President Donald Trump signed another batch of executive orders in the Oval Office on Wednesday including one on school discipline policies.
White House staff secretary Will Scharf presented the executive order to Trump to sign and said that during the Obama administration, “the Department of Justice issued guidance that made it almost impossible for schools to enforce adequate discipline, disciplinary policies, this created issues in the classroom for teachers and students alike.”
Scharf claimed, “Basically they focused on CRT and sort of diversity ideology instead of actually just enforcing the rules in the classroom to ensure a safe learning environment.”
He added, “This executive order revokes that prior guidance.”
When Trump suggested that Education Secretary Linda McMahon comment on the EO, she said that the executive order “gives teachers the authority now to have discipline in their classrooms and discipline the person who is being disruptive.” She added, “We took that away.”
Trump signs an EO to make it easier for teachers to "discipline" students pic.twitter.com/6BCYck2jXE
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 23, 2025
In 2014, Obama’s Departments of Justice and Education issued school discipline guidance which “describes how schools can meet their legal obligations under federal law to administer student discipline without discriminating against students on the basis of race, color or national origin.”
During the first Trump administration, the Heritage Foundation (the conservative organization behind Project 2025, the blueprint to Trump 2.0 policies) advised Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in 2018 to withdraw Obama’s school discipline guidelines.
The Foundation claimed that Obama’s guidelines “coerced many school systems into adopting illegal racial quotas in their disciplinary decision-making,” and that it “doesn’t do misbehaving students any favors either, since a lack of early corrective action may only encourage even more disruptive and potentially dangerous behavior. This is what some refer to as the school-to-prison pipeline.
Many Democrats on X are slamming Trump’s new executive order and pointing out the contradiction of federal involvement in education policies. (Trump and McMahon have vowed to dismantle the Department of Education and leave similar matters up to the states to decide.)
One replied: “What happened to leave it to the states?” another chimed in, “Didn’t Republicans run on let parents decide what’s best for their children? Now Trump is signing an EO to let teachers decide for you how your children should be disciplined.”
.jpg){kind=link}