Many classrooms have become noisier and more chaotic as troubled students are allowed to routinely disrupt class without being suspended. This causes teachers to transfer to other schools or leave the teaching profession. And it reduces how much students learn, as a National Bureau of Economic Research paper explains. Instead of being suspended, some students are given “restorative justice”, where they get to talk about why they acted up. Teachers like Daniel Buck have pointed out that “restorative justice” doesn’t work. Restorative justice gave a free pass to a student who later went on to kill 17 people in a mass shooting.
A teacher describes how a lack of school discipline for just one badly-behaved student triggered a chain reaction that caused hundreds of students to get a bad education, and resulted in at least three teachers leaving the school, including the “best lesson writer”:
1/ “What happens when you don’t suspend a student. A case study. About 15/16 months ago. A student is chronically disruptive, and is intentionally miserable to his teacher. The teacher is at her wits end, and meetings are held to figure it all out. Here’s what happened.”
“2/ This student was only in her class to begin with because she had a good reputation for working with difficult students. So in typical educational fashion, she is given many more difficult students until she is overwhelmed and starting to hate her job. She’s burnt out.”
“3/ The student refuses to do any work. He typically arrives at school at the end of first block, will skip 2nd and 3rd block, and then attends 4th block while waiting for the bus home. He’s passing nothing, he has no intention on passing anything.”
“4/ because he is a freshman, he is at no risk of being moved for academic reasons until the end of next year. Most sophomores in his group will pass just enough classes by sophomore year to avoid being moved out of the school building so they can stick around another year or two.”
“5/ He has no intention on behaving in the classroom either. While many students are content to play quietly on their phones all period, he doesn’t use ear pods and plays music and tik toks for all to hear, he walks around the room and even out of the room as often as he wants.”
“6/ She’s called home, shes written him up. She has assigned her own detention once a week, though he could earn one every day. And he doesnt stay after for them anyway. It takes a few weeks for a teacher detention to turn into a school detention, and he doesn’t serve those either.”
“7/ So she slowed down with that since nothing happens anyway. This is the first thing admin bring up “we need more documentation. We just started the third quarter, so everything starts over, your last documentation was a month ago.”
“8/ None of his other teachers are writing him up or documenting him for hardly going to any of their classes. And they are probably glad he is skipping their classes. But now more burden is on her because ‘nobody else seems to have a problem with him.'”
“9/ So they won’t switch him to another class because then “teachers will just start complaining about students non stop to get their classes changed” He doesn’t qualify for a new academic placement because he’s a freshman. And the alternative high school is already full.”
“10/ Suspension also isn’t an option. He already had one suspension for his part in a brawl in the hallway earlier in the fall, and that did not change his behavior ‘he needs to be in school’ plus, our suspension data is under a microscope. This would be seem as an ‘elective oss'”
“11/ Defiance and disruption as the reason for a suspension is not looked upon well by district and state higher ups. It’s seen as a failure by the teacher and building leadership. She is encouraged to just try harder to work with him.”
“12/ The teacher is mad, starts openly talking about looking for another job. The AP in charge of all this tells her to focus on ‘finding her why’ The Department chair and queen bee is mad that she’s talking about leaving, and suggests maybe she should leave if she hates it here.”
“13/ So, she bails. Switches to a different school and grade level. DC is mad at her for leaving, and in more of a bad mood when we can’t find anyone to fill the position. So the rest of us lose electives and have larger class sizes this year. I essentially get her course load.”
“14/ They also have a few teachers from outside our content area teach some of the sections. A few manage it well, a few don’t know the content at all and don’t do much besides rolling out our lessons and telling their class to ‘try their best'”
“15/ The least competent of these teachers is given the more advanced classes because ‘those are the only classes she can handle’ So now I have no advanced kids and the advanced kids gets a teacher who can’t really teach, and doesn’t know the subject matter at all.”
“16/ Shortly after, the AP announced she’s moving to an AP position at another school. The DC openly talks about leaving but ultimately won’t because she enjoys her queen bee status too much. But her attitude has changed, as has everyone’s attitude towards her.”
“17/ Other department members start openly applying for other jobs. Two more leave during the next year. Two more still looking, including the original teachers “work husband” who has now reached levels of burn out seldom seen in nature.”
“18/ Oh, and she had a good personality and was our content groups best lesson writer. She always did the final touch ups on lessons other people wrote and put in a lot of time into this. Not easily replaced, nor could we fill her position at all.”
“19/ The student returns this year and is in my class. Because I have him first period, I rarely see him. But when I do he comes in late, doesn’t do any work and his behavior is miserable. By October, mom pulls him from the school and we never see him again. THE END”
Writing in National Affairs, teacher Daniel Buck explains that “restorative justice” doesn’t work — “punitive discipline” does:
You don’t quickly forget the sound of a child gagging as another child clutches him in a chokehold. As a middle-school teacher, I turned the corner in the hallway one day and found a child with his arms wrapped around the neck of a refugee student — a population that was frequently the target of bullying. The perpetrator had instigated several incidents before, and he was involved in several more thereafter.
At another school where I taught, we had fights at least weekly. On one occasion, as students spilled into my classroom, a boy asked me why we had so many. He said he was embarrassed to attend the school.
Such stories are not outliers. According to reporting by the Wall Street Journal, misbehavior, office referrals, and violence spiked this past year in schools and districts across the country. The Washington Post has found a similar pattern. Individual districts reported a marked rise in such behavior. In my own conversations, teachers said their behavior rosters were the only evidence they needed of worsening conduct; some told me their schools hit referral records by mid-year….it is crucial to focus on one clear driver of the problem — the trend away from punitive discipline in schools…Alternatives to standard, punitive discipline, while glittering ideals in the abstract, are a resounding failure in practice…..In many schools, disciplinary reforms have taken the form of “restorative justice,” which focuses on mediation and restitution as opposed to punishment. The theory envisions schools as places where students are supported emotionally through various therapeutic and community-building prophylactics. Interpersonal squabbles result in community circles where students are asked deeply personal questions about their mental health and any trauma they’ve experienced. Classroom disruptions garner a chat with the school counselor. In Dallas public schools, misbehaving students kicked out of the classroom are sent to “reset centers” full of stress balls and bean bags.
Sadly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the rigorous evidence we have on restorative justice finds that it doesn’t achieve its promised goals. The RAND Corporation ran two studies on the theory…[one found that] academics worsened while arrest rates remained the same. The second study found that restorative-justice techniques….placed a heavy burden on teachers.
I watched this sequence play out in the school where I taught. When my district moved to replace traditional disciplinary practices with restorative justice…classrooms became more difficult to manage….
I’ve seen how a return to punitive justice can improve a school environment. When a school where I taught brought in an interim principal, he pushed for an aggressive focus on clear hallways and timely class attendance….within weeks, the culture of the school began to change for the better. When teachers could begin classes in a timely fashion, their classrooms developed smoother routines. When the hallways outside classrooms were quiet, students were able to focus inside their classrooms….Students who usually spent hours wandering the hallways attended class, rubbed shoulders with their more academically minded peers, and developed relationships with teachers.
An LU blogger has two relatives who work in schools, both of whom say that restorative justice doesn’t work and causes learning loss. One is a black vice principal in California who tells him that restorative justice emboldens kids who persistently disrupt class and defy their teachers, resulting in them escalating their behavior until they finally do something so bad that they can be suspended, like attacking a teacher. (California bans suspensions for “willful defiance,” but most kids can still be suspended for extreme things like violently attacking other kids). The other is a special education teacher in Washington State. She also says restorative justice doesn’t work, and she points out that kids who are coddled and allowed to escape accountability sometimes go on to commit crimes for which they are arrested.
The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think-tank, published “Restorative justice gone wrong: One mother’s horror story,” describing the harm caused by restorative justice policies.
Frederick Hess, the head of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, points out that “restorative justice” policies have “disappointing results.” He says that “restorative justice is aggressively, naively Rousseauian and ignores much of what we know about human behavior.”
