Schools for bullies … but not for the rest of the kids

I recently attended a webinar hosted by the Heritage Foundation titled “Policy Answers to Bullying in Public Schools.” What immediately stood out was not just the data, which is grim enough, but how clearly it exposed a system that has learned how to legitimize dysfunction while ignoring worried parents. I came away from the webinar with the unsettling conclusion that our public schools are no longer safe.

The most powerful moment came from a black father named Stephen Gilchrist, who is also the Commissioner of Civil Rights for the Trump administration. He shared a heart-wrenching story about what his family endured inside a public school system that claimed it took bullying seriously. His teenage son experienced relentless bullying at his public high school, including being repeatedly punched on the basketball court while teachers stood nearby, scrolling on their phones. When he picked up his son, his face was swollen and bruised. On another occasion, a student took a photo of his son while he was using the bathroom and shared it with classmates online. The caption read: “caught this N word taking a sh*t.” The student who posted it was also black, which mattered because it immediately undercut the lazy racial narratives schools often hide behind. He stated that his son could take the physical fighting and the name-calling, but the photo of his moment in the bathroom, this pleading father stated that it “broke his son.”

This father did what parents are told to do. He documented everything. He emailed the school more than 180 times. Each incident was met with lip service, promises of “restorative conversations,” and assurances that the school was “handling it internally.” Nothing changed. The bullies were allowed to stay.

At one point, the district closed the bathroom case entirely. Their explanation was chilling. “Because you and your wife did not file Title IX, the district said the case was closed.” Title IX, which was designed to protect students from sex-based discrimination, was now being used as a procedural shield to avoid disciplining violent and abusive students, especially when misconduct is classified as sexual in nature, such as taking photos of a child in a bathroom. As was cited during the seminar, schools are increasingly pointing to the Trump administration’s revised Title IX regulations as justification for declining to investigate or discipline at all. The message was clear: if you do not navigate the bureaucracy perfectly, your child is trapped.

Eventually, this father pulled his son from the school. The bullying never stopped, and the system refused to protect him.

This story is not an outlier. Roughly one in three students experiences bullying. According to federal data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the incidence of cyberbullying doubled between the 2009–10 and 2019–20 school years. Even more alarming, the FBI reported that roughly 1.3 million criminal incidents occurred at our public schools between 2020 and 2024. This is with only half of law enforcement agencies reporting, and during a period when many schools were still partially closed. The real number is much higher.

The response from schools has not been to remove bullies. Instead, the victimized students are often reclassified into special needs categories. One panelist noted that students with special needs are disproportionately victims of bullying, even though many of those students don’t belong in special needs classes academically, but because schools would rather move the victim than confront the aggressor. It is easier to change a child’s label than to enforce discipline.

The webinar also addressed the rise in antisemitism in schools. One example cited was the incident at Cooper Union, a college in New York, where Jewish students reportedly hid in a library to escape hostile protesters. Parents and students are told to file civil rights complaints with the Department of Education, but experience shows that federal enforcement is slow, selective, and unreliable.

The uncomfortable truth is that parents cannot depend on federal law to protect their children. Mandated reporting laws require teachers to report abuse, including abuse inflicted by other students. But many do not. Whether out of fear, union pressure, or institutional culture, the duty to protect children is routinely abandoned.

Against this backdrop, school choice is not a luxury. It is a necessity. There are roughly 50 million K–12 students in the United States, yet only about 1 million currently use school choice. That number is growing rapidly, not just because of ideology, but because families are fleeing systems that no longer function safely for their children.

The scale of the exodus is unprecedented. Arizona has seen enrollment drops exceeding 100,000 students. Florida now has approximately 500,000 students using education savings accounts, out of roughly 3 million students statewide. Districts are closing schools, blaming demographic shifts and declining birth rates (which is happening too), while refusing to acknowledge that parents are voting with their feet.

Federal law already recognizes the problem of bullying in our schools. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act requires districts to report persistently dangerous schools and offer families the option to transfer. In the 2021–22 school year, not a single school nationwide was reported as persistently dangerous. That changed only after pressure from the Trump administration through a Dear Colleague letter, which forced some states to begin reporting honestly.

Florida’s Hope Scholarship, designed to help victims of bullying escape unsafe schools, and federal education freedom tax credits that fund scholarships in non-school choice states, point the way to what real solutions can look like. They bypass bureaucracies that protect institutions and instead empower families.

The takeaway from the Heritage webinar was not just that bullying is widespread. It is that the system is accommodating it. While appearing to address the issue on the surface, in reality, the problem is allowed to grow. Until families are given real power to leave unsafe environments, no cliche anti-bullying acronym, or federal report, or useless district policy will fix what has become standard operating procedure in too many American schools.