Where Discipline Reform Has Gone Wrong (in Some Schools)

Listen to the interview with Alex Shevrin Venet and bink jones (transcript):

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Something has gone wrong in the way many schools are handling student behavior, and we need to talk about it.

I have been part of a larger push for discipline reform for nearly a decade now. I have promoted approaches to student behavior that prioritize things like relationship- and community-building, repairing harm, trauma-informed teaching, centering the voices of marginalized students, and reducing or eliminating exclusionary punishments.

Many of these practices could comfortably fall within the larger category of restorative justice, an approach to conflict resolution with Indigenous roots that is becoming more common in schools every year.

While this should be a positive development, a shift that results in improved behavior in every school that moves in that direction, that’s not what’s happening in every school. For a few years now, I’ve been hearing from teachers in various spaces that the discipline systems at their schools have completely broken down, creating an environment where students basically do whatever they want with no consequences. This has made teachers feel frustrated, angry, unsupported, and in some cases, unsafe.

In at least some of these schools, what I think is happening is that leadership has gotten a broad, “restorative justice light” message that Suspensions Are Bad, that in fact, any consequences at all are now taboo, and teachers should stop sending students to the office for behavior issues. In the rare circumstances when teachers do find this necessary, the student in question should be given a snack and sent back to class. This is not at ALL what restorative practices are supposed to look like, so it’s no wonder this approach isn’t working.

To get a clearer picture of how widespread this problem is, I conducted a survey of my readers, one for teachers and another for administrators. I found that indeed, this is a big problem in a lot of schools. A variety of problems are mentioned, including changes in student behavior since the pandemic, disengaged parents, and a shortage of qualified teachers, but I was most interested in looking at how the movement toward restorative approaches was impacting the overall discipline landscape. Here are a few numbers that stood out to me:

• Of the 641 public school teachers who responded (this was the biggest group of respondents), nearly 45 percent rated the overall effectiveness of student discipline at their schools as “somewhat ineffective” or “very ineffective.”
• Over half of public school teachers reported that their school had adopted restorative practices as part of their discipline approach (23 percent said they weren’t sure).
• Of those who said their school had implemented restorative practices, 61 percent reported that implementation was not going well, that there was confusion or inconsistency in how restorative practices were being used. Eleven percent said restorative practices were making discipline problems worse.

My gut tells me that the problem isn’t actually restorative practices; it’s the misunderstanding and misapplication of them. It’s poorly implemented or even barely implemented restorative practices.

Because I don’t have the training, the experience, or the vocabulary to flesh out this theory, I invited two people who have all of those things to talk to me about this problem: Alex Shevrin Venet, who has been on the podcast three times to talk about trauma-informed teaching, and bink jones, a restorative justice educator who works directly with schools to develop and implement restorative practices.

And we had a really good conversation. Alex and bink are well aware that restorative practices are getting a bad rap for all the wrong reasons, they unequivocally validate the frustrations teachers are experiencing, and they explain what they think is going wrong in schools that aren’t seeing good results from this framework. They offer a path forward for educators who are desperate for a healthy, respectful, productive climate in their schools. This is one of the longest podcast episodes I’ve ever done, but it’s worth every minute. You can listen to the full episode in the player above or read the transcript here. Below are some highlights.

Note on terminology: In this article and in our conversation, the terms restorative justice (RJ) and restorative practices are used somewhat interchangeably. I asked jones to explain the difference: “Restorative justice is the outcome. Justice is where we get to,” she said. “Restorative practices are the things we do to get us to justice.”

Why Restorative Practices Aren’t Working in Some Schools

In their work with schools, both of my guests have observed some common mistakes that are making the shift to restorative practices unsuccessful.

1. Insufficient Training

Probably the biggest issue is that some schools are not providing enough professional development to teachers in how to implement restorative practices. “Schools are giving five professional development hours to restorative justice and saying, great, we’re done,” Venet says. “How could you do that in five hours?”

Properly implemented restorative practices take years of training to get right, and that training requires a big shift in mindset.

“Restorative justice is not a program,” Venet explains. “It’s a paradigm. It’s actually a very radical paradigm shift. If you really look at it, what you’re asking schools to do when they implement RJ is reject what American society says about how we hold people accountable for harm and do something completely different. That is a huge ask. That’s taking what people have been taught their entire life about how should people be accountable when they break a law? What should happen to someone when they steal from you? What should happen to someone who commits violence? These are the core questions that RJ looks at and really tries to shift. Throwing them in jail doesn’t work. Giving them a fine doesn’t work. What does work is having tighter-knit communities where people are truly accountable to one another. It’s a lot messier than throwing people in jail and giving them a fine. It’s a lot slower than throwing people in jail and giving them a fine. And so applying that to school, you’re not only asking people to radically rethink student behavior, you’re also asking them to radically rethink all of their assumptions about right and wrong and the legal system in America.”

2. Skipping to the End

In schools where restorative practices aren’t working, leadership is often only changing the end — the punishment — and not doing all the building that’s necessary to form a foundation. If a school only removes exclusionary discipline but doesn’t do anything to build a restorative culture, the change in consequences is doomed to fail.

“Restorative justice is not a discipline program,” jones says. “It’s a new way of seeing. It’s a new way of being. It begins with connection. It begins with community. Everybody’s trying to start with the end, and it doesn’t work that way. It creates massive frustration and a massive lack of safety for teachers. When I hear teachers telling me about what’s happening under the name of ‘restorative justice,’ I get why they’re hungry for exclusionary discipline too, because it feels like the only thing that will save them.”

“You can’t restore to a relationship that didn’t exist in the first place,” Venet says. “If we don’t have a relationship, if I don’t really care that I impacted you, then why would I care about making it right with you?”

3. Expecting Fast Results

Schools that see restorative justice as just another program that can be quickly implemented are going to be disappointed.

“I spend the first year, the first two years sometimes, just talking about this mindset, just trying to convince people that this could work, that this is a way we could see accountability, that it is possible,” jones says. “All these grants come out and they want to see outcomes in the first year, they want to see suspensions change and detentions different and attendance is up. And it’s like, dude, by the end of the first year, hopefully I have teachers who are now feeling comfortable with the possibility that maybe this could work.”

4. Administrators Opting Out of Professional Development

“When you have this this disconnect between what happens with the admin and the teachers,” jones says, “a lot of times what happens is administrators don’t attend professional development. They have other stuff to do, more important things to do. And I can’t think of anything more important than this. If your goal is to change the culture of your school, every single person you can get in that room needs to be in that room. If my administrators aren’t there learning what I’m learning or being asked to do what I’m doing, how could they possibly support me? We need to start looking at how we’re spending our time, how we’re investing our resources and what we are saying are our priorities so there’s a common language, a common understanding. I may not know the exact action that my principal will take when a student lands in their office, but I do know the concept and the philosophy they’ll be approaching things with.”

5. Parents Kept Out of the Loop

For a new approach to discipline to work, parents need to be fully brought on board; otherwise, they’ll be incredibly confused and upset about why students aren’t getting the same consequences for behavior that they used to.

In schools where RJ is working, parents are treated as part of the whole community. “They aren’t calling asking what happened to the other kid because they already know, and they know what will happen when their child makes a mistake. When you have a thoroughly restorative culture built, you don’t have those calls that often because most people understand what’s happening.”

What Can Individual Teachers Do?

So if you’re teaching in a school that’s not really implementing restorative justice with fidelity, or they are making some of these missteps, what can you do? If RJ takes time and patience and high-quality training to implement, but you don’t really have time to wait for that because things are already headed down the wrong road at your school, what can you do?

“Teachers actually can use a lot of the pieces themselves,” Venet says, “even without that systemic support, and can find a lot of traction with smaller strategies underneath the umbrella, even if you don’t have the systemic support.”

A Lab Mindset

“I personally work with a lot of teachers who are really using sort of an experimentation mindset,” Venet says, “a lab mindset with their classroom management these days, because everything is so hard, just sort of experimenting with different little strategies to shift how they’re doing things.”

One of these is a restorative conference, a very brief one-on-one talk with a student after some kind of behavior incident. 

“It can be like two minutes,” Venet explains. “Just say, what happened? What were you thinking about at the time? What have you thought about since? And then what do you think could make this as right as possible? So not necessarily guiding the student to apologize, but how are you just going to make this situation better for the people who were impacted?”

The teachers she works with who have used this technique have seen powerful results. “Almost without fail, they have that conversation, they go, Whoa, okay, I learned something behind this behavior that I had no idea was going on. Oh, my student really stepped up into accountability with a creative idea I wouldn’t have thought of. Or even just, I think the student trusts me a little more because I didn’t drop a consequence on their head; I invited their perspective.”

To facilitate this kind of conference, jones keeps restorative questions on a poster in her classroom. “My students knew that that’s what we were going to talk about when I pulled them to the side. It wasn’t this like surprise conversation that all of a sudden they had to think about the answers. They knew that that’s what we were going to go through to get to the other side.”

Visualizing a Better Classroom Environment

Even if a school isn’t set up for restorative practices, a teacher can create a restorative environment in their own classroom. 

“Spend your summer thinking about what you want your classroom to feel like,” jones advises. “When you started teaching, how did you imagine it was going to feel to be in your room? And start writing down what you think is needed to create that space. What do you need from your students? What do you need from yourself for that to happen? And then when you show up to school, share with your students what your dream is for your classroom. And ask them, what is theirs? And then how can we create the space that we both feel safe in, that we all feel good in together? When we step out of our agreements, when I mess up, this is how I want you to let me know. When you mess up, this is how we’re going to let each other know. You create that container inside.”

Setting Agreements with Students

Inviting students to co-create classroom norms is one practice that can build a restorative environment. “I am much more likely to abide by something that I had a voice in creating,” jones says. “And I can hold you accountable more easily to something you had a voice in creating. It’s not my rule alone. We all agreed this is what makes the functional classroom. And right now you’re just not meeting that agreement. So how can we get you back?”

This should be done with the awareness that the teacher still has the final word. “Ultimately you are the safety keeper,” jones says. “Ultimately, if the kids come up with an agreement that is off the wall, you work through that and talk about, okay, what is actually going to help us?”

Solving Problems as a Community

Venet offers this suggestion that she credits to Carla Shalaby and her book, Troublemakers. 

“Often in schools, we take something that’s actually a community problem and we treat it as an individual one. So, for example, a kid who is constantly buzzing around and not sitting down in the circle and distracting everyone. That’s actually a community problem, right? Our community is having a hard time because not everybody in our community is showing up to our morning circle together. But we often treat it as just that kid’s problem. And we think about how do I give a consequence to this kid or how do I separate this kid because they’re being distracting? What happens when we bring to the whole class, hey, sometimes in our morning circle, not everyone’s sitting down. What should we do about that as a group? How do we solve this together? How do we support one another together?”

Looking Ahead

Our conversation covered a lot of ground, far more than I can summarize here, but I want to add one last part. At the end of our time together, I asked this question of both of my guests: Are you feeling optimistic that people who work in challenging situations actually can turn things around?

Both said yes.

“I work with teachers all the time who are in this,” Venet said. “They want to create a better world through the way they’re teaching. I hear all the time stories of interactions with students they had, interactions with families where they really shifted the energy or where a student who was struggling is struggling less or even bigger success stories. And despite how grim things are on a national and global level, I always come back to the idea that these systems from above, the federal Department of Education, that was never going to be the reason that we had communities in schools. It was always going to be us working with each other. It was always going to be us helping each other. The system isn’t here to take care of us. It’s not coming from above. We’re here for each other. And I see every single day, not just in education, but in so many places right now, people really leaning into that. And that really gives me hope that we’re going to get through all the things together.”

“As many things as we can see that challenge us,” jones said, “there are counterparts that are working for the greater good. I am working with a group of teachers right now that can’t wait to do this and who have recognized some inequities that were happening in their practice just by watching circle happen; they’ve got other parts of their practice that they’re realizing they want to shift just because of how they’ve seen their kids interact in that space. And so that’s why I do a lot of times when I start with people, the first place I ask you to go is to that dream of what your classroom was going to be like, because you can make it that way. We have the power. We have everything we need — ‘We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.'”

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