State discipline law keeps Black, Latino kids in class. Trump says it's illegal

President Trump holds an executive order relating to school discipline policies next to Education Secretary Linda McMahon.

Staff Writer

May 1, 2025 3 AM PT

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President Trump has signed an executive order that could pave the way for a legal challenge of California law banning student suspensions for “willfully defiant” conduct.
The directive has sown confusion among educators and attorneys, some of whom see it as a corollary to the administration’s wide-scale attack on diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

Violating a school dress code. Using a cellphone in class. Mouthing off at a teacher.

There was a time when that kind of behavior, called “willfully defiant” conduct, would get a California public school student suspended.

But over the last decade, a sea change in state discipline policy — one born in part out of an understanding that such suspensions disproportionately affect Black, Latino and Indigenous students — largely outlawed that kind of punishment. Instead, schools were advised to turn to practices including conflict resolution and counseling.

Now, though, an executive order signed by President Trump could presage legal challenges of pioneering California laws that overhauled school discipline by banning willful defiance suspensions for K-12 students.

In his April 23 order, Trump directed the Education Department to root out school discipline frameworks based on “discriminatory equity ideology” and issue new “commonsense” practices in the nation’s K-12 schools, while criticizing previous guidance from Democratic administrations. President Obama had directed schools to avoid enacting discipline policies that disproportionately punished underrepresented student groups — a stance later supported by President Biden.

Trump has said such rules amount to racial discrimination because, his order stated, the Obama-era directive “effectively required schools to discriminate on the basis of race by imposing discipline based on racial characteristics, rather than on objective behavior alone.”

The executive order has sown confusion among educators and attorneys, who wonder about its potential impact on California — with some saying they see it as a corollary to the Trump administration’s wide-scale attack on diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

“Shock and awe is the goal here — to shake people up and disrupt,” said Pedro A. Noguera, dean of USC’s Rossier School of Education. “But ... where’s the guidance? Where’s the desire to produce evidence that what they are doing will be helpful to children? None of that is here. The public has to insist that before you start tearing something down, you start to build up something that is better for our children.”

A spokesperson for California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said in a statement that his office was reviewing the executive order and would monitor its implementation “for compliance with the law.”

The California Department of Education expressed firm support for state policies and said that the uneven disciplining of students is “a real concern in our education system that shouldn’t be ignored or obfuscated” by the Trump administration. The department said it would continue to address student safety with an “equity lens” to “ensure that students are not disciplined differently because of the color of their skin or their ethnic background.”

“The broad concept of ‘equity’ is not unlawful,” the department said in a statement. “Nor is it the cause of very real school safety issues that require strong leadership and commonsense solutions.”

How Trump’s order could change discipline

California’s discipline laws — and previous federal guidance — stem from a legal doctrine known as “disparate impact theory.”

It holds that seemingly neutral policies may adversely affect some racial groups more than others — and can be challenged on those grounds.

But Trump’s order directed the government to set aside disparate impact theory and called on Education Secretary Linda McMahon to produce new guidance on discipline in schools within 30 days. By the 120-day mark, she is to submit a detailed report on the status of “discriminatory-equity-ideology-based school discipline” that details, in part, a “model” policy that protects “the safety and educational environment of students.”

The executive order has drawn criticism from school advocacy groups and prominent education voices, among them Denise Forte, president of EdTrust, an advocacy organization.

She said the order and others focused on education that Trump signed last week would “permit school discipline practices that target and punish students of color and students with disabilities at disproportionate rates” and “silence student and parent voices calling for policies that make students feel safe and supported in the classroom.”

Asked about the criticism of Trump’s directive on school discipline, the U.S. Department of Education provided a statement from McMahon that said the Biden administration’s “policies placed racial equity quotas over student safety — encouraging schools to turn a blind eye to poor or violent behavior in the name of inclusion.”

“A student’s success in adulthood starts with how they perform in a classroom, and we should teach our kids to discern right and wrong from a young age,” she added.

What school data show

The issue of discipline in education is a thorny one — from preschool to high school — and norms have been changing in recent years, driven in part by data that have illuminated who is suspended.

The Times reported in 2019 that California Department of Education statistics showed that, during the two preceding years, Black students accounted for 17% of total suspensions in California — despite making up less than 6% of the student population.

The data were a prelude to change. In 2019, a new state law halted willful defiance suspensions in public schools for the fourth and fifth grade, and banned them in sixth through eighth grade for a half-decade. The state had already ended such suspensions in kindergarten through third grade.

In 2023, the state extended the law, banning the suspensions for students in middle and high school. It also forbade suspensions and expulsions for truancy and tardiness. The law noted that the earlier legislation had “a disproportionately beneficial impact on Black pupils.”

The bill’s author, then-state Sen. Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley), said at the time, “Instead of kicking them out of school, we owe it to students to figure out what’s causing them to act out and help them fix it.” The legislation had wide support, passing easily, with only a handful of Republican state senators voting against it.

Educators can still suspend students for more severe actions, such as physical violence, possession or use of drugs, theft or bullying. And teachers are generally able to remove disruptive and defiant students from the classroom, but only via single-class suspensions.

The Los Angeles Unified School District waded into the issue in 2013, when it banned the suspension of willfully defiant students. Instead, officials were required to find other discipline methods. Other California school districts, among them those in Azusa and Pasadena, soon followed suit.

A spokesperson for L.A. Unified said that it would “continue to follow state law and District policy regarding student discipline, which includes due process for all students regardless of protected category. Race is not a consideration in the application of student discipline policies at the District.”

Ebony Batiste, who teaches restorative justice at L.A. Unified’s 74th Street Elementary School, said discipline should not be meted out with a “one-size-fits-all” approach. “It’s like putting a Band-Aid on two students — one just has a cut and the other one has an open wound that’s bleeding,” she said. “The support needs to be tailored to the individual students or group of students.”

She instructs her students on conflict resolution, and shares ways to communicate their thoughts and feelings. She said she has long sought out “alternatives to just punishing all the time.”

“Willful disobedience, usually, if a child is doing that, there’s a reason why,” Batiste said. “All behavior tells a story, and it’s communicating something.”

As for Trump’s order, she said she isn’t worried. “Because it seems like most of [Trump’s] executive orders are just expressing his goals and wishes of things that he wants for education,” she said. “California is going to continue serving the children like they always have.”

But some fear significant changes.

Mayra Lira, senior supervising attorney at Public Counsel, said in a statement that the directive will result in “more students of color being pushed away from and out of learning.”

The order, she said, “undermines decades of progress and goes against a large body of research that shows that punitive, exclusionary discipline does not work.” It “leaves educators with no alternatives but exclusion.”

It isn’t just liberal-leaning organizations that are critical of Trump’s order.

Dean McGee, a senior attorney from the Liberty Justice Center, a conservative legal group, said in a statement that “federal mandates on school discipline — regardless of which party is in charge — aren’t the solution.”

“Local schools shouldn’t be micromanaged by shifting policies from Washington that change with each new administration,” McGee added. “Discipline needs may vary by district, and local school boards and superintendents are better positioned to respond to those needs. When they get it wrong, they can be held accountable by their own communities.”

But he also criticized California’s ban on willful defiance suspensions, calling it “another example of a top-down policy that risks sidelining the voices of parents, teachers, and local communities concerning the discipline measures they find appropriate for their schools.”

McGee proposed a solution: “Empower families with more educational freedom — through school vouchers and scholarships, charter schools, open enrollment, and less burdensome homeschooling regulations.”

Project 2025 lurks

The executive order — officially titled “Reinstating Common Sense School Discipline Policies” — is not expected to force an immediate change, with various interested parties monitoring the government’s next steps.

But one thing is certain: Despite Trump’s previous disavowal of Project 2025 — which was created by his allies and touts “traditional American values” — the executive order is yet another signal he is taking his cues from the controversial conservative political initiative.

Trump has appointed various figures associated with Project 2025 to roles in the government, among them Russell Vought, an architect of the playbook who was appointed head of the Office of Management and Budget.

Project 2025 has much to say about the use of disparate impact theory in education — and some of its criticisms appeared in Trump’s executive order. Both reference — pejoratively — the same Obama administration letter from 2014 that noted disparities in how punishment was administered in schools, and warned against discriminatory discipline.

“Unfortunately, federal overreach has pushed many school leaders to prioritize the pursuit of racial parity in school discipline indicators — such as detentions, suspensions, and expulsions — over student safety,” Project 2025 reads. It also lays out several steps that should be taken to correct Democratic “overreach.” They include rescinding Biden administration guidance that noted racial disparities in discipline and encouraged school districts to ensure their policies were fair.

Trump’s executive order does just that.

Forte said in a statement that the order and others focused on education that Trump signed last week “mirror the blueprint laid out in Project 2025 — an extreme policy plan designed to eliminate the federal role in education, resegregate public schools, and relegate higher education to a privilege only afforded to wealthy families.”

Noguera, the USC dean, said that he sees parallels between Trump’s barrage of executive orders on education and his many anti-DEI directives.

“Their whole strategy appears so driven by ideology and not by a desire to create new policies and programs that are beneficial,” he said. “They are not building anything, and their credibility is so suspect.”