📚 This Week in Schule

Discipline, Delusion, and the Destructive Cult of Equity: Trump’s executive order restores sanity to school discipline. Naturally, the media and academia are furious.

This week, the conversation in school circles has circled back—thankfully—to something that actually matters: discipline.

More specifically, former President Trump signed an executive order that reverses yet another piece of ideological overreach from the Obama-Biden years. And despite what the media industrial complex would like you to believe, no—Trump didn’t just legalize child abuse, although that’s what my students heard on TikTok - and asked me about in English class. What he did was bring a dose of common sense back into the classroom.

A Quick History Lesson

In 2014, the Obama administration issued a “Dear Colleague” letter that, in bureaucratic terms, said: discipline according to equity—or lose your funding.

The idea was that schools and universities needed to prove they weren’t punishing Black students at higher rates than white students. If they were, the assumption was that racism—not behavior—was to blame. If you didn’t fix the numbers, the feds might just come for your money.

This was never about understanding why those disparities existed. That would require time, data, honesty, and the willingness to entertain uncomfortable truths. Instead, the solution was simple: treat every student not as an individual, but as a number in a spreadsheet.

If you suspended ten Black students, you’d better suspend ten white ones, too. Context didn’t matter. Behavior didn’t matter. Outcomes had to be “equitable,” even if reality wasn’t. As always they only looked at those racial lines. Why didn’t they check the Asian / Latin discipline gap? Or the American Indian / Native Pacific Islander discipline gap? I suspect the ‘divide and conquer quotient’ that they want isn’t what they want when you look at it that way.

What That Looked Like in Real Life

The result? A mess. A catastrophe of lowered standards and demoralized teachers.

I’ve seen it firsthand. I teach high school in a rough neighborhood. Discipline is a major problem. We have students who disrupt class, disrespect staff, and derail any chance of learning for the students around them. And yet, for years, administration has been paralyzed by this exact ideology.

One of our best teachers—a Nigerian immigrant, solid teacher, a woman of class and dignity —once asked our assistant principal why he kept returning disruptive students to her class without consequence.

His answer: “Don’t you know that Black students are suspended more than white ones?”

She looked at him like he was insane. “Where are these white students you keep talking about?” she asked.

She wasn’t being flippant. We don’t have any. The entire justification for our school’s disciplinary paralysis rested on a statistical abstraction that didn’t even apply to our population.

But once equity becomes your religion, evidence and reason go out the window. That’s how you get policy that sacrifices real students in the name of imaginary fairness.

A Culture of No Consequences

When students realize there are no consequences, they act accordingly. Why wouldn’t they? If you can disrupt class with impunity, you will.

The students who actually want to learn—the ones trying to get somewhere in life—are the ones who suffer most. Our ninth-grade suspension rate is now 60%. Sixty percent. That’s not just a statistic. That’s a sign of something gone horribly wrong.

Our youngest students are arriving at high school socially unprepared, intellectually disengaged, and morally confused about how the world actually works. And it’s no wonder. We’ve trained them to believe that consequences are bigoted, authority is oppressive, and responsibility is optional.

Enter Trump (and Cue the Screaming)

So yes, Trump’s move caught my attention. Not because he said we could “hit students”—he didn’t. That was just the usual brain-melting nonsense from corporate media.

What he did was tell schools they could enforce discipline without consulting a racial quota. They could respond to behavior based on… behavior. Imagine that.

It’s a small step back to sanity.

But of course, any time Trump does something remotely sensible, the progressive establishment loses its collective mind. It’s Pavlovian. Say his name, and they start foaming. You know the routine: fascism, bigotry, Orange Man Bad, Orange Putler. It’s all so tiresome.

The media dishonesty here isn’t just laughable—it’s corrosive. It confuses kids. As I mentioned before, my own students came to me asking if it was now legal for teachers to beat them, because that’s what TikTok told them. That’s how the corrupted Corporate Media framed it for the people.

That’s the level of discourse we’re dealing with.

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Meanwhile, on Campus...

The second education story this week comes from the New York Times, which warned that American universities are experiencing a “chilling effect” on speech. Professors are afraid. Students are muzzled. Free speech is dying.

Please.

Academia hasn’t been a haven for free speech in decades. It’s been a monoculture—ideological, fragile, allergic to dissent.

If you were a conservative, libertarian, or just plain independent-minded, you learned to keep your mouth shut. I’ve heard the same story from many former students—especially smart, skeptical young black women—who refused to buy the dogma but weren’t about to argue with a DEI-obsessed professor. So they wrote what was expected, got the A, and moved on.

That’s not education. That’s intellectual performance art. It’s parroting The Narrative in order to maintain a solid GPA.

And now, the same institutions that enforced ideological uniformity for years are clutching their pearls about a “chilling effect”? What they mean is: they’re no longer the only ones doing the chilling. This professor quoted in the NY Times article doesn’t realize that he’s been only hearing affirmative responses from students because that’s what gets the grades. He’s finally hearing a different tune, and the campus is getting shaken.

Good.

What’s Actually Needed: A Reckoning

Universities need more than a reminder. They need a reckoning. Let’s start with the student loan system. Shut it down. Let these schools survive on their own merit, not on taxpayer subsidies.

Let’s see which institutions can attract students based on actual educational value—not just elite branding and four years of ideological grooming.

The trade schools will thrive. Engineering departments will thrive. Welding, aviation, nursing—skills people actually want to pay for.

But the grievance studies departments built on buzzwords and resentment? Let them collapse. How many classes on “intersectionalism” do you need to get hired? What benefit do those classes give to graduates?

Reality Check

We are living in a deeply unserious moment.

We have students who can’t read at grade level, can’t write a coherent paragraph, can’t sit still for fifteen minutes. And yet, the media tells us the real crisis is professors feeling “unsafe” and TikTok kids believing teachers can legally punch them.

It’s absurd.

So yes, Trump made the right move. Discipline should be local. Teachers should have the authority to run their classrooms. And colleges that function as ideological finishing schools for the laptop class deserve to sweat.

Let them prove their worth—or close.

We’re going to try to tackle the discipline crisis at our high school next year. Something has to give. We can’t keep suspending half the ninth grade and pretending that’s normal.

At some point, reality has to return to the classroom.

Let’s hope we’re on the right path.

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Thanks for reading. If you’re new here, consider subscribing. I write each week from the front lines of the education system, where ideology meets reality. For too long ideology has won. Let’s try to change that.

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