President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order Wednesday barring schools from applying diversity, equity, and inclusion when administering discipline, Breitbart reported. The White House said this will make schools safer as outcomes will be based on student behavior.
The White House touted the changes in a preview of the order. "The Order requires new guidance to local and state educational agencies regarding school discipline, emphasizing compliance with Title VI protections against racial discrimination and preferencing," it said.
"It calls for appropriate action against educational agencies that fail to comply with Title VI by continuing to use racially preferential discipline practices," the document said. The order also demands further study to ensure "federal funds do not support racially preferential policies, including through nonprofit organizations, and proposing model discipline policies rooted in American values."
This order reverses former President Barack Obama's guidance on school discipline. The 2014 policy required schools to "equalize disciplinary rates by race" rather than focusing on the behavior of individual students.
According to the Federalist Society, Obama penned a "Dear Colleague" letter that used the threat of the federal government to urge schools to consider the "disparate impact" discipline has on racial minorities. It claimed that all disciplinary action should be color blind.
However, it then went on to recommend exactly the opposite in application. Schools were urged to examine the "disproportionate and unjustified effect on students of a particular race" before meting out any punishments.
Instead of behavior-based discipline, schools were forced to consider the racial makeup of the students getting caught. It claimed that "even if that policy is applied to students without regard to their race (i.e, there is no intentional discrimination), the policy might still violate federal law if it has a 'disparate impact,' i.e., a disproportionate and unjustified effect on students of a particular race."
Although it was never proven, some believed that this philosophy led to Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz falling through the cracks, Fox News reported in 2018. After committing vandalism as a middle school student, Cruz was never criminally charged and may have been put into a diversionary program called PROMISE.
However, the school district was cagey about his involvement in it after the shooting. "I was repeatedly told that the Parkland shooter was never in the Promise Program I was asking questions about. Now it turns out that in fact he was," then-Florida GOP Sen. Marco Rubio said.
Trump's Executive Order, signed on Wednesday, was a step toward righting the wrong that Obama began, and then-President Joe Biden continued. Trump's executive assistant, Will Scharf, said the policy hindered proper discipline in schools.
"Basically, they focused on [Critical Race Theory] and diversity ideology, instead of actually just enforcing the rules in classrooms to ensure a safe learning environment," Scharf said. Eliminating the "disparate impact theory" is in line with Trump's effort ban all DEI.
"This is a theory that underlies a lot of the modern DEI and CRT-driven diversity culture. The basic idea is instructing your department and agencies to no longer rely on disparate impact theory as they're regulating, as they're issuing guidance, as they're making rules," Scharf went on.
"We want to focus on results, we want to focus on actual fairness, we want to focus on merit, not things like disparate impact theory and the whole sort-of diversity, equity and inclusion cult," Scharf said. This order will go a long way to restoring sanity with a single pen stroke.
The left believes that any outcomes unfavorable to racial minorities must be because of racism, and then they enact racist policies ostensibly to counter the effects. Thankfully, Trump is eliminating this philosophy from every corner of American life.
