As restorative justice seeks to build collective care and healing, it calls for the meaningful engagement and leadership of everyone in the community. But the deeply democratic approach of restorative justice pushes up against the clear hierarchy most of us have experienced in schools, where teachers hold power over students, school administrators hold power over staff, and bureaucrats and policymakers hold distant power over it all. Students’ families are too often left on the outside looking in, and our neighbors are rarely thought of at all. For restorative justice to thrive, we need to radically rethink power dynamics in schools.
Read More...Participants described an urgent need for students to have greater self-determination in schools and beyond, including genuine decision-making power and leadership roles. Students pointed to a culture of ageism that made them feel dismissed, as River explained, “We live in a society where we think that someone older is in the right, always… Breaking that sort of stereotype and barrier is definitely one of the first steps in building a movement.” Youth leaders sometimes felt sidelined in restorative justice efforts, as administrators responded to conflict without seeking their input, or teachers disregarded student-crafted circle outlines for advisory discussions. Giving students more respect and power was seen by youth and adults as one of the biggest changes needed to make restorative justice stronger in our schools.
We also heard about the specific challenge of teachers—even those theoretically on board with restorative justice—having a hard time letting go of their authority when in personal conflicts with students, and emotions are running high. Leon told us, “When it comes down to them feeling disrespected by a student… they feel actually disempowered by restorative justice. There’s teachers who are feeling like the admin is always on the kid’s side, and I find myself like, are we not all on the kid’s side here?” Participants told us about some of the ways they were starting to disrupt the staff-student hierarchy, with student-staff pairs facilitating restorative responses to student-teacher conflicts, students providing restorative justice training for adults, and staff-only spaces to reflect on and unpack personal ideas about discipline and punishment.
Leon also reminds us that the work of empowering students is wrapped up in administrators supporting staff, and in the creation of deep cultures of respect for everyone in the school community; when staff feel supported, they have more capacity to support students. We heard about the consequences when that doesn’t happen, with a few staff participants talking about the personally painful, destabilizing experience of school leadership changing, with new principals who did not support the school culture and restorative justice work they had built over years. The fact that a single person can cause such a huge disruption highlights the need for power to be more widely distributed throughout the community, in order to make restorative school cultures more resilient in the face of change.
As Becky put it, we should be “giving communities more say in their schools, rather than having only a few people in charge of all schools.” This means involving students, their families, and school staff, alike in shaping their own lives and their communities. When people feel connected, respected, and empowered to, we strengthen our collective capacity to build safety and respond to harm when it occurs.
Listen to Community Voices
Hear from students, parents, and educators about why it’s so necessary to democratize schools, as we build restorative school cultures.
“Other adults are almost always the biggest obstacle [to RJ]…. I found that students can have punitive mindsets, but they’re usually fairly receptive to new ideas in a way that adults, especially when they’re a part of the conflict, are not…. There’s this nominal embrace of ‘we need to be more restorative so that we don’t lose so many of our students’ [to suspension and expulsion], which I think is sincere. But the ways in which adults have to share power… It really stinks when you see a kid doing a really good job of being vulnerable and trying to come back from a conflict and then an adult not budging, not allowing the young person to save face in any way. I’m just like, why are you punishing this kid so heavy? They’ve really come a long way just to be here to talk to you in this way.”
“Put a recall on the teacher’s training… In my high school we referred to the teachers by their first name instead of calling them, Mr or Mrs., because I feel like they wanted to abolish that authoritative nature that happens in schools… A lot of the teachers, I feel like they would kind of abuse their power with the students just saying, you know, ‘This is my classroom. These are my rules.’ You know, this and that and the third. So when it comes to the teacher training, I feel like they should be trained to understand students and actually listen to their students. Instead of fighting and barking at their students.”
“When it comes to addressing problems… I feel like old people… they have this old people mentality like okay… if there’s a problem and a student tried to help and they voice their opinion, like the voice, sometimes it’s not heard. Like it doesn’t really happen in my school because it’s like that. But, like, some places I go to…. some adults tend to think that okay, a student having so much power in a school is like too much, like being able to… voice their own opinions that seems too much for them. And that is something that adults need to work on, because I feel like some students have a way better opinion in a way to visit an action or a problem, than you do. Their mindset is completely different. And it’s more… I’m not going to say better, but like, it’s probably better.”
“The problem with schools is that they are too hierarchical, and I’m a big advocate for seeing democratic schools… you need to have student voice. But it needs to be a process of involving everyone in the community to really shape their vision of the school. So I don’t think it can be done in one day… [or] in just a conversation with a principal. I think it’s from the ground up really shaping, creating, co-creating a school.”
“[After five years], our founding principal left for personal reasons. However, there’s maybe like 20 or so staff who really embody the restorative practice mission, vision, philosophy, values etc of the school… But there could be another principal that comes in and says, “Nope, we’re not doing that. I don’t believe in that… I don’t know why you’re not suspending these kids.” So that was really alarming for me and really really made me feel unsafe… As we were building the house, there are people behind us taking the bricks down, but you couldn’t really see it happening. Ultimately, a lot of our policies did change in that school, so I didn’t really feel comfortable… working on restorative practices… It didn’t matter what I thought anymore, or it didn’t really matter what the students felt or thought anymore. It was more of a top-down type of shift. So that felt like… how can this happen after so many years of work?”
“I actually needed a mediation myself with a teacher… it helped us both understand where we were both coming from. We came to a common understanding. I feel like in my [previous] school, when I would have these issues, I wouldn’t be taken seriously because I’m a student, I’m looked at as a kid and it’s like ‘you do as I say.’ And when we had the conversation (the mediation in her next school), it was more of a common ground as equals, and I feel like I’m being heard, she felt like she was heard. And now we know why I reacted the way I did to certain situations, why she reacted the way she did… Just not being dismissed from the teachers because I’m a kid…. because I’m a person and you’re a person too, you know?”
“I felt that we originally agreed [with the principal] that if there was a conflict between students, she would immediately call us…. What she instead did was she would make the judgment first of what should happen and then decide if it’ll come to us or not…. And so it pushes me back down to like, ‘oh, you’re not entitled to this information’ and… we don’t figure in… That was very annoying considering what we had agreed on, and the fact that I felt a lot of these things were just misunderstandings and definitely could have been worked on. The principal making her own decisions and jumping to conclusions on how she should handle it, definitely messed up our flow in some ways… Which led, a lot of times, to someone either getting suspended or a situation getting handled before we as a restorative justice group could even hear about it.”
Work through Contradictions
Vent Diagrams help us reflect on the challenges, complexities, and contradictions of doing this work, and figure out how we can keep moving forward. Here is one of the big tensions we heard from participants about restorative justice and power dynamics in schools.
Schools are hierarchical
Restorative justice is democratic
Talk with Your Community
What does this look like for you and the people in your life? Use the prompts below to explore ideas about democratizing schools, with others in your school and communities, laying the groundwork for community understanding and making change. (Check out the Community Conversations Toolkit for downloadable guides for facilitating discussions about this project.)
Explore. When making a decision, what things do you typically think about? What is important to you in making choices?
Share Experiences. Can you think of a time when you were included in a decision making process by somebody else? What was that like for you?
Envision. If you had the responsibility to make choices for your school community, what kind of changes would you want to make? Who would you want to make those changes with?
Explore. Can you think of a community where one person makes a decision? Where a group of people make decisions together? What similarities or differences do you see in those spaces?
Share Experiences. Can you think of a time when a decision was made that impacted you, but you weren’t a part of the decision-making process? What was that like?
Envision. What could happen to a community that makes decisions together? What possibilities might come?
Make It Happen
The young people, educators, and parents we spoke with shared incredible examples of how they are trying to shift power dynamics in their schools, as well as visions of the world we must keep fighting for…. This is what restorative justice looks like, when it’s On Our Terms.
Build School Practice.
Here are specific ideas about how school communities can shift power dynamics, and try to build more democratic school cultures.
- Create opportunities for staff and students to jointly plan and facilitate intergenerational community building circles (e.g., on community norms and agreements), co-facilitate responses to staff-student conflict, and provide training on restorative justice to youth and adult members of the student community.
- Ensure that teaching staff and administrators actively participate in circles alongside students, breaking hierarchical norms within the community and helping institute circles as a community-wide, democratic practice.
- Host regular town halls or other meetings for administration to listen to needs, concerns, and ideas of staff. When administration is able to hold the needs of their staff, it increases the capacity of staff to hold the needs of their students.
- Involve young people and their families at every decision making space that impacts their experiences in the school community, such as the school leadership team, school safety meetings, grade team meetings, restorative justice action team meetings.
- Check out Let Youth Lead [LINK] and Build with Families & Neighbors [LINK] for more ideas about how to give students and families a bigger say in their school communities.
Lou T. (she/her), school staff: A student and staff pair of mediators would mediate student-staff conflicts, which were far more common in our school than student-student conflicts, partially because we’re a transfer school (with unique schedules)… And so there literally is just less opportunity for young people to have conflicts with one another, but there are plenty of opportunities to have conflicts with staff and with mentors… And so the student/staff mediation pairs mediating conflicts between staff and students felt really successful and effective and in the end, both the mediators themselves felt positive outcomes, and so did the folks who were in conflict.
Demand Policy Change.
Here are some key policies needed to help build more democratic schools.
- Create citywide youth leadership positions to inform restorative justice and other school policies, with decision making power and/or voting rights.
- Fund and support current student and staff practitioners in schools to lead the city’s restorative justice education efforts, rather than solely relying on outside trainers.
- Ensure that administrators, staff, and students have citywide have opportunities to co-develop and reflect together on the growth of restorative and healing-centered practices.
