Education experts everywhere are upset over directive from the Departments of Justice and Education that instructs schools to cease punishing disruptive students if they fall into certain racial categories.

The letter, released on Wednesday, states that it is a violation of federal law for schools to punish certain races more than others, even if those punishments stem from completely neutral rules. For example, equal numbers of black students and white students should be punished for tardiness, even if black students are more often tardy than white students.

Education professionals explain why this approach is doomed to failure:

The Daily Caller asked several education experts to weigh in the letter’s recommendations; all three raised serious concerns about the ramifications of changing school disciplinary procedures to engineer equal outcomes across the races.

Joy Pullmann, managing editor of School Reform News, told TheDC that any notion of equal racial discipline is obviously flawed.

“It’s ridiculous to assign quotas for discipline based on race,” she said. “If we did that, for one thing, we’d have to believe that Asian students are severely under-disciplined.”

Andrew Coulson, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute, said the letter’s policies, if implemented, would actually harm black children, by making the classrooms they inhabit “more chaotic.”

“The kinds [of kids] who just want to be free to learn in peace, who are not disruptive, have their education injured by the disruptive kids who remain in the classroom,” Coulson told TheDC. “And since African American kids are more often assigned to schools like that, they’ll be the ones most hurt.”

Coulson previously testified before the U.S. Senate that establishing disciplinary racial quotas would be disruptive to students, but his advice was ignored. “Pivotal research” was omitted from the recent memo, he said.

“They risk harming the education of a lot of kids,” he said.

Frederick Hess, director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, described the letter as “troubling,” and an attempt to intimidate schools into initiating bad policy.

“As best I can tell, they are telling schools that even if you have policies that are clearly neutral, that are clearly evenhanded, that are clearly designed to create safe environments for students and educators, DOJ still might come down on you like a ton of bricks,” Hess told TheDC.