at the student rally at the capitol. at a directive fund school safety under president obama should be removed. hosted by the heritage foundation, this is about one hour. >> thank you to everyone for being here today to discuss this important issue. in 2014, the obama department of education issued a colleague letter notifying schools that differences in ascension rates would because for a federal investigation. overhaul their discipline policies, that throne alone catalyzed many schools across the country. guidance, the the

rates declined dramatically. evidence suggests they are linked to school safety. news stories from across the country suggest schools have actually become less orderly and less safe leading some expert to ask what -- one of the policies may have left them more phone wrote both to violence. going to bee are serious about the safety of students we must look at the consequences of failing to punish wrongdoing by troubled students. to discuss this issue we have a panel of practitioners. gail,we will hear from she is a professor of law where she specialized in civil rights. the illinoisr supreme court.

academia, decision chicago and washington, d.c.. she also was on the judiciary and is an associate and professor of law at george mason school of law. she joined the faculty in 1989. she is currently a member of the united states commission of civil rights and sits on the board of directors of the national association of scholars and the california association of scholars. she is the author of a new paper along with her co-author who is in the audience today, obama era initiatives, racial disparities and school discipline, wrong for students, teachers, and wrong for the world. the next is max eden. he was coeditor with frederick hess of the every student succeeds act. he has appeared on the scholarly and popular areas.

following his remarks, we will hear from robert, who is a senior fellow and vice president of external affairs at the thomas b. fordham institute. he is also a former senior adviser to democracy public charter schools and charters based in harlem, new york. he writes and speaks extensively on education and education reform issues. after 20 years in journalism, including senior citizens at time and business week, he became a fifth-grade teacher at a struggling south bronx school. he served as vice president for the knowledge foundation. finally, virginia, who founded d.c. for choice. it is a health organization for

parents and washington, d.c., and that founding led to the successful establishment of the d.c. opportunity scholarship program, school choice option in the nation's capital. she is also a founding member of the black alliance and served on the d.c. advisory committee for the civil rights commission. she is also a member of the breakthrough network in d.c. as well p she currently serves on the board of the freeman foundation and the arkansas connections academy. she is executive director of the arkansas information network working to make choices available to arkansas parents. she is also a visiting fellow at the heritage foundation. please join me in welcoming our panelists. [applause]

>> thank you lindsay and the heritage foundation. i have only 10 minutes. let me concentrate on two points here. i suspect a lot of people agree with me that the policy and practice of school discipline should not be a federal issue. the federal role under title vi of the civil rights act of 1964 should be confined to investigating and acting on allegations of race discrimination. otherwise, discipline is a matter that is best handled at the local level, where teachers know the students, no the facts on the ground better than bureaucrats do. when the edicts sound reasonable, at the time they reached the foot soldiers on the ground, they get garbled.

if the federal government had said, don't discipline minority students unless it is justified, it would have sounded reasonable. that is naturally understood by school districts as, don't discipline a minority student unless you are confident you can persuade some future federal investigator whose judgment you have no reason to trust that it was justified. in turn, that is presented to principles. don't discipline a minority student unless you and your teachers jump to the following time-consuming seadrill limited designed to document the satisfaction of some future federal investigator whose judgment none of us have any reason to trust that it was justified. finally, teachers here 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 iraq was sea, ladies and gentlemen. those who complain that schools

overreact, this is the nature of it, ladies and gentlemen. it essentially told schools that if your teachers and principals are disciplining her personally more african-american students than white or asian students, we are coming after you with massive investigations and threats to cut off your funding. under this approach, it is not actually race discrimination that gets schools in trouble, it is having bad numbers. the law for bit actual discrimination. it does not for bit bad numbers. the policy, nobody disputes that african-american students are disciplined at higher rates than white students or asian students nationally. what if the reason for that is that african-american students

misbehave more often? what if the cost of failure to disciplined the students falls on their fellow african-american students who are trying to learn a made 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 numbers. it is virtually undisputed that students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to miss behave instance from middle-class backgrounds. not surprisingly, therefore, when empirical studies are undertaken, they find when socioeconomics are taken out, the black-white difference shrinks pneumatically. it does not disappear altogether. african-american people who are disadvantaged is still somewhat more likely to be disciplined. that may be because the most widely used measure of

disadvantage is inadequate eligibility for the free or reduced price lunch program. remember the title of two students from you might well qualify for a free lunch. in any event, the remaining racial difference does not prove discrimination. the most likely immediate expiration for the racial gap in discipline is that teachers are being honest. for whatever reason, african americans misbehave in class more than whites and whites misbehave more than asians and boys misbehave more than girls. by far, the best study in this area is called open prior problem behavior accounts for the racial gap in school suspensions."

it found prior problem behavior, not race, is the best predictor of who will get suspended from school. in other words, the teachers are being upfront and identifying students who are misbehaving. especially for the worst offenders, it tends to be the same kids over and over again, regardless of race. once hired behavior is taken into account, race drops out as a predictor entirely. meanwhile, however, the obama administration's policies have had severely negative effects. first, it has caused schools to back away from discipline generally, with the result of more chaotic classrooms. second, it has led to real discrimination, where white and asian students on the one hand and african-american students on the other operate under a

different discipline rules, all in order to make the numbers look good. all in all, i would say we have a mess on our hands. i would certainly urge the department of education to withdraw the dear colleague letter establishing that policy. we need to put teachers and establishments back in charge. we have a much better shot at getting it better than the federal government does. for point two, for telling them they can have their funding cut, the obama administration was misstating the law. for the nonlawyers among you, disparate impact liability, the government means that it does not matter whether the teachers are actually treating students differently based on race. solely because african americans are misbehaving more often, the school is still in trouble

unless it can prove its discipline method is necessary. they have to prove, for example, that before suspending a student for punching another student out, they are just giving him a good talking to or taken away his library privileges. that is just not the law. title vi, the statute that supposedly is being enforced outlaws actual based discrimination, not disparate impact. the supreme court has repeatedly said, 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 vi

regulations that go beyond title vi by creating liability for disparate impact. i will say that when clarence thomas was for civil rights, he did not interpret them that way. if that were at the regulations, it would create giant problems since a lot of what schools do has a disparate impact on some racial group. for example, do we need to place the basketball hoop so high up? it makes it disproportionally harder for asian americans, who on average are shorter to make the team. let me say this instead, because this is a slamdunk legal argument. if the regulations mean the obama administration said what

they mean, then we are about the scope and hence null and void. the agency would not have the power to vastly expand statutes i declare you can't marry your second or third cousin either or anybody who grew up on the same street as you. not only would that go beyond the way the sketches allow, there is no argument that the regulation is aimed at ensuring the underlying statute enforcement. a case would be if you wanted to marry your cousin. the kinds of things that would be permissible in that context would be a requirement that one present one's birth certificate when they get married. regulations that are passed pursuant to a statute can sometimes go beyond what the

statute requires, that they have to be aimed at enforcing the statute. they can be a sneaky way to expand it. the proper analogy is that a case that concern how far congress can go in enforcing the 14th amendment's equal protection clause. there he held that title vi is basically a clone of the equal protection clause, and the case is a near-perfect fit. the course held that congress can pass a statute that goes somewhat beyond the equal protection clause. there has to be an honest enforcement, not just an expansion. any congressional enactment needs to be congruent and proportional to genuine genuine difficulty enforcing actual cause. there is no way, assuming they really are authorizing all-purpose disparate and impact liability, would be upheld as congruent and proportional to

title vi violations. it is a massive overreach. even if somewhere, somehow, there are recipients of our discriminating, fixing it by a massive response like a disparate and all-purpose impact regulation would be overkill. i think i better stop there. bear in mind that i have just essentially summarized a very, very long article for you. if you really want to know what my co-author and i have to say, you are going to need to read the whole article. thank you, ladies and gentlemen. [applause]

>> could you pull up the powerpoint? max: i have spent the last year researching the scope and effect of the dear letter on discipline. i want to share what i have learned. first, this was not guidance. these were orders. there was a three-part disparate impact test. one, is there to spare to? two, is it necessary for eight legitimate goal? three, is there an effective alternative? maybe not unreasonable, not what they actually did. suspensions don't work, and there are effective alternatives available. if we know the answer to the second and third question, then there is only one actual question, is there a disparity? if there is some of you might face a federal investigation.

if it is about the numbers, what you better do is get the numbers down. the most effective way to get the numbers down is by holding students to lower standards. because if you don't, you will face an investigation. these investigations used to be noble and diligent efforts to find discriminatory treatments. after the guidance, they became syntax for prosecutions intended to thwart school districts to adopt lower standards. take oklahoma city, for example. the allegations were false. those students were suspended same way for the same thing. investigators found the white student was actually hispanic. that didn't really matter. after two years, they did not get around to asking teachers within the discipline policies were justified. the second part of the test rarely happens. they forced a policy change,

even as teachers are crying out about the chaos it was causing. for now, we could take rochester, minnesota. there were no allegations of discriminatory treatments. no particular policies were scrutinized. after five years, the district emailed them, the effect of this matter has dragged on for five years requirement expenditure of enormous resources on the part of the district without any evidence of wrongdoing is unconscionable. the investigation closed in september 2015. three weeks later, a new one opened. rochester, minnesota has been under investigation for the past eight years. i will you know when they close it. two months ago, walking was forced to adopt lower standards for student behavior. the superintendent said she had no choice in the matter. the school board did not even know that there was an investigation that had been

going on for 3.5 years. total secret we are not talking about the public and the teachers not known, we are 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 am happy to tell anybody whether or not your district has been under investigation. new york has been 47, seattle for seven years, fresno for four years, millions and millions of people are in districts where teachers have been forced by the federal government to hold them to lower behavioral standards. what are the results of this? we know terrifyingly little. after schools were forced to lower suspension, lazy reporters take the sign that schools are getting safer. it could be true. it could be schools are getting less safe. it could be that the numbers are just fake.

in washington, d.c., they saw a 40% drop in suspensions. it turns out, principles cap suspending, they just stopped telling district about it. it was fake news. state data can become pretty dubious. in miami, after they banned suspensions, they also stopped reporting thousands of flights to the state of florida. crime data also can become dubious. sheriff israel can boast that arrests are down in broward county. that tends to happen when you stop arresting. that does not mean that schools are safer. there are many academic studies, student and teacher surveys. i have repeatedly asked advocates of these policies to direct me towards any evidence that isn't bad because there is so little. i will run you through everything i have found in the last year. chicago -- they lowered the length of suspension and declassified some things from suspensions to in school suspensions.

better attendance, no economic effects. more crime and disorder according to teachers and worse relationships according to students. turning back. philadelphia, a ban on suspensions for willful defiance and nonviolent behavior and severe disrespect cannot be punish for them. not every school complied, but across the board, putting serious drop in academic achievement. about 5% with some fluctuation-year-old, but troubling. truancy -- you cannot do the same controls, but has been dropping your after year, and then started writing right after by 16% to about 40% total. why? it may be kids were staying home from school because there were more scared. maybe there were more scared because they were more serious

incidents. this gets to the truly first part of this house see. african american students ended up spending more time out of school on suspension after the suspension band. why? because of the rise in serious incidents. maybe when schools are not allowed to enforce a sick norms, serious problems increase. in los angeles, academic growth tanked. other california schools that didn't deal with the ban, ellis schools was 1/5 of year of learning. schools that suspended fewer than 10 times, took a hit. schools that had more than 10 suspensions and defiance lost one third worth of year of learning. we have some school level service where students are asked the same question from one year to the next, and you can see how the answers change and are they

feeling more or fewer feeling safe? in new york city, the bar graphs represent all schools in america city and changes in student answers to various questions on drugs, fights, respect, gangs. the gray zone are schools that the answers did not really change. the orange zones are schools were 5% to 50% fewer students gave answers. the red is where 15% fewer students gave an answer. on the left, and that was deblasio's and bloomberg's on the left. you told to does your not allowed to suspend the first time a student is a low-level offense. things are stable. on the right we have deposit is reform which said to teachers, after the third time, you need to provide extensive documentation to your principal who will take the 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 school sulfites, disrespect, drugs, gang activity. the rules changed and the students knew it. students serving the high shares of minority students were hit hardest. 60% saw respect deteriorate. it is not just an urban problem. we see the same thing. in a two-year. before the reform, things were stable. markets were respecting the rules. after the reform, it is all worse. fewer kids at 60% 80% of schools were respecting the roles, each other, respecting teachers, feeling safe. we don't have these questions from before the reform could will have them from 2015 to 2017. we can see that fewer kids are reporting an ability to deal

with frustration and understand their emotions, even to tell right from wrong. 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. seattle, 2015 two twice 17 is the same thing. very bad. kids say teachers aren't protecting them from bullies. kids say teachers are supporting bullies. they don't feel safe. when i talked to advocates, they point to seattle as the place of getting this right. that is it for student surveys. mostly, they don't exist. sometimes they exist and won't share data with me. as soon as things go south, they change questions or the answers. sometimes, when the reform start, they stop publishing or asking. that is the case in charlotte,

new haven, portland, broward county. we do have surveys that are commissioned by teacher's unions. teacher's unions are against traditional discipline. the nea declared it to be a product of institutional racism, which is kind of a funny thing to say given they are the institution. [laughter] at the local level, unions are less interested ideology but more interested in protecting teacher. they cannot do that when the feds are in town. the least they can ask teachers what is going on. teachers are not feeling safe. these are not good answers could we do not want our teachers not feeling safe. teachers don't think the new approach works great 13% in charleston, 13% in denver. 13% in madison.

these are incredibly awful approval ratings. you do not want your school to be forced to do something that 10% of teachers think works. remember, the department of education today under secretary devos thinks the teachers are wrong. they think suspensions don't work, they think restorative justice does. and theustice activist teachers are not only wrong for racist. racism, institutional and explaining why teachers leave traditional quote works, and what that don't believe the new approach keeps kid safe. they have silence teachers, teachers are afraid, afraid of being called a racist, if they speak out for the safety of their students. only two districts have given teachers the opportunity to

speak anonymously about what is going on. i will read you their word and give them a voice. i will leave you with a question. thehoma city, we were told files would not require suspension unless it was flawed. we had more fights in the first nine weeks than we had in the last five years. i would like to see a consequence of bad behavior of some kind, such as when a male student took his penis out and showed it to a female student and admitted he did so and nothing was done. the school environment is unsafe. i do not feel safe. teachers are afraid. students have little to no consequences for behavior that is outright violence. these comments were public during the investigation. ocr admitted they do not talk to teachers. did they not notice or did they not care? buffalo. never seen anything like it, the behavior is unreal. students are threatening teachers with violent and in -- with violence and in many

cases physically attacking teachers. no consequences for anything and we are not allowed to write up students electronically. i was told by an admin that he rips up writeups. 81% of teachers in buffalo say their administrators underreport behavioral problems. it is the only district to my knowledge that put this question to teachers. my question to you is why should , we think buffalo is unique? finally, fresno, i had a student punch another in the face. the perpetrator was sent back to class without a suspension. when a special education student is violent, the district makes excuses for the behavior. a student said he would shoot and kill me. three students heard the threat as shoot and kill. the administration believed the perpetrator, who claimed he was going to prank me with a slingshot.

administration said that because he did not specifically use the gun, it -- the word, was not as serious a threat as i thought. final question, 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 , encourages administrators to systematically suppress records of disturbing behavior, a policy that encourages adults charged with the care of our nation's children to willfully ignore clear threats to shoot and kill. [applause] >> good afternoon. i am not a researcher, but here's a project that i would

love to see a researcher undertake with a small army of graduate students. going to various schools with a stopwatch or chess clock and recording the amount of time students spend on task. i would bet you real money that a significant portion of the achievement gap is a time on task gap. and much of that gap is caused by disruptive classroom behavior. there is some suggestive empirical evidence. about 10 years ago, the american federation of teachers found 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 is nearly four out of 10 teachers losing two to three hours per week. in urban schools, 21% said they lost four more hours per week. that is a higher figure. in urban secondary schools, it

was 24%. about one in four. every student i have ever taught has been a low income students of color in an urban setting. i taught fifth grade for several years in a south bronx elementary school that was the lowest performing school in new york city's lowest performing school district. the data i just alluded to aligns perfectly with my own experience. disruption was easily the biggest challenge we faced and without question the biggest impediment to student learning. in my post classroom life, most of my interests are in curriculum and instruction. i think it gets too little attention from reformers at large. i would argue getting the school's climate and culture right matters more than getting its curriculum right. you could have nobel prize winners delivering best in class curriculum, but my gut tells me it will not make much difference if students are hemorrhaging

their learning time to disruptive behavior, feeling physically unsafe in school because they are worried about getting bullied in class or jumped after school. a bit of a war story. my first year in the classroom coincided with joel klein's first year as new york city school chair. if you were the principal of a school like mine, as i understood it, there were two ways a principal could sign. -- could shine. the first would be to raise test scores, the second was to have a whichspension rate, ostensibly indicated you are running a tight ship. our scores were abysmal. the year i started, 16% of students were reading and above -- reading at or above grade level. to reduce the suspension rate. you just don't suspend kids. i was a new teacher at that time . everything i knew was filtered to me through the

administration. reportedly, he said in 2002, i don't care about suspensions. i just want higher test scores. we started suspending kids. climbedimproved, scores modestly. new principal the evaluation system was put in place that once again validated lope attention -- low suspension rates. saying wer started need to tighten up on discipline. i remember thinking we just did that. that's why things are improving. you can predict what happened. -- the biggest contribution , can make as a nonlawyer nongovernmental person, is to remind people how well intended policy initiatives land in the classroom, like a game of telephone. , it wastarted teaching

the height of bulletin board mania. an idea had taken root that emerging era of standards-based education, bulletin boards were exemplary to standard student work. the best window into the quality of instruction in a classroom. that was what they wanted to see, and i learned to repeat that phrase. what they wanted to see. the quality of instruction, as best as i could tell, did not change much, but did the quality of bulletin boards skyrocket. teachers started planning units specifically to produce bulletin board work because it is what they wanted to see. this impulse to keep the appearance of effectiveness can take on cartoonish dimensions. one time, an assistant principal

came to me -- why don't you have -- on the students' desks? these pattern blocks, international -- interlocking cubes and whatnot. my answer was that i'm teaching ela. she told me it didn't matter. -- math items must be near students at all times. because it is what they want to see. if they want to see lower suspension rates, they will get them. but they will not see improved ,chool climate, better outcomes classrooms where students feel safe, respected, and able to learn. in a few years, we will be back in this room talking about the crisis of school safety.

about the urgency of school suspensions and the concerns about impact -- i've seen this movie before. it is likely to have consequences -- it already has consequences that are not intended but are quite foreseeable. the outcomes of students who can afford it the least. there are good reasons to be concerned about exclusionary discipline, but there are equally good reasons to be concerned about the concern and the signals it sends to teachers and students. i have been on panels like this before where we wring our hands about civic education and how to get students to be more cynically engaged. schools are not just places where kids become physically engaged -- it is where they experienced the civic engagement of others. kids who have

bought into the promise of education, but we give them schools where they feel unsafe, bullied, forgotten. civichat is the engagement we inflict upon them, we are saying something to them about their value. the value of them coming to the school and following the rules, etc.. offinal point is that all this runs the risk of schools composing a value system on families that families might not support. i am 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 is a right way to parent. variation from the normal path needs to justify itself. anything,ontrol means it should mean responsiveness about community norms -- what they stand for is what schools

stand for. that cannot be managed from washington, d.c.. [applause] >> good afternoon. i guess i'm going to bring it to the personal point. i'm going to talk about parents. i run a program in little rock, arkansas, that serves children -- in the midst of running this program, i've grown to know the kids. i came into my office a few months ago at 3:00 and said, why are you not in school? what are you home early for? she clearly had not gone to school that day. she said i'm not going to school today or tomorrow. she said, i had a fight at school and they did not do anything. i know that if i go back to

school today or tomorrow, the girl is 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. she sat down and explained to me that kids at her school did not feel safe because the kids that were creating a lot of discipline problems were just getting a slap on the hand. as they were dealing with -- they had no consequences to their actions. this girl was a tiny thing, about 90 pounds. she has been continually bullied all year long. --advice has always been talk to your counselor, your parent, your teacher. she made it really, really clear to me that that is not doing any good. that because her school -- and i found this out recently -- does ,ot want to suspend students they are trying to keep the suspension rate down.

i'm hearing all of this from the panel here and i'm learning that these things are happening in the real world. these children are going to school and feeling unsafe. then there is another little girl in this group. what i like about this group of 50 or 60 kids, there's all types. there are some like that little girl, and others who are probably creating some of the problems. one little girl fights all the time. i said, why are you fighting all the time? and she said because i can. people bother me, so i hit them. -- she knows she is not going to get suspended. she knows they will fuss at her and probably send her to an in-house class or something. but there is no threat. she does not feel any threat. so she can go around smacking

people all day long. that at the church, but they were consequences to then hitting people at the church. we made that clear. he brought parents in. 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 and hoping this little girl next week will be over it. not, but i think she is going to be continually terrorized for the rest of the school year. those are the kinds of things that we are seeing in our schools in arkansas. we probably have low suspension rates. i would imagine so. we had a troubled school system. with this group of children i'm serving in this community, i'm seeing some terrible things.

not going to school. they brought in report cards last week. i never saw so many f's in my entire life. i said, why are you getting these? they said nobody cares about us. low income african-american and at the schools that my church serves, those kids are not getting served. they are not getting academically served, protected. they are not getting -- we feed them every day. they are not getting the kinds of things we need. up, goingre growing to school, you knew you were going to be safe. you knew teachers would take care of you, administrators would take care of you. you knew that was something that was going to happen. when my children were in school, i never worried.

later on, i thought something different, but with my younger kids. thats gotten so terrible kids are not going to school. what about the truancy rate? we are not suspending for kids not going to school, so now they are truant. we are 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 from any of these reasons. you cannot touch the kids. she would see kids running up and down the street, cussing each other out, and nobody did anything. she was an old schoolteacher and it drove her crazy. two girls had a fight in school with knives. they sent them both to class. knives!

these kinds of things are changing the environment of the school. kids that need to feel safe, kids that really, really want to learn -- we are seeing higher dropout rates, kids staying home. it is a battleground for children instead of a safe haven. we have seen it since the obama administration policy. teachers are scared to do or say anything. myparents were teachers, friends are teachers. i hear the same thing from them. they are not safe because they cannot make decisions on how to discipline the kids. rules are rules. you do what the principal says to do. that child -- slap them on the wrist and send them back to class. or let the security guard or police officer on campus talk to them. if that is not making any difference, tomorrow, they will

do it again. at our church, we are providing the safe haven. more and more kids stay home and come over to the church. and we send them back to school, because we do not want them to be truant. we comfort them or try to give them what the process is. the process has changed. you can have a conference with take carepal and they of you. now, the teacher slaps the other student on the hand and sends them back to class -- parents don't want to go through that. they tell me, i'm not going up there. they did nothing the last time my child got beat up. i'm not going to take off from and spend half the day at school for somebody to tell me -- you know, these kids will work it out. i send george back to school and johnny back to class, and

they'll be fine. we talked to them. we had this conference and that will stick in their brain. and it doesn't. the saddest part is that the kids understand they cannot do anything to them. when my son was young, he did something really bad. i said, what did you learn? he said, i'm going to call grandma and tell on you. that's how it is. they call grandma and tell. but nobody does anything in school. and he knew that if grandma told me not to do anything, i would. that is what they are feeling. these guys are coming to the church and talking to me, saying i can do anything i want, basically. and i say you can't. -- i am continue assuming it is happening in most of the schools in little rock, at least, because most of the schools in little rock are

predominantly black and hispanic. 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 have been killed since january. 40 african-american boys, all under 24, have been killed in little rock. all dropouts. what is happening that is causing this to happen in little rock? i can speak for my city, because i came from d.c., where i thought it was pretty rough here. then i go to my hometown. i spent 30 years in d.c., and thought this was bad. and i get home and it was worse. it is absolutely worse. me.it terrifies we have incredible legislators trying to make a difference, but

what i'm seeing is kids just running the show. teachers do not feel safe enough to say anything. they don't feel like they can, according to policy, say anything. they are just letting things kind of go the way they go. that is kind of the on the ground perspective. that is what i see. i think this policy has made it awful for the classroom teachers -- and principles principals. i think teachers are amazing. all of them living in fear and not being able to discipline their own class is horrible. that we aretatement not heading in the direction we think we are with education. if we don't figure out a way to solve this kind of problem, it is going to get worse in the , in a, and we will see

few years, we will be back talking about more safety and more crime in schools. [applause] >> thank you for your remarks. we have a couple of minutes to take questions. if you have a question, raise your hand and somebody will come around with a microphone. yes sir? >> is it recording? -- robert's point about conflicting trade-offs between exclusionary and overly concerned about exclusionary discipline spoke to me. 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

absurds off -- either end, that we continually -- theze the higher -- hiring ofome school resource officers. we have at the federal and state level the zero-tolerance policies that removed the discretion about infractions. i suppose i'm curious what the panel thinks about what we try ando federally to not take any stance on discipline at all? >> how about federally not taking any stance on discipline at all? >> i think a lot of this stems from a discomfort with the excess of zero tolerance. i'm sympathetic to those. what zero tolerance said to teachers is do not use your judgment.

if the student does this, you have to do that. the solution was to tell teachers not to use your judgment. if a student does this, you cannot do that. it is two sides of the same coin. fundamentally about distrusting teachers to exercise judgment. if we don't want school resource officers, don't want the cops to have to handle this -- and i don't -- we have to let the teachers make the decisions in the classroom. >> can i make a club? i have never taught at the elementary, middle, or high school level. i teach law students and they are well behaved most of the time. i miss staying after school as a nice punishment that is much more effective than telling the student who is disruptive that they get to go home because they've been suspended. and arrests are often utterly over-the-top.

sometimes it is not, but we have overused arresting in the past. arresting elementary school children accused of sexual harassment when they are little kids who can't even spell it. back in the 1970's, there was litigation that made it very difficult for schools to have students stay after school, which is actually unpleasant and makes students who might be disruptive otherwise not want to do it. they have an incentive, therefore, not to be disruptive. maybe that was a wrong turn in the 70's that made some of these other wrong turns possible. >> i'm with heritage. i'm curious as a newcomer to this area, had there been any discussion by the administration? they have been in office for 14 months. why has there not been discussion about resending --

rescinding this dear colleague memo? scared.nk they are i think the narrative on this can be clear and overwhelming. either you are for this guidance or you somehow support systematic racism or are somehow for the school to prison pipeline. if any of you watch the interview last night with secretary devos, she was asked a couple questions with frames i would have challenged the premise of. she could not answer them adequately because it is -- don't you think this is institutional racism? this, i kindok at of see institutional racism, but a different kind. see dramatic disparities and suspensions that are profoundly troubling. -- the secretary of education blamed teachers for

this. i don't think teachers are responsible for these disparities. i think they are baked into american civilization due to the awfulness of slavery and awful policies, well intended or not. -- when i see the department of education telling school districts they have to hold african-american students to lowered standards, i see institutional racism there. thoughts from the panel? we have time for one more. >> thanks. thank you for your presentation. you have highlighted some of the largest urban districts, and i wonder if we have a handle on what is happening in the other 16,000 rural, suburban, small-town communities in terms of school discipline, first of all. second, there are a lot of

states at the community level long before the federal guidance limited exclusionary discipline in places like california and colorado. do you feel more comfortable with local communities making those decisions outside of federal action? max, you can probably speak to the districts. but yes, of course. you have to be consistent. --i don't think it is ok school boards, teachers, administrators. they are there. they know the communities they are dealing with. -- i can't think of a good reason why we would not almost reflexively defer. if that is what those communities want, that is what they should have. as a teacher, i was accused of being authoritarian. it was not a compliment.

on one hand, that is my bias. on the other hand, one of the most edifying -- i made was to the standard chartered network and brooklyn. they have, of their own accord, gone full board restorative justice, but critically, they it to the staff and families. now this is what they do and it works beautifully. i can see myself teaching there because there is a cohesive school culture that everyone is on board with. that should be the goal. not want -- and we are seeing this in new york city -- this works well there and we are going to put it here. no training, no buy-in, and it turns into garbage. in the end of the day, it is about by in. >> another aspect is that when a locality makes a mistake, it is easier to correct at a local

level then when the federal government is saying you must do this. when teachers start complaining to the principal, parents start complaining, they start thinking, maybe we made a mistake. when you are dealing with a situation like this, where the pressure is coming from the federal government, when a parent or teacher complains, they are told there's nothing we can do. >> 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, andof the largest cities urban centers in arkansas. but i see a difference when they come talk about kids and school discipline at workshops. they talk about, we handle everything ourselves without secretly saying we are not going by anybody's policy by -- anybody's policy but our own. they have less trouble in their schools then anywhere else in

the state. i think discipline policy should always be handled at the local level. we know our kids. we know what needs to be done. this community i am in is the only public housing project left in little rock. thatw there is some issues should be handled in the schools with the teachers, and parents who might not be in other areas. >> my level of discomfort with discipline reform increases the farther it gets from the classroom because of the disconnect between the teacher between thel, principal and superintendent, superintendent and school board, school board and state, and state and feds. to more we put this down between teachers and principals using their judgment, the better the decisions will be.

i hear a lot about how we need to protect students. i am all about protecting students, but the implication is that the feds ought to protect them from their teachers. i don't agree with the premise of that. as to where else this has happened and what we know, i think you would be shocked that how few places did this before the guidance without direct federal coercion. outside the scope of districts that have done this under investigation, given we barely ofe data for the largest america's school districts, i unfortunately have nothing but anecdotes to offer for smaller districts that we don't always know if and what they are doing. >> thank you all for coming. please join me in thanking our panelists. [applause] next saturday, students from around the country will be taking part in the march for our

lives rally, calling on lawmakers to take action against gun violence in schools. the march takes place in washington, d.c. on the national mall. live coverage will begin at noon eastern on c-span. education secretary betsy devos addressed school safety and education policy at the national pta legislative conference. of oneeaking, the mother of the victims of the sandy hook elementary school shooting, who cofounded the group, safe and sound schools. this is 45 minutes. [applause] >> you are going to get me emotional before i start. i am