Trump Admin Ends Obama Policies That Forced Schools To Discipline Based On Race

The Federalist 

The Department of Education announced Thursday it is scrapping regulations the Obama administration “weaponized” to discipline students differently based on their race.

Responding to the Department of Justice’s move in December to eliminate “disparate-impact liability” for Title VI of the Civil Rights Act — prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin in federally funded programs — the Education Department is rescinding multiple “disparate-impact” provisions from its implementation of Title VI.

Disparate impact theory posits that a neutrally applied policy or regulation can be technically discriminatory if it affects one group disproportionately compared to another. For example, if one group of people commits more of a certain kind of crime than others, disparate impact theory would suggest that the law prohibiting the crime is discriminatory because it is being enforced against the group committing the crime more frequently than groups that are not.

“While disparate-impact liability has been used for decades, the Obama Administration weaponized it as a tool for the radical left, forcing schools to make race a factor when considering disciplinary actions,” the department stated. “Indeed, under Democrat Administrations, OCR found schools guilty of violating Title VI for even-handedly applying race-neutral policies — with no discriminatory intent — solely because data indicated the school disciplined more minority students.”

The ideology behind disparate impact-driven school discipline — that enforcement should be essentially equitable across demographics, no matter what — necessarily dictates that some students of certain races who should be disciplined will not be, so long as students of other races are not misbehaving to the same degree.

According to the department, “deregulation will ensure equal educational opportunities and meritocracy for all students,” which follows the “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy” executive order signed by President Donald Trump in April 2025.

That executive order argues aggressively against disparate-impact liability, noting that it is both a killer of merit and unconstitutional, and that equity-driven outcomes run afoul of equal treatment under law — a “bedrock principle of the United States” that thwarts “race- or sex-based favoritism.”

“A child is so much more than a number in a data set. The left’s notion of ‘equity’ should never prevent teachers from keeping their classrooms and students safe. With these changes, schools will be empowered to address classroom issues without fearing the federal government will weaponize antidiscrimination laws,” Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey said in a press release. “These regulatory changes will help ensure fair enforcement of Title VI, as intended by Congress. The Trump Administration will always hold schools accountable for discrimination and ensure all students in America receive the equal educational opportunities and equal treatment to which they are entitled by law.”

Before this change, schools would keep disciplinary datasets that track their enforcement along racial lines. In previous administrations, a school’s dataset showing enforcement against one race more than others would result in the threat of a civil rights violation from the federal government.

The result was schools cooking the books to make the data look equitable, including not enforcing rules against minorities and overcorrecting against white students.