The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) is applauding the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) for opening a Title VI investigation into Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) over allegations that its policies require or encourage school officials to consider student race when making disciplinary decisions.  

WILL has sounded the alarm on race-based approaches to school discipline for years, beginning with federal guidance issued during the Obama administration and renewed under the Biden administration. 

The Quotes: WILL Deputy Counsel, Cory Brewer, stated, “This investigation will hopefully uncover the racially discriminatory school discipline policies at MPS. WILL has spent years calling for reform and a break from the Obama and Biden administrations’ emphasis on racial balancing. Today is a very positive step toward true equality and safe classrooms.”  

WILL Research Director Will Flanders, stated, “Discipline quotas based on the color of a student’s skin are a harmful practice that has been shown over and over to just create chaos in our classrooms and contribute to the teacher shortage. We should be honest with ourselves about the dangers that exist to educators in the classroom and the effect on academic achievement.”  

What The Trump Administration Said: In their announcement, the Department of Education stated, “In line with this new guidance, the Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) today opened two Title VI investigations into school districts that allegedly require personnel to consider race when making disciplinary decisions . . . 

In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, education leaders derided facially neutral school policies as reflecting systemic “whiteness,” seemingly encouraging school officials to consider race in disciplinary practices.”   

WILL Work Tackling Classroom Behavior and Equality: WILL has been raising concerns about federal and local race-based approaches to school discipline for nearly a decade. 

In 2017, WILL published Feds in the Classroom: The Impact of the Obama Administration’s Discipline Policy on Wisconsin’s Public Schools, which examined effects of federal policies pressuring school districts to reduce racial disparities in discipline. The report found that racial disparities in suspensions had not meaningfully improved at MPS despite efforts to reduce them. It also highlighted research showing factors other than race, including poverty, can play an important role in predicting whether a student is suspended.  

WILL continued to raise concerns when the Biden administration moved toward restoring Obama-era approaches to school discipline, warning that efforts to equalize discipline rates across racial groups can come at the expense of classroom safety and equal treatment. 

And then this year, WILL released Classrooms in Crisis, a documentary examining the growing problem of disruptive and violent student behavior in Wisconsin schools. The documentary features a Milwaukee whistleblower who describes efforts within MPS to obscure the extent of student behavioral problems and manipulate how disciplinary data are reported.  

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