The predictable failure of ‘restorative justice’ in schools

As American students enter the 2023-2024 school year, our educational system faces three interlocking crises: severe academic underperformance, rampant student misbehavior and an unprecedented teacher shortage.

While there are many components to each of these issues, one common thread linking and exacerbating them all is the turn toward so-called restorative justice in schools.

In contrast to traditional approaches to discipline, which rely on punishment to deter future misbehavior, restorative justice “encourages students to reflect on their transgressions and their root causes, talk about them — usually with the victims of the misbehavior — and try to make amends.” This approach began to gain adherents in the mid-2010s and has gained popularity in the near decade since, despite the — entirely predictable — evidence against its efficacy.

It should have been obvious that academic outcomes would get worse if students could misbehave with impunity. Anyone who has ever managed a classroom knows that when students who are attempting to stay on task are distracted by other students who are constantly disrupting, learning suffers. While suspensions and expulsions are extreme measures (the efficacy of which can be justly called into question with respect to misbehaving students themselves), they do provide well-behaved students relief from disruption and/or victimization; they also act as deterrents to those who might be inclined to misbehave.

It is no surprise that, without these disciplinary measures, teachers’ time is more consistently wasted on classroom management, students are more consistently disrupted and chaos reigns. And chaotic environments are not ideal for academic learning.

It should have been equally obvious that students would misbehave more if they faced no punitive consequences for misbehavior. Some restorative justice programs go so far as to reward misbehavior with time in a “decompression room” and the administration of snacks. Nearly all of them encourage students to blame factors outside their own control for misbehavior.

While interrogating motivations for bad behavior and developing the emotional language and self-awareness to speak negative feelings rather than act on them is indeed useful, it becomes counterproductive if we assume, as many restorative justice advocates do, that said motivations are external to the child rather than borne of their own innate desire to do something wrong (i.e., what we used to call temptation).

When students learn to say “I pushed you because I was hungry” or the like, they are claiming external reasons for antisocial behavior. In this way, restorative justice fails to inculcate in students the self-control required to behave in pro-social ways. After all, whether I pushed you because I was hungry or because I was angry at you isn’t ultimately relevant, because I will inevitably be hungry or angry again — but we don’t want me to push you again even so, right? Neither my eating schedule nor my visceral emotions will always be ideal; so, best to recognize that, contra the zeitgeist of restorative justice, the problematic behavior has only one source that I can control: my own susceptibility to temptation.

Finally, it should have been obvious that teachers, like all rational human beings, prefer order to chaos, safety to danger, and purpose to futility. Take away a school’s ability to use the traditional disciplinary methods that actually work to facilitate order and safety, and many teachers will inevitably move on to less challenging, more fulfilling jobs. Babysitting preteens and teens — and, make no mistake, that is what school becomes when order is absent — is not purposeful work for good teachers. So, it’s not just attrition that’s the problem, but attrition of the very teachers that refuse to be part of this charade.

Each of these entirely predictable consequences of schools in which misbehavior has no real consequences was denied in deference to an ideological commitment to produce racial equity in suspension rates. As in the case of many such short-sighted, virtue-signaling polices, it is socio-economically disadvantaged children of color — the vast majority of whom are victims, not perpetrators, of school-based violence and misbehavior — who suffer the consequences of this blind ideological adherence to obvious illogic.  And all so that progressive elites, most of them white, can feel good about using the word “justice” to describe a new system that in fact perpetrates, on their watch, ever more profound injustice against the very people they claim to want to help.

Elizabeth Grace Matthew is a visiting fellow at Independent Women’s Forum and a Young Voices Contributor.