Restorative justice, or restorative practices [1], has arisen as a prominent alternative to exclusionary discipline. Fellow Pedagogies of Punishment blog contributors Martha Minow and Laura Oxley have pointed to the promise of restorative justice in schools, while Julia Carlson highlighted challenges to successful implementation. While I agree that restorative justice is a worthy aim, and research to date suggests that we should proceed with caution, restorative justice can be interpreted in more and less radical ways, and school implementation can either reproduce social inequality or challenge it.

Schools began adopting restorative justice in the early 2000s, and the approach has proliferated rapidly in recent years as critiques of zero-tolerance discipline have come to a head. In light of racially disproportionate discipline data (Green 2018), exclusionary discipline is not only discouraged but can lead to investigation and sanctions by the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights if schools are found to be in violation of Title VI, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin. For many schools, restorative justice has come to fill a void that exclusionary discipline once filled.

 Winn (2018) argues for a vision of restorative justice that she terms “transformative justice.” Transformative justice requires a participatory democracy in which students have an equal voice relative to other students and educators, and which “holds our educators accountable for identifying institutional racism and racist policies that they participate in” (Winn, 2018). Transformative justice is preferable to less radical understandings of restorative justice, because it challenges social inequality in schools by equalizing relationships between educators and students and placing responsibility on all community members for addressing systems of inequality. Despite this radical vision for schools as transformative spaces, a nascent body of research suggests that restorative justice can perpetuate or even exacerbate social inequalities in practice (Lustick, 2017; Winn, 2018). In particular, restorative justice can perpetuate racial and gender inequality when it is integrated into existing behavioral frameworks that stigmatize student misbehavior (Ispa-Landa, 2017; Winn, 2018), when it is used as a tool for social control (Lustick, 2017; Reimer, 2018), and when the work of restorative justice is distributed disproportionately along lines of race and gender (Lustick, 2017; Winn, 2018 ). These barriers pose a persistent challenge for schools and educators aiming to shift school disciplinary practices and sheds light on an important gap between restorative justice theory and practice.

Ispa-Landa (2017) argues that restorative justice in its ideal form aims to destigmatize and decriminalize student misbehavior by allowing students to “take it upon themselves to find ways to correct past wrongs” (p. 2). In contrast, traditional “punitive” practices stigmatize student misbehavior; for example, through the use of suspension and expulsion. Punitive practices can also criminalize students; for example, school police officers have the power to ticket and arrest students. Punitive and restorative practices do not merely exist parallel to one another and are often intertwined in practice (Ispa-Landa, 2017). Restorative justice programs are frequently introduced in schools with suspension and expulsion policies and school police officer programs (Ispa-Landa, 2017). In our recent research, Erica Turner and I found that school police officers in one midwestern city were trained and embedded in school restorative justice (Turner & Beneke, 2020). While individual police officers may be well-intentioned, the involvement of law enforcement in restorative justice programs constitutes an extension of the role of police officers in the educational mission of schools and in students’ lives, exacerbating their exposure to the criminal justice system (Turner & Beneke, 2020). School police officers “may be more likely to construct counseling and behavioral issues as criminal problems” (Ispa-Landa, 2017, p. 2) and thus put Black and Latinx students, who are already disproportionately suspended and expelled, at further risk of being pushed out of schools and into the criminal justice system (Crenshaw, Ocen, & Jyoti, 2015; Kupchik, 2010; Morris, 2018). Restorative justice is weakened, or worse yet, coopted as a punitive tool when implemented in schools with suspension, expulsion, and school police officers. 

Regardless of the formal discipline policies at a given school, the way that restorative justice is implemented can either be used to offer students an authentic opportunity to identify and solve problems in partnership with adults or as a top-down approach for achieving student compliance. Drawing on her research of an elementary school in Alberta, Canada and a high school in eastern Scotland, Reimer (2018) found that the high school emphasized restorative practices as a means for teaching students to behave in a different way and “take responsibility for their own actions” (p. 126). Restorative justice implemented in this way does not give students the opportunity to identify and address problems; rather, it reinforces compliance with adult-determined school rules. Similarly, in her study of three schools in New York City implementing restorative justice, Lustick (2017) found that while suspension rates were lowered, restorative justice “ultimately reinforced traditional notions of order in the school” (p. 12). School deans had restorative conversations with students, but these conversations were “symbolically democratic” in that they were ultimately aimed at quelling student resistance and gaining compliance with school rules (Lustick, 2017, p. 21). Restorative justice implementation predicated on the maintenance of adult control does little to allow for democratic schools where all community members’ voices are heard, nor does it allow for adults in the school building to authentically reflect on and address historical racial inequalities (Lustick, 2017).

The distribution of restorative justice labor can also undermine racial and gender equality in schools when the burden of building community and repairing harm falls disproportionately on female students and staff of color. For example, Lustick (2017) found that school staff relied on non-white restorative justice coordinators from the same neighborhoods as their students to “bond with, contain, and compel obedience from students of color” (p. 1). These staff conversed with students who had frequent conflicts with teachers, heard their anger, talked to them about how to emotionally care for themselves, and about the power structures they faced at school and in the community (Lustick, 2017). In her study, Winn (2018) found that female students and staff of color were predominately responsible for restorative justice work in one midwestern high school. Student Circle Keepers, the majority of whom identified as Black and female, were primarily responsible for facilitating conflict circles with students who were referred to conflict circles—who were also predominately Black and female (Winn, 2018). Women and staff of color were some of the only school staff trained in restorative justice and expressed feeling overwhelmed with the need for restorative justice and the burden of other work. As Winn (2018) argues, the reliance on Black students for doing the work of restorative justice assumes that all Black students can and will relate to each other (Winn, 2018). Furthermore, this approach fails to “hold the entire school community responsible for finding ways to be in relationship with one another” (Winn, 2018, p. 121). While restorative justice leadership positions imbue students and staff with agency, it can also constitute another instantiation of racial and gender inequality if their male and white counterparts are not also willing to work to build restorative communities.

Restorative justice remains a worthy aim for creating more democratic and equitable schools that allow for all students to have an equal voice (Pranis, 2012). However, restorative justice proponents should remain critically aware of the pitfalls schools are likely to encounter along the way. One possibility for countering inequitable restorative justice implementation is by introducing restorative justice to educators as a “paradigm shift” (Zehr, 1990; Winn, 2018) rather than a method or set of practices. While circles, restorative conversations, and peer mediation are core components of restorative justice, perhaps more important is educators’ commitment to the value and dignity of all school community members (Winn, 2018). Emphasizing the theory of restorative justice may be one way of mending the divide between restorative justice theory and practice.

Notes

[1] See Maisha Winn’s critique of the term “restorative practices” in Justice on Both Sides (2018).

References

Binkley, C. (2018, December 21). Trump officials cancel Obama-era policy on school discipline.  AP News. Retrieved from https://apnews.com/07c8e7c5a69942699f7640890677c2d2

Crenshaw, K., Ocen, P., & Nanda, J. (2015). Black girls matter: Pushed out, overpoliced, and underprotected. New York: African American Policy Forum, Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies.

Evans, K. & Vaandering, D. (2016). The little book of restorative justice in education: Fostering responsibility, healing, and hope in schools. Intercourse, PA: Good Books.

Green, E.L. (2018, April 4). Government watchdog finds racial bias in school discipline. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/us/politics/racial-bias- school-discipline-policies.html

Ispa-Landa, S. (2017). Racial and gender inequality and school discipline: Toward a more comprehensive view of school policy. Social Currents, 00(0), 1-7.

Kuchik, A. (2010). Homeroom security: School discipline in an age of fear. New York, NY: New York University Press.

Lustick, H. (2017). “Restorative justice” or restoring order? Restorative school discipline practices in urban public schools. Urban Education, 00(0), 1-28.

Morris, M. (2018). Pushout: The criminalization of Black girls in schools. New York, NY: The New Press.

Pranis, K. (2012). The restorative impulse. Tikkun, 33-34.

Reimer, K. (2019). Adult intentions, student perceptions: How restorative justice is used in schools to control and engage. Information Age Publishing.

Turner, E. & Beneke, A.J. (2020). ‘Softening’ School Resource Officers: The extension of police presence in schools in an era of Black Lives Matter, school shootings, and rising inequality. Race, Ethnicity & Education, 23 (2), 221-240.

U.S. Department of Education (2014). Joint “dear colleague” letter. Office for Civil Rights. Retrieved from https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/letters/colleague-201401-title- vi.html

Winn, M.T. (2018). Justice on both sides: Transforming education through restorative justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

Zehr, H. (2002). The little book of restorative justice. Intercourse, PA: Good Books.

Abigail Beneke is a PhD candidate in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Using qualitative case study methods and critical sociocultural theories, her research examines issues of race and equity in school discipline policy and practice. Beneke’s dissertation examines educators’ sensemaking and enactment of restorative justice using a comparative case study design. Beneke holds a BA in anthropology from Lawrence University and an MA in urban education. Before studying at UW-Madison, Beneke taught first grade in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.