Also published in American Thinker Tue. September 1, « Show Fewer. Williamson M. Vicki E. Alger is a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. Twitter Email. One was already suspended for assaulting another student, and the other two could not be suspended due to district policy on excessive suspensions for certain groups of students.
We ultimately pulled our son from the district. I am a career educator and strong believer in public education. But I am a mom first. The reality is that theory and practice are very different. My research of the theory convinced me that I should introduce restorative justice in my school, but my research of the practice in similar schools and districts changed my mind. The story of my son was further confirmation that I had made the right choice.
She holds a B. Advancing Educational Excellence. Search Search. Julia Carlson. My happy little boy wanted to die. Policy Priority: High Expectations. Topics: Governance.
Sign Up to Receive Fordham Updates. Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get stories like this delivered directly to your inbox. Get important education news and analysis delivered straight to your inbox. In , the Obama Administration jolted the education world with a report detailing unfair and racist school discipline practices across the country.
Sixteen percent of all black students were being suspended, more than three times the rate of white students. Even preschoolers were being suspended at alarming rates.
In education settings, there are various ways to implement this alternative to suspensions and expulsions but it generally involves having kids sit in a circle and discuss their conflicts with the help of an adult mediator. Early research seemed promising. Sometimes, early adopters even claimed that student achievement improved. No studies could prove that the restorative justice programs were causing any of the positive changes that the advocates had noticed.
By late even proponents openly worried that schools had moved too quickly. At last, more sophisticated research has been commissioned, and the results are starting to trickle in. For proponents of restorative justice, the first two studies are not especially promising with both failing to show clear benefits for these non-punitive approaches to student discipline. Academic achievement fell for some students who were exposed to restorative justice compared to students at schools who were disciplined as usual.
Implementation problems were common. Both studies were conducted by RAND Corporation, a research firm, which randomly assigned schools in the city of Pittsburgh and the state of Maine to try restorative justice practices.
The institute is a research, development and evaluation agency of the U. Department of Justice. Department of Health and Human Services. Accepting that premise, the negative results for black students should suggest that restorative justice is an even more culturally incompetent approach. The researchers conduct an admittedly non-causal empirical dance to support the proposition that the disjunction between teacher and student perception of teacher classroom management is due to non-implementing teachers.
That could be true. It could also be true that teachers think that it makes them better, even as students see their classroom climate deteriorating. And perhaps the most salutary effect of the Trump era is the extreme and extremely justified skepticism of policy elites. Despite the fact that this study represents the most rigorous empirical examination of restorative justice, editorial decisions made in the game of telephone from researchers to journalists to advocates to educators all but guarantee that school leaders would be better informed if they never heard of it.
Advancing Educational Excellence.
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