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Twenty years ago, the Columbine school shooting was the deadliest of its kind in U.S. history. As with the shooting in Parkland, no major gun reforms followed. And yet Columbine did prompt profound change of another, less obvious kind, as schools all over the country overhauled their safety procedures. In 1997, just 10 percent of public schools had campus-based police, known as school resource officers or SROs. By 2014, it was 30 percent. Between 1996 and 2008, the number of school districts that had their own police departments more than doubled.

The purpose of these new practices was to protect students from violence. But what happened instead was the widespread criminalization of bad behavior. Before Columbine, some 79 percent of schools had zero tolerance policies for violence, according to the Department of Education; a federal law mandated a year’s suspension for bringing a gun on campus. After the shooting, schools rushed to expand these policies to lesser forms of misconduct. What was seen as a “weapon” expanded to the point of absurdity. Students were suspended or expelled for bringing butter knives in their lunchboxes, aiming “finger guns” or biting a Pop-Tart into what teachers interpreted as the shape of a gun. Arrest rates skyrocketed for vaguely defined offenses like “disruption.” (These arrests often escalated from behavior as minor as throwing pencils in class or running in halls.) In public schools with SROs, students were five times more likely to be arrested for “disorderly conduct” than at schools without them. Researchers eventually deemed that the new zero tolerance rules didn’t actually increase school safety. Meanwhile, even as juvenile crime rates steadily decreased after their 1994 peak, suspensions kept rising. ( 2 ) Annual student suspensions nearly doubled from 1974 to 2001, increasing from 1.7 million to 3.1 million over that time.

The new precautions coincided with a heightened suspicion of teenagers in the mid-’90s, a fear that was often racialized. And it was students of color—especially black students, and especially black boys—who bore the brunt of the post-Columbine emphasis on school security. Black students account for around 15 percent of the public school population but around a third of school-based arrests. Even as preschoolers, black students are more than three times as likely to be suspended as their white peers, and twice as likely to be arrested at school, according to The Sentencing Project. In recent years, security cameras and student cellphones have captured shocking footage of black children on campus being manhandled like dangerous criminals—a teenage girl violently flipped over and thrown across the room by an SRO; a kindergartner handcuffed for a temper tantrum.

Students of color bore the brunt of the post-Columbine emphasis on school security. SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES

Russell Skiba, a professor emeritus at Indiana University and a leading researcher on disparate discipline, noted that over 20 years, all but a handful of studies have found that the reason for the discrepancy isn't that black children are misbehaving at higher rates. Rather, black students are punished more for offenses that rely on subjective assessment, such as “disruptive behavior” or “defiance.” White students, meanwhile, are more often punished for objective offenses that can’t be ignored, like smoking or vandalism. Black students are also 31 percent more likely to receive discretionary suspensions, according to the Justice Center—that is, not for violations that would automatically mandate it.

Many researchers largely attribute the problem to implicit bias: teachers, administrators and SROs judging the same behavior differently depending on the race of the child. One superintendent in Minnesota examined discipline referrals for her district’s kindergartens and found that when white kids misbehaved, teachers described them as high-strung or frustrated—unable to “use his words”—while black classmates were labeled unmanageable or violent.

These experiences can alter the course of a student’s life. According to an authoritative 2011 study in Texas, children who are suspended are twice as likely as similar peers to drop out and 11 times more likely to become involved with the juvenile justice system. Other studies have found those who drop out are three times more likely to end up incarcerated.

Broward was as good an example as any of this phenomenon. In 2011, the county had the most school arrests in Florida. As the nation’s sixth-largest district, this was perhaps not surprising—but 71 percent of those arrests were for misdemeanors like graffiti or possessing marijuana. According to the local NAACP, black students in Broward were two and a half times more likely than white students to be suspended, expelled and arrested. Their achievement gap was also stark. In 2011, only 57 percent of the district’s black male students graduated; several years earlier, the graduation rate for that group had been the third-worst in the country among districts with a large black population.

Robert Runcie JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES

Robert Runcie became Broward’s first permanent black superintendent in 2011. He wasn’t a career educator. A tall, wiry, driven man with a thin mustache, he’d grown up in a cinder-block house in Jamaica and emigrated with his working-class family to the U.S. when he was 6. He studied economics at Harvard and Northwestern and founded a technology consulting firm. In 2003, his college friend Arne Duncan, then the CEO of Chicago’s public schools, asked him to run the district’s data systems. There, he helped to work on an algorithm project to determine which students were at greatest risk of being harmed by gang violence.

After his arrival in Broward, Runcie was contacted by a small core of leaders, convened by the local NAACP, that had been trying to address the school-to-prison pipeline. Runcie “was a data geek,” said Gordon Weekes, an attorney in Broward’s public defender’s office. “He said, ‘Whatever the data shows, it shows.’” When the data demonstrated that there were indeed significant racial disparities at work, the group assembled a coalition, joined by Runcie and various local agencies, including law enforcement, to review the district’s policies.

The team was particularly intrigued by a model developed in the poorest school district in metro Atlanta. Over a 10-year span, the arrival of police in Clayton County schools had led to a 1,200 percent increase in school-based arrests, overwhelmingly for petty offenses. Black students were 12 times more likely than white ones to be arrested. Graduation rates fell to an all-time low and crime in the county increased. As Clayton Juvenile Judge Steve Teske explained, once children are pulled into the system, they begin to identify as delinquents and are desensitized to the threat of jail. Arrest a student for low-level misbehavior, Teske has said, and “you might as well be sending him to prison one day.”

In 2004, Teske brokered a partnership between school and law enforcement in which arrests would be diverted for four minor offenses—fights, disorderly conduct, disruption and failure to follow police instructions. This led to a 70 percent drop in arrests and rising graduation rates. Georgia’s then-Governor Nathan Deal, a Republican and former juvenile judge, described Teske’s work as “revolutionary.”

A teacher who had lost a loved one at MSD said that PROMISE had “created a safe haven for criminals in our schools.”

In 2013, Broward’s team expanded “the Teske model” into a program they called PROMISE (Preventing Recidivism through Opportunities, Mentoring, Interventions, Support and Education). It covered 13 common types of misbehavior, including alcohol and marijuana possession, vandalism and “minor fighting.” Instead of being arrested for those offenses, students could be sent to one of the district’s alternative schools, Pine Ridge Education Center, for classes, counseling and a wide range of social services to address the underlying causes of misbehavior. Over the next four years, Broward’s school arrests fell 63 percent. An independent assessment by Nova Southeastern University, which offers counseling services in partnership with PROMISE, found that same-year recidivism dropped from 50 percent to 8 percent. The black male graduation rate, meanwhile, increased significantly. Runcie and his Executive Director of Student Support Initiatives, Michaelle “Mickey” Pope, were inundated with calls for advice from educators around the country. Runcie would eventually be invited to a White House panel that recognized Broward as leading the nation in discipline reforms.

In January 2014, all public K-12 schools received a “Dear Colleague” letter from the departments of Justice and Education (the latter then led by Arne Duncan). Under the Civil Rights Act, the letter said, federally funded entities could not penalize students of one race disproportionately. Any “disparate impact” could be evidence of discrimination, even if policies were race-neutral on their face. The letter signaled that the education department’s Office of Civil Rights would investigate potential violations. The American Civil Liberties Union described the move as “groundbreaking”; dozens of states and school districts subsequently instituted reforms.

Conservative critics like Eden objected on multiple fronts. ( 3 ) Conservative think tanks that follow education policy include the American Enterprise Institute, the Federalist Society and the Hoover Institution, as well as smaller organizations like the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, the Center for Equal Opportunity and the Center for the American Experiment. When DeVos held her first “listening session” on the Obama guidance, multiple members of this network attended. They argued that the guidance was federal overreach and that it changed the standard for discrimination from equal treatment to equal outcomes. Many were deeply skeptical of the restorative justice programs that replaced suspensions for certain offenses, or bristled at the implication that educators might harbor unconscious biases. They often cited a 2014 report that attributed the disparities to previous misbehavior (though Skiba said this study has methodological flaws). Some argued that the research didn’t prove that suspensions actually cause the negative outcomes cited by reformers.

And then there were those who believed that minorities simply misbehave more often, as a result of poverty or single-parent homes. Eden’s Manhattan Institute colleague, Heather Mac Donald—whose books include “The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture”—wrote in City Journal, “Given what we know about the breakdown of family socialization in the black community, it is wholly consistent that black students would be more prone to insubordination and classroom disruption.” ( 4 ) Multiple studies show that even black students from two-parent, middle- or upper-class homes are still disciplined at school more than their white counterparts. Somewhat more gently, Eden agreed: “I see dramatic disparities, but I think they’re baked into American society due to the American sin of slavery and generations of policies, whether well- or mal-intended, holding African American students to lower standards.”

But mostly, conservatives complained that the letter forced schools into a dangerous numbers game. Eden characterized it this way: If three black students and one white student were suspended for swearing at a teacher, the school could be violating the guidance by producing a disparate outcome. As a result, he said, schools are compelled to “juke the stats”—borrowing the term from “The Wire,” a show that delivered a devastating indictment of broken windows policing and traditional disciplinary approaches in poor urban schools.

To support his argument, Eden collected school surveys administered by officials or teachers unions. He found more than 10 large districts where teachers said discipline reform wasn’t working. In Oklahoma City, one teacher reported that the principal had said suspensions were no longer mandatory unless there was an incident involving blood. In other districts, some teachers reported feeling so distraught—by both the policy and the implication that they were racist if they objected to it—that they’d considered leaving the profession altogether.

Eden’s most recognized work is a 2017 report claiming that after New York City enacted reforms, at 38 percent of schools an increased share of teachers said order and discipline had grown worse. However, education policy writer RiShawn Biddle took issue with the methodology. Biddle noted the raw survey data showed that, district wide, the proportion of teachers who thought order and discipline had been maintained actually remained steady, at 80 percent. (Eden also found that at 44 percent of schools, more students reported fighting than before.) Beyond that, Biddle said, there are inherent limitations to using survey responses as an objective measure of safety. He pointed to a 2016 study that found white teachers have lower expectations of their black students than do black teachers, as well as a 2015 study showing that black children are suspended less often when taught by black teachers. “Teachers, students, parents all have biases,” Biddle said. “You’re dealing with perception, and for many people, perception is reality.”

After President Donald Trump was elected, Eden and other reform opponents had the ear of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. Four months into the new administration, Eden wrote an op-ed urging DeVos to rescind the Obama letter. In the fall of 2017, a Federalist Society report accused reformers of transforming schools into “menacing places where gangs of out-of-control teens prowl the halls.” Soon afterward, DeVos hired the study’s co-author. In September, DeVos, who’d already withdrawn one Obama guidance concerning the rights of transgender students, announced she was pulling a second, concerning campus sexual assault. Conservatives clamored for her to keep going, with one think tank cheering, “Two Down, One to Go.”