During the Obama years, public school discipline took a hit. As Heather Mac Donald explains:

The Obama Justice and Education Departments have strong-armed schools across the country to all but eliminate the suspension and expulsion of insubordinate students. The reason? Because black students are disciplined at higher rates than whites. According to Washington bureaucrats, such disproportionate suspensions can mean only one thing: teachers and administrators are racist.

The Obama administration rejects the proposition that black students are more likely to assault teachers or fight with other students in class. The so-called “school to prison” pipeline is a function of bias, not of behavior, they say.

People who claim that the disproportionate suspension rates are evidence of racism do a disservice to African-American kids, who deserve to learn in an orderly environment where serious trouble makers can be disciplined. They also overlook that a larger percentage of African American kids come from single-parent households and that this could be a factor in the lack of discipline that (before the Obama diktat) led to a disproportionate number of black students being suspended.

Mac Donald ties the "violence in the halls" to the "disorder in the malls" that we have seen in the last few weeks:

The idea that such street behavior does not have a classroom counterpart is ludicrous. Black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at ten times the rate of white and Hispanic males of the same age. The lack of socialization that produces such a vast disparity in murder rates, as well as less lethal street violence, inevitably will show up in classroom behavior. Teens who react to a perceived insult on social media by trying to shoot the offender are not likely to restrain themselves in the classroom if they feel “disrespected” by a teacher or fellow students.

Interviews with teachers confirm the proposition that children from communities with high rates of family breakdown bring vast amounts of disruptive anger to school, especially girls.  It is no surprise that several of the Christmas riots began with fights between girls.  School officials in urban areas across the country set up security corridors manned by police officers at school dismissal times to avoid gang shootings. And yet, the Obama administration would have us believe that in the classroom, black students are no more likely to disrupt order than white students.

Equally preposterous is the claim that teachers and administrators are bigots. There is no more liberal a profession than teaching; education schools are one long indoctrination in white-privilege theory. And yet when these social-justice warriors get in the classroom, according to the Obama civil rights lawyers, they start wielding invidious double standards in discipline.

The other preposterous aspect of the Obama administration's war on school discipline is that (like most liberal and progressive programs) it hurts the very people in whose name it is pushed: low-income black kids who, unable to zip off to a private school, need what being able to learn in an orderly and congenial atmosphere can give them. Let's ask ourselves: wasn't it the Obama policy that was, in point of fact, actually racist?

Mac Donald argues that the incoming Trump administration must "tear up every guidance and mandate in the Justice and Education Departments that penalize school districts for disproportionate rates of school discipline." Only that way will kids be disciplined in school, allowing all the atmosphere in which to learn. And, disciplined in school, they are less likely to engage in dangerous activity on the streets.