For the 50 million kids who attend public schools in the US, the 2020 election is personal.

Watch more 2020 US election explainers at http://vox.com/ElectionVideos

When it comes to who gets punished and removed from American classrooms, the US doesn’t treat all students equally. Black students get suspended and expelled far more frequently than their white classmates, and often for the same or similar offenses. And the weeks of school that Black kids miss each year can kick off a chain reaction that changes a child’s future.

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 They investigated the schools with significant racial gaps in punishment rates, and issued guidance on how to replace outdated policies with more effective ones.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:    • How America can leave fossil fuels be...  
2) Voting rights:    • What long voting lines in the US real...  
3) Reproductive health:    • How US abortion policy targets the po...  
4) Public schools:    • How US schools punish Black kids | 20...  
5) Police reform:    • How the next president could change p...  
6) America’s role in the world:    • How America could lose its allies | 2...  
7) Transportation:    • Why American public transit is so bad...  
8) LGBTQ rights:    • Why LGBTQ rights hinge on the definit...  
9) The eviction crisis:    • Millions of Americans can't pay rent ...  

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.e...

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/de...

The Texas schools study we mention in the video is publicly available through the Center for State Governments: https://knowledgecenter.csg.org/kc/sy...

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