For the 50 million kids who attend public schools in the US, the 2020 election is personal.
But the US education system gives the American president a tremendous amount of power over public schools. Whoever holds the Presidency decides how schools handle things like testing, class size, and discipline.
During the Obama administration, the US Department of Education started to take the country’s school discipline problem seriously. They investigated the schools with significant racial gaps in punishment rates, and issued guidance on how to replace outdated policies with more effective ones.
Then Betsy DeVos, President Trump’s education secretary, abandoned those efforts. Trump's administration stopped releasing discipline data, changed the standard of what constitutes racist outcomes, and scaled back efforts to fix or even acknowledge racial disparities in how we punish kids. In this video we explain the origins of this crisis, and how the 2020 election could change things.
This was the fourth in our series of 2020 election explainers, all based on viewer suggestions. Watch the others, which cover the stakes of the election on:
1) Climate change: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfAXbGInwno
If you want to learn more about racial disparities in school discipline, check out the UCLA Civil Rights Project. They’ve been studying this crisis for years: https://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/school-discipline
Our colleagues at ProPublica, particularly Annie Waldman, have done extensive investigative work chronicling how the Trump administration has neglected to enforce students’ civil rights: https://www.propublica.org/article/devos-has-scuttled-more-than-1-200-civil-rights-probes-inherited-from-obama
The Texas schools study we mention in the video is publicly available through the Center for State Governments: https://knowledgecenter.csg.org/kc/system/files/Breaking_School_Rules.pdf
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