Did an Obama-Era School Discipline Policy Contribute to the Parkland Shooting? Sen. Marco Rubio says maybe. – By Lauren Camera (usnews.com) / March 6 2018
Sen. Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican who has found himself in the maelstrom of federal and state debates over school safety and gun control, says an Obama-era civil rights law may have contributed to the massacre at a high school in his state last month, where a former student fatally shot 17 children and adults.
“Disturbing reports have indicated that federal guidance may have contributed to systemic failures to report Nikolas Cruz’s dangerous behaviors to local law enforcement,” Rubio wrote to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and Attorney General Jeff Sessions in a joint letter dated Monday.
At issue is a “Dear Colleague” letter and guidance from the previous administration, issued in 2014, which aimed to stem the school-to-prison pipeline by prodding schools to reduce the number of suspensions and expulsions, especially for students of color and students with disabilities, both of whom receive disciplinary actions at disproportionately high rates.
According to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, among the 2.6 million students suspended each year, black boys are three times more like than white boys to be suspended, black girls are six times more likely than white girls to be suspended, and students with disabilities are more than twice as likely as their peers to be suspended.
Broward County Public Schools in Florida, the sixth-largest school system in the country and home to Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where last month’s school shooting took place, was one of the first to embrace what’s known as “restorative justice” discipline programs and quickly became one of the Obama administration’s darlings for its efforts to focus on equity in discipline.
In fact, the superintendent of the Broward school, Robert Runcie, who worked alongside former Education Secretary Arne Duncan in the Chicago Public Schools, was the leading force behind instituting new practices within the district for handling student behavior issues without resorting to law enforcement involvement, which quickly became a national model for ending zero-tolerance policies in schools.
Student-related arrests, Runcie’s bio shows, are down by 65 percent since he came to Broward County.
But in the letter to DeVos and Sessions, Rubio posits that it may be these policies, spurred by the Obama administration’s guidance, that allowed the gunman to skirt law enforcement despite a well-known history of displaying disturbing behaviors.
“The overarching goals of the 2014 directive to mitigate the school-to-prison pipeline, reduce suspensions and expulsions, and to prevent racially biased discipline are laudable and should be explored,” Rubio wrote. “However, any policy seeking to achieve these goals requires basic common sense and an understanding that failure to report trouble students, like Cruz, to law enforcement can have dangerous repercussions.”
Rubio writes that by asking states to set new standards for calculating what qualifies as a disproportionate amount of students when handing out disciplinary actions, the federal government actually incentivized schools to not report troubled students to law enforcement.
Rubio is not the first to make such an argument. A handful of education policy experts have similarly criticized the guidance for potentially putting students and teachers at an increased safety risk.
Max Eden, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, recently made that argument when testifying before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, where he blamed the guidance for creating “a school climate catastrophe and puts more students at risk.”
“If we are willing to revise our assumptions based on better evidence, we should be utterly alarmed that our efforts to fix the school-to-prison pipelines has actually amplified it,” Eden said. “We are on a very dangerous road.”
The line of thinking has been rebuked by civil rights advocacy groups who say such arguments are driven purely by ideology that dismisses policies aimed at helping the most historically underserved students.
To be sure, researchers have published an onslaught of conflicting findings over the last two years on the outcomes of such disciplinary policies, leading many to cherry-pick findings in favor of their individual arguments.
DeVos, for one, has signaled her interest in reviewing the guidance – part of a larger ongoing regulatory review by the department, which is in the process of withdrawing nearly 600 pieces of guidance that federals officials say are “out of date.”
“The 2014 directive lacked common sense,” Rubio wrote, “but the guidance can be revised to strike an appropriate balance that marries school safety with students discipline and counseling.”
