no one disputes

that the. department of education during the obama administration argued instead that way back in 1966 the federal government issued all purpose title 6 regulations that go beyond title 6 by creating liability for dispret impact. i'm afraid we don't have time to go through all the steps of why that interpretation of those regulations is wrong, i'll just say that when clarence thomas was assistant secretary for civil rights, he didn't interpret them that way. and, if that were the right way continue to interpret those regulation, it would create giant problems. since a lot of what schools do has a dispret impact on some racial group, it's not always the same group. for example, do we really need to place the basketball hoop so high up? it makes it disproportionately hard for asian americans who on average are shorter to make the

team, you know. but let me say this instead because i think this is a slam dunk legal argument. if the regulations mean what the obama administration said they mean, then they're clearly beyond the scope of the agency authority and, hence, null and void. let me give you a silly example to i will stralt because i'm a law professor and law professor love silly hype threat kals cals. shos a let slate ture makes it illegal to marry one's first cousin and gives the marriage agency the power to effectuate that staut. agency would not have the power to vastly expand that statute by declare that you can't marry your second or third cousin either or anybody who grew up on the same street with you. not only would that go way beyond what the statute allows, there's no rational argument that the regulation is named at assuring the underlying statute's enforcement. the kinds of things that would be per missable in that context would be a requirement, for example, that one present one's birth certificate when one gets a marriage license because that helps effectuate the statute.

inglations that are passed pursuant to a statute can sometimes go beyond what the statute requires, but they have to be aimed as enforcing the statute. they can't just be a sneaky way to expand it. the prar analogy is to the supreme court's decision in city of bernie versus flores. that case concerned how far congress can go in enforcing the 14th amendment's equal protection clause. since the supreme court had held that title 6, the statute we're dealing with, is basically a clone of the equal protection clause, the case is in near perfect fit for puts the court held that congress can pass a statute that goes somewhat beyond the equal protection clause but it has to be an honest enforcement effort. in the court's vocabulary, any congressional enactment needs to be congruent and proportional to -- in enforcing equal

protection clause. there's no way that the 1966 regulations, assuming that they really are authorizing all purpose and impact liability would be upheld as congruent and proportional to title 6 violations. it's not close. it's a massive overreach. even if somewhere somehow there are federal funding recipients who are, in fact, discriminating, fixing it by a massive response like a disprit, an all purpose dispret reaction would be overkill. i think i better stop there. bear in mind that i have just essentially summarized a very, very long law review article for you. if you really want to know what my coauthor and i have to say, you're going to need to read the whole article. thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

>> could you pull up the powerpoint in there? >> great. thanks so much, lindsey. so i've spent the last year researching the scope and effects of obama's deer colleague letter on school discipline and i want to share with you what i've learned. first, this was not guidance, these were orders. on stens ably there was a three part impact test. one, is there disparity? two, is the policy necessary for legitimate goal? three, is there an effective alternative? maybe not unreasonable, but not what they actually did. see, because suspensions don't work and there are effective alternatives available.

if we know the answer to the second and third question, then there's only one actual question. is there a disparity? and if there is, you might face a federal investigation. and if it's about the numbers, what you better do is get the numbers down and the most effective way to get the numbers down is by holding students to lower standards. because if you don't, then you're going to face an investigation. now, these investigations used to be noble and diligent efforts to find discriminatory treatment. but after the guidance they became thin pretexts for prosecutions intended to force school districts to adopt lower standards. take oklahoma city for example. the allegations were false. both students were suspended the same way for the same thing and investigators found that the white student was actually hispanic. but that didn't really matter. after two years, they did not get around to asking teachers whether their discipline policies were justified.

theoretically the second part of this three-part test that rarely actually happens. yet they forced a policy change even as teachers are crying out about the chaos that this policy was causing. we'll circle back to that later. for now we can take rochester, minnesota. there were no allegations of discriminatory treatment. no particular policies were scrutinized. after five years, the district e-mailed them the fact that this matter has dragged on for five years requiring expenditure of enormous resources on the part of the district, without any evidence of wrongdoing is unconscionable. the investigation closed in secht 2015 and three weeks later a new one opens. so rochester, minnesota, has been under investigation for the past eight years. it's not clear if they found anything in the last three, i'll let you know when they close it. two months ago ocf forced milwaukee to adopt lower standards for student behavior.

the super intendant said that she had no choice in the matter. the school board didn't even know there was an investigation that had been going on phon3 1/2 years. total secret. we're not talking about the public not knowing, we're not talking about the teachers not knowing, we're talking about the school board not knowing. so much for local control. these investigations hit hundreds of school districts serving millions of students. the scope of it is breathtaking. i'm happy to tell anybody whether or not your district has been under investigation. new york has been for seven years, seattle for seven years, fresno for four years. millions and millions of students are in districts where their teachers have been forced by the federal government to hold them to lower behavioral standards. so what are the results of this? we know terrifyingly little. after schools are forced to lower suspensions, lazy reporters take the fast of the

sign that skoorls getting safer. could be true? could be that schools are getting less safe. could be that the numbers are just fake. in washington, d.c. they saw 40% drop in suspensions. turns out, principals kept suspend, they just stopped telling the district about it. it was fake news. state data can become dubious. in miami after they banned suspensions they also stopped reporting thousands of fights to the state of florida. crime data also can become dubious. sheriff israel can boast that arrests are down in broward county were that tends to happen when you stop arresting. that does not mean that schools are safer. there aren't many academic studies, teachers surveys, i've repeatedly asked advocates of these policies to direct me towards any evidence that isn't bad. because there's so little, i will run you through everything that i found in the last year.

chicago, very mild reform, lower the length of suspensions and declassified some things from long suspensions to shorter suspensions. better attendance, that's nice, no academic affects, not bad, more crime and disorder according to teachers. worst peer relationships according to students. so mixed trending bad. philadelphia, a ban on suspensions for willful defiance. nonviolent behavior, severe disrespect, things i would not be allowed to say on air, can't be punished for them anymore. for the effects, not every school complied, but across the board pretty serious drop in academic achievement. about 5% net, some fluk waction year to year but troubling. true wenssy, country do the same controls but you can look at what happened, had been dropping mostly year after year and then started rising right after. by 16% to about 42% total.

why? and maybe kids were staying home from school because they were more scared. maybe they were more scared because there were more serious incidents which gets to the truly perverse part of this policy in philadelphia. african-american students ended up spending more time out of school on suspension after the suspension ban. why? because of the rise in serious incidents. maybe when schools aren't allowed to enforce basic norms, seriously problems increase. in los angeles, it tanked. compared to other california schools that didn't have to deal with the ban, l.a. schools lost a fifth of a year of learning. schools that never suspend weren't particularly hit. schools that suspended fewer than ten times willful defiance took a hefty hit. schools that had more than ten suspensions willful defiance lost 1/3 year of learning. we have some surveys where

students are asked the same question from one year to the next and you can see how do their answers change and are they feeling more or fewer students feel safe? in new york city, i published this last year, these bar graphs represent all middle and high schools in new york city and the dmangs stud den answers to various questions on drugs, fights, respect, gangs. the gray zone are schools that the answers didn't really change in. the orange zones are schools where 5 to 15% fewer students gave a nice answer and the red zones are schools where 15 plus percent of students gave a good answer. you can see on the left that was bloomberg's effort on the left to lower suspensions by telling teachers you're not allowed to suspend the first time a student does a low-level offense. you can see things are pretty stable, which kind of makes sense. on the right we have deblahs so he's reform which said to teachers after the third time

you need to provide extensive documentation to the principal who will take this documentation and write an application to the central office which is disinclined to accept the application before we will approve a suspension for a nonviolent offense. according to students, more schools saw fights, disrespect, drugs, gang activity, and that makes sense too. the rules had changed and the students knew it. and, look, schools serving the highest shares of minority students were hit the hardest. half were saw an increase in fights, 60% saw it deteriorate and it's not just an urban problem. in the two-year period before the reform, things were stable. more kids were respecting the rules, that's pretty nice. after the reform it's all worse. fewer kids at 60, 70%, 80% of schools were respecting the rules, respecting each other, respecting teachers, feeling safe. we don't have these questions, these social and emotional

questions before the reform, we only have them from 2015 to 2017. but we can see that fewer kids are reporting an ability to deal with frustration, to understand their emotions, even to tell right from wrong. here's the crazy thing. i only found out about the discipline reform after digging into an article about the great success they were having with their social and emotional learning initiative. finally, seattle, we also don't have before, this is twist to 2017 and it's the same thing. very, very bad. teachers -- kids say teachers aren't protecting them from bullies. teachers say -- kids say teachers aren't even spotting bullies. kids don't feel respected, they don't feel safe. and when i talk to advocates about this stuff they point to seattle as a place that's getting this right. that's it for student surveys. mostly they just don't exist. sometimes they exist and won't share their data with me. sometimes as soon as things start going south they change

the questions or the answers. and sometimes as soon as these reforms start they just stop publishing them or stop asking them, that dmas charlotte, new haven, portland, broward county. we do have though, surveys that are commissioned by teachers unions. now teachers unions are a little bit odd on this issue. at the national level they're against traditional discipline. in fact, the nea declared it to be a product of institutional racism. which is kind of the funny thing to say given that then are the institution. but at the local level unions are less interested and less ideology, they're more interested in protecting their teachers but they can't really do that when the feds are in town so at least they can ask teachers, hey, what's going on? teachers aren't feeling safe. that these are not good answers. we do not want our teachers not

feeling safe. a lot of text here, suffice to say teachers don't think that the new approach works. 13 ners charleston, 13% in denver, 13% in madison. these are incredibly awful approval ratings. do you not want your school to be forced to do something that 10% of teachers think works. but, remember, the department of education today under secretary devos thinks that teachers are wrong. they think that suspensions don't work and they think that restorative justice does. social justice activists think that teachers are not only wrong, but racist. to them, only institutional racism can explain why teachers believe that traditional discipline works and why they don't believe that the new approach keeps kids safe. they have silenced teachers. teachers are afraid, afraid of being called racist if they speak out for the safety of their student.

to my knowledge, only three districts under investigation have given teachers the opportunity to speak anonymously on what's going on. you're not supposed to do this with a powerpoint but i will read you their words to give awe i voice and i'll leave you with a question about the city. oklahoma city, we were told the referrals would not require suspension unless there was blood. we had more fights in the first nine weeks than we've had in the last five years. i would like to see a consequence for bad behavior of some kind such as when a male student took his penis out and showed it to a female student and nothing was done. school environment is unsafe. i do not feel safe, teachers are afraid. students have little to no consequences for behavior that's outright violent towards teachers and staff. help us. these comments were public during the investigation. ocr admitted they didn't talk to teachers. did they really not notice or did they really not care?

buffalo. never seen anything like it, the behavior is unreal. students are threatening teachers with violence and in many cases physically attacking teachers with little to no consequence. no consequences for anything. and we are not allowed to right up students electronically in incident. i was told by admin 91 that he rips up invites -- rips up write-ups. now, 81% of teachers in buffalo say that they're administrators underreport behavioral problems. it's the only distinct that has put this question to teachers. my question to you is why should we tharvink that buffalo is uni? finally fresno. i had a student pun' another student in the face while in line. the perpetrator was sent back to close without a suspension. when a special education student is violent, the district makes excuses for the behavior. and, a student said he would shoot and kill me. three students heard the threat

as shoot and kill, but the administration believed the perpetrator who claimed he was going to prank me with a sling shot. administration said that because he didn't specifically use the word gun, it was not as serious a threat as i thought. so final question, i know i'm a little bit over, lindsey, why today one year into the trump administration do we still have an obama policy that forces districts to abandon traditional discipline without regard to student safety, a policy that ebb courages administrators to systemally suppress records of disturbing violent belafr rare policy that tells adults to willfully ignore clear threats to shoot and kill? >> afternoon.

i'm not a researcher, but here's a project if any of you are that i would love to see a researcher undertake with a small army of graduate students. go into various schools and said things with a stopwatch or a chess clock even and record the amount of time that students spend on task. i would bet you real money that a significant portion of the achievement gap is actually a time on task gap. and much of that time on task gap is caused by disruptive classroom behavior. there's some suggestion empirical evidence of this. about ten years ago a poll of the teacher members found that 17% of teachers say they lost four or more hours of instructional time per week to disruptive behavior. another 19% said they lost two to three hours, that's nearly four out of ten teachers losing two or more hours of teaching time per week to disruptive

behavior. in urban schools 21% said they lot of four or more hours per week, that's a higher figure, than urban secondary at 24%, about one in four. every student i've ever talked has been a low-income student of color in an urban setting. i taught fifth grade for several years in a south bronx school that was quite literally the low of the performing school in new york city's loft performing school district. so it aligned perfectly with my own experience, disruption was easily the biggest challenge we face and without question the biggest impediment to student learning. many in my post classroom life most of my interests are in curriculum and instruction, which i think gets too little attention from reform at large. but i would argue that getting the school's climate and culture right matters more than getting its curriculum right. you could have noble prize

winners in front of every classroom delivering best in class curriculum, but my gut tells me it wouldn't help if kids are having disruptive behavior and to disruptive behavior, feeling physically unsafe in school. bit of a war story. my first year in the classroom coincided with joel kline's first year as new york city's school chancellor. if you were the principal of a school like mine, as i understood it, there were two ways in which a principal could shine. the first would be to raise test scores. the second was to have a low suspension rate, which ostensibly indicated that you were running a tight ship. our scores were abysmal the year i started, 16% of our students were reading at or above grade level. but look, it's easy to reduce the suspension rate, right? you just don't suspend kids. i was a brand-new teacher at the

time. everything i knew about ed policy was filtered to me through my administration, but reportedly, kline said, circa 2002 that, look, i don't care about suspensions. i just want to see higher test scores. so we started suspending kids. climate improved. scores climbed not dramatically but appreciably, modestly. the next year, a new principal evaluation system was approximate us put in place and i remember my principal at the start of the following year saying, telling the staff, we're going to need to really tighten up on discipline this year and i remember thinking, we just did that. we just tightened up discipline. that's why things are improving. you can predict what happened. so the only significant contribution i can make to this discussion as a nonlawyer, as a nongovernment person, is to remind people how well intended policy initiatives land in the classroom. i've always likened it to a child's game of telephone where finely calibrated policies

become blunt instruments at the school level. when i started teaching, some of you may remember this, it was the height of bulletin board mania in the new york city department of education. the idea had taken root somewhere that in our emerging era of standards based education that bulletin boards with kpe p exemplary work were the absolute best window into the quality of instruction in a classroom. that was what they wanted to see, and i learned to repeat that phrase or hear it all the time. that's what they wanted to see. the quality of instruction as best as i could tell in my school didn't change much but boy did the quality of bulletin boards skyrocket. teachers started planning lessons in units, specifically to produce bulletin board work. why? because, say it with me, it's what they wanted to see. so, this impulse to protect the appearance of effectiveness while remaining ineffective can

take on cartoonish dimensions. one time before a district puba visited our school, an assistant principal came to me and she said, why don't you have math manipulatives out on the students' desks. for those of you who have not been in the classroom, that's pattern blocks and interlocking cubes that you use for math. my answer was that i'm teaching ela right now. she told me it didn't matter. math manipulatives have to be within students' reach at all time. at all times? even when i'm not teaching math? yes, was the answer. for what possible reason? because it's what they want to see. so if they want to see lower suspension rates, i promise you, they will get them. what they will not see is improved school climate, better school outcomes, student outcomes, classrooms where students feel safe, respected, able to learn and in a few years, we will be back in this

room, i promise you, talking about the crisis in school safety. so, i'm skeptical about the urgency around student suspensions and the concerns, however well intended about disparate impact, it's because i've seen this movie before, as max has documented, it's likely to have consequences. it's already having consequences that are not intended but are quite foreseeable and as ever, they will damage the outcomes of students who can afford it the least, the students that i teach. look, there are very good reasons to be concerned about exclusionary discipline but there are equally good reasons to be concerned about the concern, as it were, and the signal that it sends to teachers and students. i've been on panels like this before where we wring our hands about civic education, max and i were just on one last week, and how to get students to be more civically engaged and i say this all the time. schools are not just places where kids become civically engaged. it's where they go to experience the civic engagement of others,

so i worry about what it says to kids who are engaged, who are motivated, who are bought into the promise of education, but we give them schools where they feel unsafe, where they are bullied or god forbid harmed. and there's no meaningful consequence when that's the civic engage. we inflict upon them, as it were. we're saying something to them about their value, the value that haof their coming to school, following the rules, et cetera. and that brings me to my final point which is that all this runs the risk of schools impose be a value system on kids and families that families might not support. i'm uncomfortable, not just as a teacher but as a parent, with the idea that there is a right way to discipline any more than there's a right way to parent your children, and that any variation from said right way needs to justify itself. if local control means anything, it should mean that responsiveness to community norms about who our children or how our children conduct themselves in schools, what they

stand for, what schools stand for, and what they will not stand for. that is simply not something that can be managed from washington, d.c. thank you. >> good afternoon. i guess i'm going to kind of bring it to the personal point. i'm going to talk about parents. i run a program in arkansas, in little rock, that serves children in the evening snack program and in the midst of running this program for the last couple years, i've grown to know the kids. a little girl came into my office a few months ago at 3:00 and i said, why are you not in school? you know, what are you home early for? because she was clearly -- had not gone to school that day. and she said, i'm not going to school today or tomorrow. and i said, why? and she said, because i had a

fight at school and they didn't do anything. you know, i know that if i go back to school today or tomorrow, the girl's going to want to fight me again. she might be over it by next week, but today and tomorrow, she's going to fight me again so i'm not going to school. you know, then she sat down and explained to me that kids at her school didn't feel safe because the kids that were creating a lot of the discipline problems at school were just getting a slap on the hand and they weren't dealing with what the -- they had no consequences to their actions. this little girl was probably -- a little tiny thing, about 90 pounds, little bitty thing and she has been continually bullied all yearlong. my advice has always been, well, talk to your counselor, talk to your parent, talk to your teacher, but she made it really, really clear to me that day that that's not doing any good. that because her school -- and i

just found this out recently -- does not want to suspend students, they're trying to keep the suspension rate down, see, i'm hearing all this from the panel up here, and i'm learning that these things are, in fact, happening in the real world. and these children are going to school and they're feeling unsafe. then, there's the other little girl in this group -- the one thing i like about this group of about 50 or 60 kids is they're all types, some like that little girl, and there are others that are probably creating some of the problems. one little girl fights all the time, and i said, why are you fighting all the time? and she said, because i can. you know, people bother me so i hit them. with that kind of attitude. another case, she knows she's not going to get suspended. she knows they're going to fuss at her and probably, you know, send her to an in-house class or something. but she's not going to be --

there's no threat -- she doesn't feel any threat so she can just go around smacking people all day long. they tried that at the church, but there are consequences to them hitting people at the church. and we made that very clear. and so we brought parents in. and one of the parents -- the parents of the first little girl i was discussing, her mother is terrified to send her child to school. she agreed with her staying home from school and not going in for a couple of days and hoping that this little girl next week will be over it. i think maybe not, but i think she's going to be continually terrorized for the rest of the school year. and those are the kinds of things that we're seeing in our schools in arkansas. probably -- we probably have low suspension rates, i would imagine so. we have a troubled school system. but with this group of children

that i'm serving in this community, i'm just seeing some terrible things, you know, not going to school, not feeling -- they brought in report cards last week. i never saw so many fs in my entire life and i'm like, why are you getting fs? nobody cares about us. nobody pays attention to us. so it's not just discipline. it's what's happening, especially with low income african-american and hispanic kids which the schools that my church serves are a part of. those kids are not getting served. they're not getting academically served. they're not getting protected. you know, they're not getting the kinds of things -- we feed them. every day. and so they're not getting the kinds of things they need. when we were growing up, school safety -- going to school, you knew you were going to be safe. you knew that the teachers were going to take care of you. administrators were going to take care of you and you knew that was something that was going to happen. when my children were in school,

who are adults now, the older kids, i never worried about. i knew they were safe in the school. now later on, i saw something different, but with my younger kids, but now it has gotten so terrible that kids are not going to school. so, what about the truancy rate? we're not suspending, so kids are not going to school, so now they're truant. so, we're having a decrease in the number of kids going to school because of policies such as this that create these environments where teachers are afraid to do anything. my sister just retired, and she retired for many of these reasons. you can't touch the kids. she'd see kids running up and down the street, cussing each other out and nobody did anything and then she's an old schoolteacher. it drove her crazy. and she would come home every day and say, two little girls had a fight in school with knives. they sent them both to class.

you know? with knives. those kind of things are changing the environment of the school and so the kids that need to feel safe, kids who really, really want to learn, are -- we're seeing higher dropout rates. we're seeing kids staying home. i mean, these -- it's providing a place that's a battleground for children instead of a safe haven for children. and we've seen it since the obama administration policy, teachers are scared to do anything, say anything. i mean, my parents were teachers. my friends are teachers. and i hear the exact same thing from them. they're not safe because they can't make decisions on how to discipline the kids. the rules are the rules. you do what the principal says for you to do. and if that child, slap them on the wrist, send them back to class or let the security guard or police officers on campus

talk to them. and that's not making any difference at all. they'll listen and then tomorrow, they'll do it again. so, at our church, we're providing the safe haven, and more and more i'm seeing kids stay home and come over to the church and of course we send them back to school because we don't want them to be truant or we talk to their paints rents o try to give them what the process is, but the process has changed now. used to be you could have a conference with the principal and they could take care of it. now you have a conference with the principal, and the teacher slaps the other student on the hand and sebnds them back to class and the conference is over. and parents don't want to go for that and they tell me, i'm not going to -- they did nothing the last time my child got beat up. they're not going to do anything this time. so i'm not going to take off from my little job and go over and spend half the day at the school for somebody to tell me,

you know, these kids are going to -- they'll work it out. i'm going to send george over here back to school and johnny over here back to class and they'll be fine. because we talked to them. we had this conference and that's going to "international desk" -- stick in their brains and it doesn't. and the saddest part is the kids understand they can't do nothing to them. it was like when my son was young, he did something really, really bad, and i said, so, what did you learn? and he said, i'm going to call grandma and tell on you. that's kind of how these kids -- they call grandma and tell it on them but nobody does anything to them. and he knew that if grandma told me not to do nothing, i wouldn't, and that's what they're feeling in school. so these little guys are coming over to the church and talking to me and saying, i can do anything i want to, basically. and then i say no, you can't. and they continue to do that, so i'm assuming it's happening in

most of the schools in little rock, at least, because most of the schools in little rock are predominantly black and hispanic. and i'm seeing too much and hearing too much. we have a terrible crime rate. max talked about the crime rate. these kids -- i was telling somebody today, they put a report out on african-american boys who had been killed since january. 40 african-american boys, all under 24, have been killed in little rock, all dropouts. so, what's happening that's causing this to happen in little rock? i can certainly speak for my city because i came from d.c. where i thought it was pretty rough here, and then i go to my hometown. i spent 30 years in d.c. and i thought, this is bad, let me go home. and then i get home and it's worse. it's absolutely worse.

and it terrifies me. we have some incredible legislators that are trying to make a difference but what i'm seeing is kids just running the show. and teachers don't feel safe enough to say anything. they don't feel like they can, according to the policy, say anything, and so they're just letting things kind of go the way they go. so that is kind of the on the ground perspective. that's what i see. and i think this policy has just made it awful for the classroom teachers and for principals. i'm a big supporter of classroom teachers and principals and as you know, i'm a school choice advocate but i think teachers are amazing, and all of them living in fear and not being able to discipline their own classes is just horrible. it just makes a statement that we're not headed in the direction we think we are with education. if we don't figure out a way to

solve this kind of problem, discipline is just going to get worse in the schools, and then we'll see, in a few years, we will be back talking about more safety and more crime in schools. >> great. well, thanks to each of you for your remarks. we've got a couple of minutes to take a couple of questions. if the you've got a question, just raise your hand and somebody will come around with a mike. yes, sir? do you have a mike? they're recording. hold on. >> thanks. robert's point about the conflicting tradeoffs between both exclusionary and the over concern about exclusionary discipline really spoke to me, and i guess i wonder what the panel thinks about the fact that

at the federal level, we are sort of promoting both of those sort of absurds of either end at the same time, both with this guidance and also with the fact that we continually subsidize the hiring of school resource officers. we have both at the federal and state level these zero tolerance laws in place that remove the discretion principals at the school level to build these school cultures by having more discretion about what to do about infractions and everything, and so i guess -- i suppose i'm curious what the panel thinks about what we should do federally to maybe try and not be taking any stance on discipline at all. >> thank you. >> how about federally not taking any stance on discipline at all. >> i think -- i mean, a lot of this guidance stemmed from a discomfort at the excesses of zero tolerance and i'm sympathetic to those, because

what zero tolerance said to teachers is, don't use your judgment. if a student does this, you have to do that. and then the fix to that was to tell teachers, don't use your judgment, if a student does this, you can't do that. it's two sides of the same coin. it is fundamentally about distrusting teachers to exercise their judgment, so if we don't want school resource officers, if we don't want the cops to have to handle this in school, and i don't, we have to let the teache teachers make the decisions within the classroom that they know how to make. >> can i make a plug here? i mean, i have never taught at the elementary, middle school, or high school level. i teach law students and law students are pretty well behaved, but -- most of the time. but i miss staying after school as a nice punishment that is much more effective than telling a student who is disruptive that they get to go home because

they've been suspended. and arrest is often utterly over the top for what we're talking about. sometimes it's not. but nevertheless, we have overused arresting in the past. arresting children -- elementary school children accused of sexual harassment when they're little kids and can't even spell sexual harassment. but back in the 1970s, there was litigation that ended up making it very difficult for schools to have students stay after school, which is actually unpleasant and therefore makes students who might be disruptive otherwise don't want to do it and they have an incentive, therefore, not to be disruptive. and maybe that was a wrong turn back in the 1970s that has made some of these other wrong turns possible. >> yes, sir. >> tom sport with heritage. i'm just curious, as a newcomer to this area, has there been any discussion by the

administration, they've been in office now for 14 months, why hasn't there been discussion about rescinding this dear colleague memo. thank you. >> max? >> i think they're scared. i think that narrative on this can be very clear and overwhelming. either you are for this guidance or you somehow support systematic racism or you are somehow for the school to prison pipeline. if any of you watched the interview last night with secretary devos, she was asked a couple questions with frames that i would have challenged the premise of, and she could not answer them adequately because it is -- don't you think that this is institutional racism. and when i look at this, i kind of see institutional racism, but a different kind. like i see dramatic disparities in suspensions that are

profoundly troubling that secretary of education arnie duncan blamed teachers for. i don't think teachers are responsible for these disparities. i think they are baked into the american civilization due to the awful sin of slavery and generations of policies that are mall intended or well intended. and when i see the department of education telling school districts across the country, you have to hold african-american students to lower standards, i see institutional racism there. but it's a hard case to articulate, and i think they've been intimidated the same way teachers have been. >> great. any other thoughts from the panel on that? we've got time for one more. yes, sir. >> thanks. thank you so much for your presentations. you highlighted some of the largest urban districts and i was wondering if you think we have a handle on what's happening in the other 16,000 rural suburban, small town communities in terms of school

discipline, first of all. and then second of all, there are a lot of states and at the community level, long before the 2014 federal guidance limited exclusionary discipline in places like california and colorado and i guess my question is, do you feel more comfortable with local communities making those decisions outside of federal action. >> max, you can probably speak to the districts but yeah, sure, of course. i mean, you have to be consistent on this. if i don't think it's okay for -- either you favor local control or not. i think school boards, teachers, administrators, they're there. they know the communities they're dealing with. they are the ones who -- the parent is not an abstraction. it's somebody they see every morning at dropoff, et cetera, so yeah, why wouldn't -- i can't think of a good reason why we would not almost reflexively defer, if that's what those communities want, that's what those communities should have. as a teacher, i was accused of

being authoritarian and it was not a compliment. so on the one hand, that's my bias. on the other hand, one of the most edifying school visits i've made recently was to the ascend charter in brooklyn. they are as opposite that as possible. they have willingly, of their own accord, gone full bore restorative justice but critically, they politicked for it. in other words, they sold this to the staff and families. now this is what they do and it works beautifully. i could even see myself teaching there, because there's a cohesive school culture that everybody's on board with and supports. that should be the goal. i would not want that in -- we're seeing this in new york city where, o oh, this works so well there, so we're going to put it there. no training, no buy-in, et cetera, then it all turns to garbage. so yeah, it's really all about, at the end of the day, buy-in. if the staff and family support it, it's going to work. if they don't, it's not.

>> another aspect of this is simply that a locality, when it makes a mistake, it's a lot easier to correct at the local level than it is when the federal government is saying you must do this, when teachers start complaining to the principal, when parents start complaining, they start thinking, well, maybe we made a mistake and they can reverse it. instead, when you're dealing with a situation like this, where the pressure's coming from the federal government, when a parent complains, when a teacher complains, they're told, there's nothing we can do about this. >> and i know that in arkansas, there are 140 little school districts, and i know a lot of them handle their own problems. they don't have the same problems that little rock has, which is one of the largest cities -- only a couple real large urban centers in arkansas. but i see a difference when they come up and we have workshops and we talk about kids and school discipline. they talk about, we handle everything ourselves without kind of secretly saying we're not going by anybody's policy by

our own and they have less trouble in their schools with their students than anywhere around the state. many of them. so, i think it always should be handled -- discipline, policy should always be handled at the local level. we know our kids. those of us in different cities in education. we know our kids. we know what needs to be done. i look -- this community i'm in, i work in, is the only public housing project left in little rock, so i know that there's some issues that should be handled in the schools with the teachers and the parents that may not be in other areas. >> my level of discomfort with discipline reform increases the farther it gets from the classroom. because there's a disconnect between the teacher and the principal, there's a disconnect between the principal and the superintendent. there's a disconnect between the superintendent and the school board. there's a disconnect between the school board and the state and a disconnect between the states and the feds so i think the more

that we push this down to between the teachers and the principals using their judgment, the better the decisions will be. i hear a lot about how we need to protect students and i'm all about protecting students but the implication is that the feds ought to protect them from their teachers. and i don't quite agree with the premise of that. as to where else this has happened and what we know, i think you would be shocked at how few places did this before the guidance without direct federal coercion by an investigation. and outside of the scope of districts that have done this under investigation, given that we barely have data for the largest of america's school districts i unfortunately have nothing but anecdote to offer for smaller districts that we don't always know if and what they're doing. >> well, thank you all, again, for coming, and please join me in thanking our panelists.

some of the issues we're covering today on the c-span networks include a discussion on innovation in the automotive industry and wireless technology needed to advance it. it's live from the new america foundation at 12:10 p.m. eastern here on c-span3. later a new report on the environmental and societal impacts of the trump administration's proposed cuts to climate and environment research. that's live at 2:00 p.m. eastern also on c-span3. and a look at the potential national security implications if the u.s. withdraws from the north american free trade agreement, nafta. our live coverage from the heritage foundation starting at 1:30 eastern. that will be on c-span2. we'll also cover a discussion on deterring russian cyber activities and what tools the u.s. government has to impose consequences and combat russian encroachment. that's also live at 1:30 eastern over on c-span.