What Is Restorative Justice Discipline, and Who Pays?

Your child mentions it at dinner, somewhere between the potatoes and asking to be excused: the boy who threw a chair in third period was back in his seat by fourth. They sat in a circle and talked about how it made everyone feel. Then math resumed, twenty minutes short.

You are not against talking. You know what talking is worth: everything when something stands behind it, nothing when nothing does.

The school has a lovely name for what happened in third period. Here is the plain version: restorative justice replaces suspensions with conversations, and the research says the half-done version is what costs the kids who follow the rules. By the end you will know what it actually is, what the three strongest studies found, and the five questions that tell you which version your school bought.

The short answer#

Restorative justice discipline answers misbehavior with a structured conversation instead of a suspension: a circle, a conference, and questions about who was harmed and how to repair it (Zehr Institute). The best research is not a verdict on that philosophy but on the follow-through.

What costs the child who follows the rules is not restorative justice itself, but the half-done version most schools actually buy. Schools that fully replaced suspensions left their other students' learning untouched, while schools that went halfway watched peers' math scores fall (Steinberg and Lacoe).

What this guide covers#

• What restorative justice discipline actually is
• How it got into your child's school
• What the research actually found
• The finding nobody puts in the newsletter
• What it costs the child who follows the rules
• Five questions that tell you which version you bought
• Frequently asked questions

What restorative justice discipline actually is#

Start by giving it its due, because a fair fight begins with an honest description.

Restorative justice did not start in schools. It grew up in the 1970s as a different way of answering crime, one that asked a different set of questions than a courtroom asks. Not "what rule was broken and what does the offender have coming," but who was hurt, what do they need, and whose job is it to put it right (Zehr Institute).

Howard Zehr, the man most responsible for the idea, states the aim without hedging: rather than obsessing about whether offenders get what they deserve, it focuses on repairing the harm and engaging the community in the process (Zehr Institute).

In a school, a philosophy has to become a schedule. RAND's inventory of Pittsburgh's program lists eleven concrete elements, running from "affective statements" (an adult saying out loud how a behavior made him feel) through "responsive circles" (students and staff in a ring, discussing an incident with the child who caused it, careful to emphasize the harm rather than the person) up to full "restorative conferences" for serious incidents, with the family in the room (RAND).

The one-sentence version: Restorative justice answers misbehavior with a conversation about repairing harm, where a suspension would have answered it with a cost.

Now the part that gets skipped by people on my side of the aisle, and it should not be. The case against suspensions is not made of nothing.

Suspension is linked to lower achievement, and one study found it the single strongest predictor of a child dropping out altogether (RAND). In one school year, roughly 3.5 million American public school students were suspended, losing close to 18 million days of instruction (Adukia, Feigenberg, and Momeni).

Eighteen million days. If you think a nine-year-old belongs on his porch at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday for refusing to take off a hat, then you and I disagree, and we can have that argument another time.

It is not this argument. The question was never whether to stop throwing kids out for hats. The question is what got built in its place.

How it got into your child's school#

It did not arrive because your principal read Howard Zehr on vacation.

In January 2014, the U.S. Department of Education and the Department of Justice sent every district in America a letter. It said a discipline policy could violate the Civil Rights Act even when it is neutral on its face and administered evenhandedly, if it lands with a disproportionate and unjustified effect on students of one race (Department of Education).

Read that twice, because the whole story is inside it. The letter made the ratio the offense.

Districts are not stupid, and they are not slow. By May of the next year, 22 states and the District of Columbia had rewritten their laws to limit exclusionary discipline and push non-punitive strategies like restorative justice instead (Steinberg and Lacoe).

The letter itself was rescinded in December 2018 (Department of Education). The programs it seeded stayed exactly where they were.

The tell to remember: When you grade an institution on a number, you have not told it to solve the problem. You have told it to fix the number.

This is not a hunch: back in 1979 a social scientist named Donald Campbell wrote the pattern down as a rule, and it has held up like gravity ever since. The more weight a single number carries in a decision, he warned, "the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor" (Campbell's Law). Point at the suspension count hard enough and the count moves; whether anything underneath it moves is a separate question, and the answer depends entirely on what the school built.

What the research actually found#

Three cities, three serious studies. Read them side by side and a pattern shows up that neither camp is eager to hand you.

Chicago is the strongest case restorative justice has, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. When researchers tracked Chicago Public Schools' rollout across 73 high schools, they found out-of-school suspensions down 17.8 percent and child arrests down 18.8 percent, split across violent (14.8 percent) and non-violent (19.8 percent) offenses (Adukia, Feigenberg, and Momeni).

The number that should stop you is this one: arrests outside of school, on the street, fell 14.7 percent. Chicago police officers do not work for the principal and do not care about his numbers, which is exactly why the authors call that the strongest evidence of genuine change in how kids behaved (Adukia, Feigenberg, and Momeni).

On test scores they found a null effect, "ruling out meaningful average declines." Not a triumph, not a wreck. Nothing.

Pittsburgh is the most rigorous, because it is the one that was randomized: 44 schools, split down the middle, June 2015 to June 2017 (RAND). Suspensions fell hard, disparities in suspension fell with them, and teachers said the climate improved.

And then: academic outcomes did not improve anywhere, they actually worsened in grades 6 through 8, and there was no reduction in violence or arrests at all (RAND).

So one city got real behavior change, and one city got worse math and the same fights. That looks like a contradiction. It is not.

The finding nobody puts in the newsletter#

Philadelphia is where the fog lifts.

Beginning in 2012, the district flatly prohibited out-of-school suspension for two kinds of non-violent misconduct: failing to follow classroom rules, and profane or obscene language (Steinberg and Lacoe). One policy, one district, one year.

Then Matthew Steinberg and Johanna Lacoe did the thing nobody thinks to do. They split the schools by what they actually did about it.

In the schools that took those suspensions all the way to zero, the achievement and attendance of the non-offending peers did not suffer. In the schools that cut suspensions partway and stopped there, peer math achievement declined and school absences rose (Steinberg and Lacoe).

Same policy, same district, same year. Opposite outcome for the kid who sat still and did his worksheet.

Be careful with that, though, because the authors are. The schools that only went partway were also the poorest and lowest-achieving schools in Philadelphia, the ones that did not comply or frankly could not (Steinberg and Lacoe).

So the honest reading is not that half-measures are a magic poison. It is that the schools with the least capacity were handed a mandate and no means, and their kids paid for the gap.

That is not a defense of the districts. That is the indictment. You do not hand the weakest building in town a policy that requires trained adults, and then skip the adults.

Now hold that next to Pittsburgh, a different city and a different research team, where the confound does not apply. RAND found its negative effect on achievement was not about who the students were. It happened at the school level, and the authors went out of their way to name the cause: the likely explanation is "the way in which it was implemented in these schools, rather than any attributes of the students themselves or their out-of-school circumstances" (RAND).

Then RAND drove it home. Among the teachers who actually filled out the survey, the ones using restorative practices most (the top two thirds) had classroom-management ratings no different from teachers at schools that never adopted the program at all. The damage was concentrated among the teachers with very low use, or who were too disengaged to return the survey about their own usage (RAND).

Sit with that. In the same building, under the same banner, the teachers who did the work were fine. The classrooms that fell apart were the ones where the program existed on a poster.

The core of it: Restorative justice does not hurt the kids who follow the rules. Half-done restorative justice does. And half-done is what most districts buy.

What it costs the child who follows the rules#

Pittsburgh handed a survey to the adults and a survey to the children. Then it published both, which was either brave or careless, and either way we should be grateful.

The adults were pleased. On managing student conduct, teachers in the restorative schools rated their schools 0.31 standard deviations better than teachers in the schools without the program, a statistically significant jump. They understood the conduct policies better, and they felt they worked in a safer building (RAND).

One item on that same teacher survey asked whether students actually follow the rules of conduct. It moved minus 0.05, which is to say it did not move: a stone sitting in a field.

And the children, asked to rate their own teachers on classroom management, went the other way: minus 0.21, statistically significant (RAND).

The grown-ups' scores went up and the kids' scores went down. The one question that asked whether children actually followed the rules did not move at all.

Every adult in that building could have told you the program was working, honestly and sincerely, and been wrong about the only thing that mattered.

Here is the detail I cannot get out of my head. Before Pittsburgh ever launched the thing, its own 2013-14 student survey found that 22 percent of its students already believed student misbehavior was slowing down learning (RAND).

More than one in five kids had told the district, in writing, that the disruption was costing them. The district read that survey and built a program to fix the suspension numbers.

Five questions that tell you which version you bought#

You are not going to win a philosophical argument about discipline at a board meeting, and you should not have to try. You need one thing: whether your school bought the program or the press release.

1. In the hour after a child is sent out of class, what specifically happens, and which adult runs it? A real answer has a name and a room in it. A half-done program answers with a philosophy.
2. How many staff were trained, and how many actually use it? Those are two different numbers, and RAND's whole finding lives in the gap between them.
3. What replaced the suspension? Not what got abolished. What got built.
4. When the circle does not work, what happens next? A plan with no floor under it is not a plan.
5. Will you show me the achievement numbers, not just the suspension numbers? Suspension counts are the easiest number in the building to move, and the least informative. Pittsburgh cut suspensions 36 percent and still lost ground in middle school math.

Ask in writing, and keep the reply. A school running the real thing will be delighted you asked, because the real thing is expensive and nobody has noticed.

A school running the poster version will send you a paragraph about its commitment to equity and belonging. That is your answer.

Frequently asked questions#

Is restorative justice the same as having no discipline? No, and treating it that way concedes the argument. The real version is more demanding than a suspension, not less: it requires trained adults, time, and follow-through. The hollow version does look like no discipline, which is the actual complaint.

Does it work? Sometimes, and specifically. It reliably cuts suspensions, and Chicago's evidence of fewer arrests outside school is genuinely strong. It has never been shown to raise academic achievement, and in Pittsburgh's middle grades it lowered it.

Can I opt my child out of a circle? That depends entirely on your state and district, so ask in writing and get the policy in writing. Proactive community-building circles are usually run as ordinary classroom instruction, which is harder to opt out of than a disciplinary conference. If your child is being asked to disclose feelings or family details, that is a different conversation, and you have more standing than you think.

My child was the one who got hurt. Does he have to sit in the circle and forgive? No child should be required to perform forgiveness on a schedule. A properly run restorative process is voluntary for the person who was harmed, and the harmed child's needs are supposed to come first. If your school treats your child's participation as mandatory, it has inverted its own model.

What is the difference between restorative justice and PBIS? They travel together and get conflated, but they are different tools. PBIS (positive behavioral interventions and supports) is a schoolwide system for teaching and reinforcing expected behavior; restorative practices are what a school does after harm has happened. A district can run one, both, or neither.

Why did my school adopt this? Often because of the 2014 federal letter that made suspension ratios a civil rights exposure, which is why 22 states rewrote their discipline laws within about a year. Some schools adopted it because they believed in it. The letter is gone; the programs stayed.

Is my school's suspension drop good news? It is not news at all by itself. Watch for infractions being relabeled: in Philadelphia, low-level suspensions fell, but black students grew more likely to be suspended for more serious infractions instead, so the racial gap in suspensions did not shrink and by the district-level measure it rose (Steinberg and Lacoe).

Should I want my school to drop it? Not necessarily. The evidence says a fully implemented program does not cost the other children anything and may cut arrests, while a half-implemented one costs them math. Pushing your school to do it properly is a better bet than pushing it to lurch to the next fad.

The bottom line#

Your child will tell you about the chair at dinner tomorrow, or the shove, or the kid who screams whenever he is asked to open a book. You will hear it in that flat, unbothered voice children use for facts of life they have stopped expecting adults to fix. That voice is the thing to listen for.

You do not have to pick a team here. Restorative justice is not a hoax, and suspension is not a virtue.

The evidence says something narrower and far more useful than either side's slogan: the philosophy is not what hurts the kid who follows the rules. The half-measure is. A program that is announced but not staffed, cut but not replaced, believed in but not done, is the one that quietly bills your child for the difference.

So do not ask your school whether it does restorative justice. It will say yes, and it will be telling the truth.

Ask what happens in the hour after a child is sent out of the room, and which adult runs it. Then ask for the achievement numbers, not the suspension numbers.

A school doing the real work will have an answer with a name and a room in it. And twenty minutes of math will find its way back onto your child's desk, which was the whole point, and the only thing anybody ever needed to count.