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Controversy over efforts to reduce racial disparities
In 2014 the Obama administration issued guidance that urged schools to reduce the number of suspensions and expulsions, especially of minority students, thereby stemming the school-to-prison pipeline. During the Trump administration, in December 2018, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos rescinded these guidelines. In doing so, she cited research by John Paul Wright and four coauthors that purported to show that the disparate rates of suspensions and expulsions were due not to racism, but rather to prior poor behavior by black students.

Lead author John Paul Wright has advocated for the fringe view that black people evolved to be genetically inferior to white people. In the study cited by DeVos, Wright et al. assumed that teachers' reporting of behavior was accurate and unbiased. They concluded that "the racial gap in suspensions was completely accounted for by a measure of the prior problem behavior of the student --- a finding never before reported in the literature." However, other scholars have found implicit bias and racial discrimination in teachers' interpretation of behavior of black students as more threatening than similar behavior by white students.

Education researcher Francis Huang found other methodological flaws in the study by Wright et al., such as sample bias (comparison between a sample of 4,101 students and a reduced sample of 2,737 students who were not representative of the earlier sample) and their use of the Social Skills Rating Scale as a proxy for evaluating prior behavior. Correcting for sample bias in the study by Wright et al. led Huang to conclude that their data confirmed what earlier researchers had found regarding racial disparities in punishment that could not be accounted for by actual differences in behavior.