As the new school year gets underway for nearly half the country, teachers are bracing for a familiar problem: students who don’t take school rules seriously. In a recent Education Week survey, one teacher put it bluntly: “Students have become apathetic toward school rules and feel emboldened to disrespect or clearly ignore their teachers.”
The reason, according to a new Manhattan Institute analysis, is that students have learned that consequences are not tied to their behavior but to a web of bureaucratic conditions, aggregate statistics, and discretionary “wellness” interventions. The result, the report argues, is that schools have effectively traded classroom order for a system of endless excuses.
A Bold New Federal Push — With Limits
The Trump administration appears to want to change course. On August 18, the Department of Education issued a “Dear Colleague” letter to states and school districts, reminding them that discipline serves a purpose and that school policies cannot intentionally “favor nor disfavor” students based on race. The letter signals a shift away from the federal policies of 2014, which made discipline partly conditional on aggregate racial statistics.
Under the Obama-era disparate impact framework, schools faced the threat of federal investigations if their race-neutral policies produced racial disparities in suspension or expulsion rates — even in the absence of any discriminatory intent. The Manhattan Institute report argues that administrators, fearing investigation, were motivated to reduce reported incidents, but misbehavior didn’t disappear. It just went unaddressed, replaced by a different set of priorities.
The Rise of the ‘Wellness’ Bureaucracy
The report, authored by Manhattan Institute fellows Carolyn D. Gorman and Jennifer Weber, argues that discipline reform didn’t stop at changing federal guidance. States followed suit, and schools built up what the authors call a “wellness bureaucracy” that made codes of conduct unruly and consequences unpredictable.
Illinois, for example, required districts with the highest reported rates of exclusionary action among students of color to submit corrective action plans. A later state law restricted suspensions and expulsions and, in the name of equity, required schools to consider discipline case by case — meaning identical behavior could draw different responses depending on the student’s background or the administrator’s discretion.
Research cited in the report, published in Education Administration Quarterly, found that between the 2013-14 and 2015-16 school years, Maryland districts added more than five response options to the average student offense, often involving special education referrals.
Fueled by federal education dollars and Medicaid reimbursements, districts now spend billions on restorative justice, social-emotional learning, mental health initiatives, and trauma-informed practices. The report argues that these programs — often purchased as commercial curricula — have replaced straightforward enforcement of existing rules.
Why ‘Identification’ Isn’t Correction
One of the core problems the report identifies is the conflation of understanding misbehavior with correcting it. “Identification is not the same as correction,” the authors write. Naming a student’s distress or adversity may help a teacher understand why he misbehaved, but it does not, by itself, teach the student to act differently.
In practice, the report argues, “wellness” solutions often end up rewarding misbehavior — by removing students from classwork and giving them access to counselors and attention. A school leader quoted in the new federal guidance described how students not suspended “amp up their behavior in order to see how much they’ll get away with without consequence.”
The Evidence: Did Reforms Help?
The report highlights research from Philadelphia that suggests the reforms didn’t deliver the benefits their advocates hoped for. In the most disadvantaged schools, students who had previously been suspended but were spared under the new policy did not perform better academically. Meanwhile, their never-suspended peers performed worse.
Discipline, the report argues, imposes both costs and benefits on misbehaving students. But failing to respond to misbehavior imposes costs alone on students who come to class ready to learn — costs like increased school violence and disorder, which have risen as consequence-free policies have spread.
The Soft Bigotry of Excuses
The authors don’t mince words. “Perceived racism, trauma, or distress all became reasons that schools were either required to excuse misbehavior or chose to do so,” they write. “Schools began asking whether something outside the classroom explained the conduct, without first asking whether something inside did.”
In their view, lowering expectations based on a student’s circumstances — race, home hardship, or anything else — is “soft bigotry.” Conversely, consistent discipline signals to students that adults believe they are capable of overcoming their challenges and meeting the standard.
A Path Forward
The report offers a set of recommendations for what sound discipline policy should look like: short, public codes of conduct with predictable, proportionate consequences. Schools should acknowledge that discrimination, adversity, and distress exist — but without telling students that ordinary expectations don’t apply to them. Unfinished work should be made up, not excused. A disruptive student should be removed until he is ready to follow the rules, and then expected to complete the work he missed.
Teachers and parents should know the rules and consequences, and administrators should back teachers up when they enforce them. The report notes that codes of conduct that sprawl over dozens of pages cannot credibly be understood by students, parents, or teachers.
And there is evidence that enforcement works. The report points to school phone bans as a case study. The largest study of phone bans to date found that in-class phone use fell from 61% to 13% after restrictions took effect. “Clear policies were adopted, schools implemented them, teachers enforced them, and students adjusted,” the authors write. “Kids have not mysteriously become unable to follow school rules. They just need expectations consistently upheld.”
The Trump administration’s “Dear Colleague” letter is a start, but the authors argue more is needed. They specifically call on the administration to reassess federal funding for school-based “wellness” programs, which they say work against fair and consistent discipline, undermine teacher authority, and can deliver services without parental consent.
“The wellness bureaucracy confuses rules, undermines teacher authority, lowers accountability in the education system, and delivers services without parental consent,” they write. “It often makes students feel worse.”
As schools across the country settle into another year, the question remains whether the administration’s guidance will translate into real changes in classrooms — or whether the bureaucracy it says it wants to fix has become too entrenched to move.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/how-school-bureaucracy-traded-classroom-order-for-endless-excuses