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Restorative justice is damaging American schools
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Hundreds of school districts and more than 18,000 schools in the US have adopted restorative justice policies in recent years, wherein traditional punishments are replaced with efforts at reconciliation between students.
Parents Defending Education published a list this week of each school district in the US that incorporates restorative justice in its disciplinary codes, with such schools representing more than 11 million students in districts such as New York City, Baltimore and San Francisco.
Some time around 2013, public opinion seemed to coalesce around the belief that removing unruly students from the classroom “didn’t work”, in that it failed to solve underlying behavioural issues. Restorative justice holds that suspensions, expulsions and the involvement of law enforcement to punish misbehaving students constitute a “school-to-prison pipeline” that feeds into structural racism. The restorative justice approach seeks to correct this by replacing punishments with preventative measures, often in the form of dialogue and talking circles.
The underlying principle is that excluding students from the classroom doesn’t improve their behaviour or educational outcomes. But with teachers unable to remove disruptive and even violent children and teenagers, it’s rule-following pupils who suffer.
Restorative justice focuses heavily on social issues, particularly race. The restorative justice curriculum of schools in Oakland, California includes “talking circles to address race and gender equity issues in a preventive way”, while students are encouraged to explore their feelings about “heterosexual privilege”.
In New York City, the push for restorative justice has brought about new rules making suspensions and expulsions more difficult. The city’s Department of Education requires schools to document three instances of non-punitive interventions in response to a student’s bad behaviour before suspending them, and schools are barred from involving the police over infractions such as marijuana possession. A 2015 memo from then-Mayor Bill DeBlasio laid out statistics on the racial disparities in school disciplinary incidents, and reducing racial disparities in punishments was an explicit goal of the restorative justice plan.
New York’s policies in particular have yielded shocking headlines. Two boys remained in school and were sent to “restorative mediation” and “wellness check-ins” after beating an 11-year old girl and sharing footage of the attack on the internet.
For all of restorative justice’s emphasis on prevention, it’s far from clear that these methods are causing a decline in school violence and behavioural issues. Online teacher forums are awash with complaints about “zero consequence culture”, with some questioning why pupil misbehaviour is “swept under the rug”. Educators are despairing that administrators’ failure to enforce discipline is making classrooms unmanageable and chaotic. All, it would seem, because school leadership teams want to maintain low rates of suspensions and expulsions. “Principals need their numbers to look good,” one forum member claimed. “That’s the bottom line.”
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Originally Posted by Hektor12
United Kingdom
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