Fayetteville Was Just Doing Its Job. Washington Called That Suspicious.

The U.S. Department of Education descended on Fayetteville Public Schools in Arkansas this month and announced an investigation with the gravity of a perp walk. The offense, according to a federal press release: teachers were “directed to take students’ racial identities into account when issuing discipline as part of an effort to bring about ‘restorative justice’ to address ‘the disproportionality of discipline on students of color.’”

Superintendent John Mulford — now in his fourth year running the district — was given roughly two hours of heads-up before his district’s name hit the federal blast. His response was the kind of thing you can only say when you’ve actually done your job. “We’re a little shocked at this point and completely in the dark as to what this is even about.” Of course he’s in the dark. There was nothing to find.

Mulford told an interviewer that “ever since I’ve been here, we’ve done extensive work around the consistency of our discipline policy… so that it takes away any ambiguity at all.” The policy is: the standard is the standard. “We never talk about, ‘Hey, go softer or harder on this particular group of people.’ That doesn’t even come into our language at all.” Good. That is exactly what an honest superintendent sounds like.

For more than a decade, the Office for Civil Rights ran a parallel enforcement regime built around one rule: any district whose discipline data showed racial disparities could be investigated. The flagship statistic of this regime, repeated like scripture by every civil rights group that wanted to scare a district into compliance: African-American students represented 15 percent of enrollment but 35 percent of students suspended once and 44 percent of students suspended more than once. The 2014 Obama-era guidance, written by then-OCR head Catherine Lhamon, told schools that such disparities “give rise to concerns that schools may be engaging in racial discrimination that violates the Federal civil rights laws.” That language — “give rise to concerns” — was the engine of the regime. It did not require a finding of bias. It only required a statistic. A graph showing Black children suspended at higher rates than their share of enrollment was, by itself, enough to trigger a federal investigation.

That is the leverage the regime actually offered, and it is worth tracing who cashed it in. The Office for Civil Rights gained, from this framework, exactly what an enforcement bureaucracy gains from a broad reading of its own mandate: a long reach into every district in the country whose discipline numbers could be tabulated by race. Catherine Lhamon — who led OCR under President Obama and returned to lead it under President Biden — built a professional reputation across those two stints on the explicit premise that disparate-impact scrutiny of discipline was the continuation of the desegregation work the agency was created to perform. “The very first desegregation agreements that [OCR] was created by Congress to enforce included requirements that discriminatory discipline practices end,” Lhamon said in reflecting on her original 2014 memo. The Obama and Biden Education Departments validated the framework not because the data proved teacher racism — it did not — but because the framework gave the agency authority no previous generation of civil rights enforcers had.

The credentialed voices orbiting the regime drew their own institutional return. The American Psychological Association task force the regime cited as authority said it “found no evidence that these disparities reflected differences in student behavior,” and attributed them instead to “lack of teacher preparation in classroom management, lack of training in culturally competent practices, or racial stereotypes” — lending a halo to a conclusion that, on its own terms, was not reachable. When the new guidance came down this month, EdTrust responded by insisting that schools “must be able to examine who is being suspended, expelled, or referred to law enforcement, why those decisions are being made, and whether students are being treated differently for similar behavior.” That is the voice that defines what “good” discipline policy looks like in every district the old regime ever touched. Its authority in that conversation was not incidental; it was produced by the regime that made the conversation mandatory.

An interpretation that will not consider the possibility that behavior varies across any human population — that requires nothing of the children being suspended and everything of the adults disciplining them — is not analysis. It is catechism. The federal government spent more than a decade catechizing districts into it. After the 2014 guidance, OCR struck a deal with Wake County Public School System in North Carolina after finding that Black students disciplined for a first offense were more likely to be suspended than “similarly situated” white students — the “similarly situated” caveat being the kind of phrase that lets a bureaucrat declare that two children who did different things did the same thing. Lhamon returned to lead OCR under Biden and re-upped the threat in 2023.

The result was a nationwide ratchet away from suspension and toward “restorative justice” — a practice that emphasizes dialogue and mediation over accountability. By 2018, the share of students suspended at least once had dropped from 5.6 percent to 4.7 percent, with Hispanic students seeing a 30 percent drop. Conservative critics warned at the time that districts were being bullied into going easy on disruptive students to keep their racial numbers balanced. In 2018, the commentator Max Eden wrote that “school districts must never again be presumed guilty and unable to prove their innocence, and kids should never again be put in danger because of statistics.” Eden’s warning was treated as heresy. The ratchet continued. The classroom consequences continued.

Then came COVID, and with it a spike in student misbehavior that made the consequences impossible to keep ignoring. Teachers told stories. Parents told stories. The chaos reached the 2024 presidential campaign, where Republicans pledged to “support overhauling standards on school discipline [and] advocate for immediate suspension of violent students.” In April 2025, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Reinstating Common Sense School Discipline Policies.” The Department has spent the months since building the legal scaffolding that makes the reversal stick. This month’s guidance, signed by Kimberly Richey, the current head of OCR, finishes the job. As Richey put it: “classrooms are less safe, they are more disruptive, and that is all a fruit of this policy. And that’s why we’re ending it.”

The new guidance makes a simple point, and the old guard is furious about it because they cannot refute it. The previous policy, the guidance argues, “ignored or covered up — rather than disciplined — student misconduct to avoid any purported racial disparity in discipline numbers.” The new policy says the obvious: “The consideration of race in student discipline is race discrimination.” That is not a slogan. That is what the law has always said. Lhamon argues that without the old disparity-hunting, “some of our kids in school will experience extraordinary harm.” But that is a confession dressed as a warning: under the Lhamon regime, the children who mattered were not the ones being hit or the ones being harassed, but the ones whose numbers looked wrong on a spreadsheet.

EdTrust’s response to the new guidance insists that schools “must be able to examine who is being suspended, expelled, or referred to law enforcement, why those decisions are being made, and whether students are being treated differently for similar behavior.” That sounds reasonable until you notice what it does not say: it does not promise that any child, of any color, will be protected from the child sitting next to him. “Examining disparities” was never a discipline strategy. It was a discipline veto.

Fayetteville is one of two districts being investigated — the other is Milwaukee Public Schools — and the pattern the Department has chosen to enforce is the more telling story. A Milwaukee spokesperson said the district had received no explanation either. What both districts share, according to their own public statements, is that they tried to write discipline policies in plain language so the rule applied the same way to every child. That is what consistency looks like when it is honest. The federal government is now treating consistency as suspicious. The investigation is the message the Department wants every other superintendent in the country to receive.

Mulford says he welcomes the investigation. “Great. Share it with us. If we’re doing something wrong, we’ll get it fixed.” He does not expect to hear back. He is right not to.

The old order could not survive a superintendent who actually meant it when he said “the standard is the standard.” That is the news from Fayetteville. The investigation is the epilogue.