[This was a paper I wrote for a policy class as a first year MSW student on restorative practices in NYC public schools]
Susan Dominus discusses a new approach, “restorative practices,” to handling disciplinary problems with students that is being used by the Leadership and Public Service High School in Manhattan’s Financial District, and has been tried in other school systems around the country. The approach “asks students and teachers to strengthen connections and heal rifts by sitting on chairs in circles and allowing each participant to speak about how a given incident affected him or her.”
New York City now requires that in order to suspend a student the school must first get approval from the Education Department. Earlier policy, in particular from 1999 through 2009, “enforced zero tolerance policies that require[d] mandatory suspensions for certain offenses.”
Although the targeted population of both policies is students generally, the New York Civil Liberties Union found that, between 1999 and 2009 (the “Zero Tolerance” period) there were about 450,000 suspensions in New York City schools, and although “black students made up only 30 percent of all students [during that period, they] accounted for 50 percent of suspensions.” Intentionally or not, the earlier policy targeted black students in greater numbers than white students.
The intended consequence of the “Zero Tolerance Policy,” beyond simple order in schools, was to reduce “fears about weapons in schools.” Research based on the large-scale implementation of the policy showed that it failed with respect to its disciplinary intent as it “did not deter bad behavior” and “most likely fed [sic] it by alienating students from the school community.” It also had the unintended consequence of racial disparity as mentioned above, and “studies show that a student who has been suspended is more likely to eventually drop out of school or end up in the criminal-justice system,” according to the NYCLU report.
Restorative practices have been used at the Leadership school since 2011 and have shown drops in their suspension rates, including a 60% drop last year from the year before. Although suspension rates dropped city-wide as a result of new rules, the Morningside Center “found that the rates dropped even more in those schools where teachers were trained in restorative practices.” They have also proven to be very successful in other cities where they were started earlier, including Denver and Oakland which have seen “lowered suspension rates, higher graduation rates, [and] improved school atmosphere.”
Depending on the age and maturation of the student involved, restorative practices contribute to the value of social control through either “socialization” (for younger students) or “resocialization” (for older students). In either case, the school is attempting to “regulate [their] social behavior within culturally desirable patterns” (e.g., not yelling at or engaging in threatening behavior towards teachers, to use the incident in the Dominus article), or helping to “solve social problems for those having difficulty in coping with life situations” (Cowger, 1974).
In terms of social justice, the restorative practices approach better balances the competing values of individual responsibility and social contexts. It doesn’t disregard the role of “individual causation” but also recognizes that “[s]ome forces are beyond the control or influence of any individual.” (Dolgoff & Feldstein, 2013). The earlier “Zero Tolerance Policy” reflected simple “Direct Behavior Control,” in that it simply defined and enforced the limits of behavior (Cowger, 1974) and disregarded any “public issues” that might have been in play with the student’s behavior (Dolgoff & Feldstein, 2013).
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