School Discipline Is in Crisis. Trump Isn’t Helping

In her 37 years of teaching, Amy Smith has never seen so many students disengaged. In the historically strong public high school where she teaches in Austin, Texas, more of her students are failing since the pandemic—even in her most advanced classes. 

“I’ve never had so many seniors in my AP Literature class who have just stalled out, like they have a 15 [percent] in my class,” Smith said. “They’re just not turning in anything … that, to me, is avoidance behavior.” 

The post-pandemic landscape in schools is grim. Teachers are reporting greater apathy, defiance, and excessive phone use among their students. Nationwide, nearly half of educators surveyed by Education Week deemed their students’ behavior in 2024 “a lot worse” than pre-pandemic levels, a finding experts link to post-COVID-19 learning loss and declines in reading and math performance. 

Teachers say they need help to turn things around in their classrooms—more tools to cope with misbehaving students, more training, and more pay for extra time spent. The number of elementary teachers reporting they need more classroom management training has jumped 14 percent since 2022. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s administration has cut $600 million in grants to fund teacher training. And cuts to student loan forgiveness for teachers and the elimination of grants intended to grow the teacher workforce have left schools unable to compensate for the pandemic-era exodus of veteran teachers. The inexperienced and emergency-certified teachers who filled their places are more likely to over-discipline students through detentions and suspensions, a 2024 study from Massachusetts shows, even though lesser measures are more effective in the long term. This trend does a disservice to students and taxpayers: Large school districts spend an average of $25,000 to replace a teacher who has left the workforce, a high cost to pay for worse results.  

The Trump administration’s disruption of at least $12 billion in previously awarded federal education funds has made things worse. Roughly $1 billion of funding for mental health services in schools has been cut, angering students, parents, and educators who relied on those resources to help de-escalate conflicts at school. “To be able to provide those [mental health] services and then have it ripped away for something that is completely out of our control, it’s horrible,” Superintendent Derek Fialkiewicz in Corbett, Oregon, told NPR last May. “I feel for our students more than anything because they’re not gonna get the services that they need.” Additional cuts to child behavioral research and studies on school crime aren’t helping. 

Historically, school discipline has meant kicking kids out of class when they act out: relying on detentions, suspensions, and expulsions. In more extreme or violent cases, this may be the best option for keeping students and teachers safe. But it is counterproductive for students who commit more vague offenses like “defiance” or “disruption”—both of which account for millions of suspensions every year—and which usually amount to small things like ripping up homework, doing a cartwheel, or cursing. Being pulled from the classroom disrupts students’ learning and wastes valuable resources that could be used for instruction. One study out of UCLA in 2016 found that 10th grade suspensions contributed to 67,000 dropouts nationwide and generated upwards of $35 billion in social costs to taxpayers. 

Research has linked frequent suspensions to worse academic outcomes and higher rates of contact with the criminal justice system, even after controlling for background factors. A 2014 Department of Education analysis found that Black students were disciplined at substantially higher rates than their peers, prompting President Barack Obama’s administration to encourage schools and states to limit the use of suspensions and expulsions. Between 2014 and 2019, at least 36 states passed legislation restricting exclusionary discipline or promoting alternatives. 

Various reform methods have been developed and strengthened in the wake of the Obama-era directive, and emerging evidence suggests they can be effective. These promising approaches are now under threat, with the Trump administration issuing an executive order criticizing what it calls Obama’s “discriminatory equity ideology” approach to reducing racial discrimination in the classroom and calling for a return to “common sense” school discipline policies (read: kicking students out of class, which has been tried, and has failed, for decades). And not for nothing, but the Trump administration’s cuts to research on school crime may threaten further data collection on the effectiveness of reform methods. 

Restorative justice, a reform approach that focuses on conversation-based conflict resolution, has proven effective in well-resourced districts. It is “restorative” because it aims to make the person who was harmed whole, and it is “just” because it ensures accountability from the person who created the harm. In Evanston, Illinois, a partnership with the nonprofit James B. Moran Center for Youth Advocacy has led to a reduction in youth arrests over five years.  

“Teachers are saying that these practices have transformed classrooms, how teachers engage with students, how students engage with each other, [and] how administrators mete out school discipline,” Moran Center Director Patrick Keenan-Devlin told me. 

Another popular reform approach is Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), used by almost 30,000 schools nationwide. It is a rewards-based system that is tailored to each school community. It has been shown through more than two dozen randomized controlled trials to reduce suspensions and office referrals.  

Now, as disciplinary issues rise, Trump’s executive order suggests a return to the old ways. In its efforts to erase Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) across institutions, the administration is writing off reforms like PBIS and restorative justice as examples of “failed equity policies”—despite their evidence-backed usefulness.  

The “back to basics” approach will exacerbate the learning loss plaguing schools since the pandemic. Research continues to show that suspending students does little to reduce future misbehavior and does not result in either increased academic achievement for peers or improved perceptions of positive school climate. 

Smith’s experience is her greatest asset in the classroom; indeed, veteran teachers are less likely than their less-experienced colleagues to resort to unproductive disciplinary tactics such as suspensions and expulsions. And education experts say that good teachers—with the resources to back them up—are the key variables in whether a disciplinary method works.  

Dennis Boyd, a Ph.D. student at Washington University in St. Louis and a former K-12 education consultant, says schools that attempt to discipline students for misbehavior need to consider adolescents’ development. In middle and high school, students are not able to assess risk, articulate their needs, or gauge the consequences of their actions, which makes punitive discipline less effective on them. 

“It’s important to take a developmental approach to discipline and not see the behavior as the problem,” Boyd said. “I see the behavior as a symptom of the problem.” 

Boyd, who published an op-ed on school discipline in the Missouri Independent in February, has built his career studying how schools can connect with young men of color, who are more likely than their peers to be disciplined. Through his work with public schools, charter schools, and youth organizations, he has mentored upwards of 2,500 students. In his experience, addressing misbehavior starts with a conversation between the student and their teacher. 

“Kids respond to people who they know care,” Boyd said. “They respond to adults who actually stop and listen and respect their voice first and foremost.” 

Across the country, research has shown that, with the right resources, innovations can work well in urban, rural, high-income, and low-income communities. PBIS, when implemented school-wide, significantly reduced suspensions and referrals across 37 elementary schools. Restorative justice poses implementation challenges, but well-resourced programs have proven to reduce racial disparities in school discipline. 

Teachers want to feel that schools have their back on classroom management and order. They insist that, without extra time, training, and resources, they cannot properly implement effective disciplinary methods. 

“What happens a lot of times when someone has this program or whatever, like restorative justice … is people come in, and they’re like, ‘Oh, this could make a positive change,’” Smith told me. “And it absolutely could make a positive change. But what happens is they bring it in, and it becomes more work for teachers who are already overworked.” 

Behavioral issues over the past five years have raised alarm bells, but the answer is not to scrap reforms that work, advocates say. School discipline woes are intimately connected to teacher shortages and increases in student mental health problems, along with learning difficulties brought on by the pandemic—all of which the Trump administration’s cuts are poised to worsen.  

It may be tempting for schools to capitulate to the Trump administration’s directives and return to old ways, but that would deprive students of the best techniques for helping them get back on track. In an era when students are struggling to engage with the material, relate to their peers, and maintain their mental health, schools can’t fall back on disciplinary measures that push them out of the classroom. Without reforming school discipline, they risk losing the students who stand to benefit the most from public education. 

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