On August 18, 2026, the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights issued a Dear Colleague Letter titled "Guidance on Pupil Discipline and Compliance with Title VI," directing that public schools must stop considering race in their disciplinary policies and practices. The letter states that evaluating racial outcomes of discipline policies and making decisions based on those outcomes constitutes race discrimination under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The guidance describes itself as an interpretive rule without direct legal consequences, but law firm analyses note the department can enforce its interpretation through investigations, funding freezes, and other regulatory actions.
The same day, OCR opened two Title VI investigations. In Fayetteville, Arkansas, teachers were allegedly directed to consider students' racial identities when issuing discipline as part of restorative justice efforts. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, education leaders allegedly criticized facially neutral policies as reflecting systemic whiteness. The investigations will test how the new interpretation is applied.
Guidance details and legal context
The letter says schools must cease race-conscious discipline absent extraordinary circumstances satisfying strict scrutiny. It follows a July 24, 2026 final rule that eliminated disparate-impact liability from the department's Title VI regulations. That change means demographic data alone can no longer prove a civil rights violation without evidence of discriminatory intent. The department also rescinded its prior guidelines for eliminating discrimination in vocational programs.
The guidance traces to Executive Order 14,280 from April 2025, which directed the department to issue new discipline guidance. A companion order made eliminating disparate-impact liability across federal contexts a U.S. policy goal. The Biden administration's May 2023 discipline guidance is in the process of being formally rescinded, according to the department.
Comparable federal actions
The new letter is the latest in a cycle of federal guidance changes on school discipline. In January 2014, the Obama administration issued a joint Dear Colleague Letter from the Education and Justice departments that advised that racially neutral discipline rules could violate Title VI if they had a disproportionate impact on students of one race. That guidance said statistical analysis of discipline data was an important indicator of potential violations.
The first Trump administration rescinded the 2014 guidance in December 2018. A Federal Commission on School Safety report, led by then-Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, argued the guidance gave schools a perverse incentive to align discipline rates with enrollment proportions regardless of individual misconduct. The 2014 guidance's impact on most districts was limited: a 2018 survey of 950 district leaders in 47 states found only 16 percent said their districts had modified discipline policies in response. Of those, 44 percent reported positive outcomes, while less than 1 percent said the guidance had a negative effect on addressing disciplinary issues.
A more recent predecessor was a February 2025 OCR Dear Colleague Letter interpreting Title VI under the Supreme Court's Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard ruling. That letter was vacated by the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland in August 2025, which found its position that race-neutral means of increasing diversity are constitutionally suspect was directly contradicted by binding precedent in the Fourth Circuit. The Fourth Circuit's 2024 decision in Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board held that adopting race-neutral policies to improve racial diversity is not constitutionally suspect, and the Supreme Court declined to review that decision.
In December 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice updated its own Title VI regulations to eliminate disparate-impact liability, preceding the Education Department's July 2026 rule change. The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel also issued an opinion in June 2026 that the EEOC's Title VII guidelines allowing disparate-impact liability were unconstitutional, and the EEOC reportedly closed all pending disparate-impact investigations in September 2025.
Research evidence on discipline disparities
The 2014 Dear Colleague Letter cited Civil Rights Data Collection figures showing that African-American students without disabilities were more than three times as likely as white peers to be expelled or suspended. African-American students accounted for 15 percent of students in the data collection but made up 35 percent of students suspended once and 44 percent of those suspended multiple times. The 2014 letter stated that research suggests these disparities are not explained by more frequent or more serious misbehavior by students of color.
A 2023 Education Department report found that Black preschool children receiving out-of-school suspensions did so at a rate nearly twice their enrollment share, and that such disparities persist across grade levels.
An analysis by NPR and Child Trends found that after the 2014 guidance, suspensions declined nationwide, particularly for Hispanic students. But Black high school students remained twice as likely as white students to be suspended, indicating that reducing disparities proved harder than reducing overall suspension rates. More than 50 of the largest school districts reformed discipline following the 2014 guidance, and over half of states revised their laws to reduce suspensions and expulsions.
The Brookings Institution reviewed the empirical basis of the 2018 Federal Commission on School Safety report and found it provided little evidence related to the effects of the 2014 guidance aside from anecdotes and survey responses, calling the research literature on discipline policy effects relatively thin. Brookings also noted that school shooters are not predominantly students of color, which undermined the commission's implicit reasoning connecting the guidance to school safety.
Impact on districts and enforcement outlook
Former federal civil rights enforcement attorneys told K-12 Dive that cases of intentional discrimination are much more difficult to prove than unintentional discrimination through policy disparities. They said districts can expect their existing disparate-impact investigations to be closed or narrowed following the rescission of the disparate-impact framework. The Department of Education said OCR will vigorously enforce Title VI to ensure discipline systems are neutral and operate nondiscriminatorily.