The Donald Trump administration is aiming to change how schools discipline children and it is causing a major debate among parents.

On 23 April, 2025, Trump issued an executive order, titled ‘Reinstating Common Sense School Discipline Policies’, which promises new guidance for K-12 schools, with the goal of ‘ensuring school discipline policies are based on objective behaviour, not DEI,’ as per a White House executive order.

In a section titled ‘Making America’s Educational Institutions Great Again’, a segment reads: “President Trump prioritises the needs of students, parents, and teachers over the demands of teachers’ unions, ensuring policies serve the interests of American families first.”

This order goes against the stances of his predecessors, Democratic presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama before him, extending his sweeping changes to the country’s education system.

During the Obama administration, there was a crackdown on suspensions, expulsions, and other disciplinary practices that were found to disproportionately impact students of colour, such as Black, Latino, and Indigenous students.

Trump’s executive order targets K-12 schools (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

In 2014, the Obama administration issued guidelines highlighting that Black students were more than three times as likely to be suspended compared with their white peers, even for similar infractions, PBS reported.

Instead, schools were told that suspensions, expulsions and reporting students to the police were a last resort and they should focus on ‘restorative’ discipline measures that didn’t remove teenagers from the classroom.

During his first term, the Trump administration rolled back the Obama-era initiative, and in December 2018, the U.S. Department of Education, led by Secretary Betsy DeVos, officially rescinded the guidance.

In May 2023, the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice under the Biden administration issued a joint letter to public schools, urging them to examine disciplinary data and practices to ensure fairness in light of it.

In the new executive order aimed at K-12 schools, however, Trump has requested new federal guidance on school discipline, instead claiming the previous administration’s guidelines had ‘effectively reinstated the practice of weaponizing Title VI to promote an approach to school discipline based on discriminatory equity ideology’.

As for what constitutes as ‘discipline’, the order doesn’t make it clear, however, The Conversation says that the presumption is that this includes alternatives to suspensions, with a focus on racial discrimination in these cases.

Some parents have expressed concern (Getty Stock Image)

“Trump’s order empowers local school boards by encouraging real discipline” said Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty on X. “By ending federal overreach, it frees educators to focus on teaching, not chaos, ensuring kids get a quality education.”

“This is not the discipline that you are seeking to cause division with! It’s simple discipline! No disruption! Or you leave,” someone else said.

But not everyone agrees.

“In one of the most heinous moments yet, Trump signs an executive order to make it easier for teachers to ‘discipline’ students in school,” one person said. “As a parent I’m genuinely appalled. I don’t want Trump telling people how to discipline my child.”

“These executive orders are another move to dismantle civil rights protections,” Judith Browne Dianis, who runs the Advancement Project, a civil rights nonprofit, said (via NPR).

“The Administration wants to rebuild the school to prison pipeline but civil rights law is clear: schools cannot punish students more harshly because of race, color, national origin, sex, or disability.”