Restorative justice in schools

The contemporary restorative justice movement draws on family group conferences developed in New Zealand in the 1980s, which themselves drew on Maori practices of whanau-based dispute resolution. Howard Zehr, a Mennonite scholar working in criminal justice, translated these practices for Western audiences in Changing Lenses (1990), arguing that the conventional question — what law was broken, who broke it, what punishment is deserved — should be replaced by who was harmed, what do they need, and whose obligation is it to meet that need. The framework moved from prison contexts to schools in the late 1990s and 2000s, with the International Institute for Restorative Practices, founded by Ted Wachtel, becoming the dominant training provider in American education.

The push into schools was driven less by theoretical conversion than by the discipline statistics. Civil Rights Data Collection releases through the 2000s and 2010s consistently showed that Black students were suspended at roughly three times the rate of white students, that students with disabilities were suspended at twice the rate of their peers, and that even preschool suspensions showed the racial gap. The American Psychological Association's 2008 task force concluded that zero-tolerance policies had not made schools safer and had measurably harmed the children excluded by them. Districts facing federal civil rights scrutiny — Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, Oakland — adopted restorative justice in part as a corrective and in part as a defensible alternative.

A restorative conference following a fight typically involves the two students who fought, any witnesses or affected peers, a trained facilitator (often a counselor or trained teacher), and ideally a parent or supporter for each student. The facilitator opens with affective statements, asks each participant to describe what happened from their perspective, asks who was affected and how, and works toward an agreement about repair — an apology delivered in a specified form, a restitution, a behavior change, a check-in schedule. The conference may last an hour. It is followed by monitoring. The technical content is less the point than the architecture: nobody is spoken about without being present, nobody is excluded from the conversation about their own consequence, and the resolution is constructed rather than imposed.

Catherine Augustine and colleagues at RAND conducted a two-year randomized evaluation of the SaferSanerSchools program across forty-four Pittsburgh schools, with twenty-two receiving training and twenty-two serving as controls. Suspension rates dropped 16 percent in treatment schools relative to controls, with larger drops for Black students and students from low-income families. Teacher-reported school climate improved. The racial gap in suspensions narrowed but did not close. Academic outcomes were neutral to slightly negative, with middle-school math showing a small decline that the researchers could not fully explain. The study became foundational because it was rigorous and because it refused to oversell.

Oakland Unified School District adopted restorative justice in 2005 and scaled it across the district through the 2010s. WestEd's evaluation by Trevor Fronius and colleagues documented substantial suspension reductions, narrowed racial gaps, and improved graduation rates. But the implementation was uneven across schools, with some sites achieving deep cultural change and others applying restorative language as a thin cover for under-supported teachers. The Oakland experience is the most-cited example of both the promise and the difficulty: when a district commits over a decade to building infrastructure, results compound; when budget cuts reduce restorative justice coordinators, the gains begin to erode.

Teachers are not opposed to restorative justice on principle, but many resist its implementation because the implementation is asked of them without the supports it requires. A teacher who has thirty students, fifty minutes, and a curriculum to cover cannot also run a forty-five-minute restorative circle every time a conflict arises. When restorative justice is implemented as a mandate on classroom teachers without dedicated personnel to handle the longer conferences, the result is teachers who feel that the consequence system has been removed from them without anything functional being put in its place. This is not a theoretical complaint. It is the modal failure mode of poorly funded adoption.

Restorative justice's framing centers the victim — who was harmed, what do they need — but in practice many implementations have struggled to deliver for victims. A student who was bullied and then sits in a circle with their bully may experience the process as another exposure rather than a resolution. Skilled facilitators screen for this and prepare both parties separately before any joint meeting. Unskilled facilitators rush. Victim advocates within the restorative justice movement, including writers like sujatha baliga and Mariame Kaba, have insisted that victim consent is not a formality and that the process must be willing to proceed without restoration if the victim is not ready. Programs that ignore this produce harm.

A common criticism of restorative justice is that it goes soft on accountability. This is sometimes true of bad implementations and rarely true of good ones. A well-run conference produces specific, monitored, often demanding obligations: written apologies, restitution, behavior plans, community service, repaired property. The student who walks out has agreed to things and will be held to them. The difference from a suspension is that the accountability is to specific people rather than to an abstract rule, and the consequences are constructive rather than exclusionary. Critics who claim restorative justice means no consequences are typically reacting to its mis-implementation, not its design.

Restorative justice tends to fail when imported into a school whose default climate is adversarial and tends to succeed when integrated into a school already investing in social-emotional learning, advisory periods, predictable routines, and adult-student relationships. The technique is not separable from the culture. Schools that adopt advisory programs, where every student has a small group and a designated adult who tracks them across years, find that restorative practices fit naturally because the relationships already exist. Schools without that infrastructure are asking trained strangers to convene crisis conversations among people who barely know each other.

The schools most in need of alternatives to exclusionary discipline are typically the schools with the fewest resources to implement restorative justice well. High-poverty schools serving predominantly Black and Latino students often face higher discipline volumes, more student trauma, more teacher turnover, and less funding for the counselors and coordinators that restorative work requires. Affluent suburban schools that adopt restorative practices do so from a baseline of low discipline volume and high staffing. The promise of restorative justice as a remedy for racial discipline gaps depends on funding the schools where the gaps are largest, which is the kind of redistribution American education has rarely managed.

Dominique Morgan, Mariame Kaba, and others have argued that restorative and transformative justice in schools is part of a larger project: dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline by refusing, at the school level, the logic of exclusion that prisons later complete. The argument is that a child who is suspended ten times by sixth grade has been trained in being processed, and that the carceral state takes over a trajectory the school began. Restorative justice, in this framing, is not a discipline reform but a political intervention. This framing is contested even within the movement, but it explains why the work is taken seriously by people whose horizon extends well beyond test scores.

A school district seriously adopting restorative justice should expect five years to first measurable returns, a coordinator FTE per several hundred students, ongoing coaching rather than one-time training, integration with social-emotional learning curricula, principal commitment to refuse the suspension shortcut during the rough early phase, and a parent and community communication strategy that explains what is happening and why. Districts that have done this — Oakland in its best years, Denver, parts of Chicago — have measurable results. Districts that have done the cheap version have learned that disciplinary systems, like ecosystems, do not respond well to half-installed replacements.

1. Zehr, Howard. Changing Lenses: A New Focus for Crime and Justice. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1990.

2. Augustine, Catherine H., John Engberg, Geoffrey E. Grimm, Emma Lee, Elaine Lin Wang, Karen Christianson, and Andrea A. Joseph. Can Restorative Practices Improve School Climate and Curb Suspensions? An Evaluation of the Impact of Restorative Practices in a Mid-Sized Urban School District. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2018.

3. Fronius, Trevor, Sarah Guckenburg, Hannah Persson, Anthony Petrosino, and Sonia Jain. Restorative Justice in U.S. Schools: An Updated Research Review. San Francisco: WestEd, 2019.

4. American Psychological Association Zero Tolerance Task Force. "Are Zero Tolerance Policies Effective in the Schools? An Evidentiary Review and Recommendations." American Psychologist 63, no. 9 (2008): 852–862.

5. Skiba, Russell J., Robert H. Horner, Choong-Geun Chung, M. Karega Rausch, Seth L. May, and Tary Tobin. "Race Is Not Neutral: A National Investigation of African American and Latino Disproportionality in School Discipline." School Psychology Review 40, no. 1 (2011): 85–107.

6. González, Thalia. "Keeping Kids in Schools: Restorative Justice, Punitive Discipline, and the School to Prison Pipeline." Journal of Law and Education 41, no. 2 (2012): 281–335.

7. Wachtel, Ted. Defining Restorative. Bethlehem, PA: International Institute for Restorative Practices, 2013.

8. baliga, sujatha, Sia Henry, and George Valentine. Restorative Community Conferencing: A Study of Community Works West's Restorative Justice Youth Diversion Program in Alameda County. Oakland: Impact Justice, 2017.

9. Losen, Daniel J., and Russell J. Skiba. Suspended Education: Urban Middle Schools in Crisis. Los Angeles: Civil Rights Project, UCLA, 2010.

10. Morrison, Brenda E., and Dorothy Vaandering. "Restorative Justice: Pedagogy, Praxis, and Discipline." Journal of School Violence 11, no. 2 (2012): 138–155.

11. Kaba, Mariame. We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021.

12. Gregory, Anne, Russell J. Skiba, and Pedro A. Noguera. "The Achievement Gap and the Discipline Gap: Two Sides of the Same Coin?" Educational Researcher 39, no. 1 (2010): 59–68.