Restorative justice can feel like a radical change for both youth and adults, representing a “fundamental shift in what people believe.” As April explained, it can require a lot of unlearning after “growing up in a system that penalizes you for everything,” including experiences at home, in schools, and in society as a whole. Even when teachers are “rhetorically supportive” of restorative justice, many have a hard time putting it into practice when they feel personally disrespected by a student. We heard about many school-specific barriers to changing the punishment mindset, including rigid staff-student hierarchies, “punitive” academics and testing pressures, and schools’ long histories of institutional harm.
Read More...With this backdrop, restorative justice asks us to rethink and transform the way that we relate to each other, in and out of conflict. This shift is not just an absence of suspension, but building the robust presence of an entirely new approach to being in community, responding to harm, and seeking healing. When we asked what made this sort of transformation possible, we heard again and again that relationships are the life force of restorative justice. It is relationships that generate the trust and belonging that makes it possible to be vulnerable, ask for help, admit mistakes, and take accountability. In turn, relationships help us keep moving through the most difficult parts of culture change, like reflecting on personal beliefs about discipline, building buy-in with community members, and working through challenges. And, critically, this work is most successful when it is a community-wide effort. Participants told us how administrator leadership and support is an important ingredient for restorative school cultures to take root, but it is the broad engagement and drive of students, staff, and parents that makes restorative justice thrive.
Transforming culture takes time, care, and patience, but schools are already under-resourced and stretched thin; yet, if our efforts are rushed or truncated, we run the risk of creating a “watered-down version of restorative justice,” that falls away from its indigenous roots and radical potential. Building restorative justice in schools demands a major reallocation of resources and shifts in priorities on the individual, school, and system-wide levels. Keep exploring our recommendations and other themes, including Invest/Divest, to learn more about what those investments should look like.
Listen to Community Voices
Hear from students, parents, and educators about how restorative justice demands that we transform school culture.
“Leadership actually needs to be involved. But the members of the school community have to be stakeholders in the restorative justice process… Parents, students, caretakers, maybe even community members… someone who works at a restaurant in the area or someone who interacts with our young people on a daily basis. Because it all comes back to relationships with our young people. And so the big ideas sometimes come from leadership, but it takes a community of folks who are like, ‘We are going to live and breathe and be restorative and transformative justice.’ That’s what I see in my context really, really pushing the work and moving us past those big ideas and actually doing it.”
“Personally, at first I didn’t really believe in the circles. I was one of those that would joke around. But then as I got into a conflict, I kind of realized how helpful it actually was. I know that after, I kind of opened up about it, I tried to push my friends to do so also. So I feel like that really, not only helped me, but helped everyone else in my friend group to be more open to communication. So… I enjoy it, even though it took me a while to do so, I personally enjoyed it.”
“The work that we did [as a team at my previous school]… it was peer mentorship. We were learning with and from each other. And I was supported in that by six or seven people. Once a month, we went to go get the ‘restorative tostones’ and we would sit there and we would eat tostones and we’d try to figure out a new way to build our school. That’s what we did and how we learned together, and all of those people are still in this work, in one place or another.”
“My challenge is buy-in from teachers who’ve been in the building for over 15 years… [who] were way more comfortable with… classroom removal, suspension…. Teachers who feel that [restorative justice] is too soft, or we’re too lenient or we’re giving students too much power… The buy-in is in being able to be open enough to listen, to talk, to engage…. It’s about changing… the mindset that the way to go is suspension as opposed to, ‘Can we talk first?’ And teachers who… [think] ‘I have to teach this kid, but I don’t have to do anything other than that.’ Whereas restorative practice calls for more than that. It calls for communication, engagement, connection…. At times I’m like, damn, what do I need to do to show you guys that this can work? Just give us a little bit of leeway, so we can show you this in action.”
“One of the biggest things when it comes to adults… is suspending this idea of efficiency… I feel like with adults, with teachers, especially in restorative justice or social justice things, there’s this need to be like ‘We got this done, we got this done,’ or ‘Let’s do this quickly. Let’s count up how many things we did, look at what we did.’ And I just feel like that’s something you really just can’t have if you want to have a true, vulnerable, and connecting space. Because I personally think they really do contradict each other… Like you can say you did it. And you can brag about it, but I just feel like you can’t measure success on that kind of scale.”
“It’s a conundrum, right? I sometimes think that RJ can never truly work as long as we’re in a punitive system. Because as long as a principal or an admin or a dean or a teacher can suspend the student, it’s like as long as the opportunity is there, it’s always going to be there…. Ultimately, I think the job of RJ is to abolish the police, and including the police that live inside our heads… like the code of conduct is a carceral system.”
“I find that schools that only focus on the students being restorative, but are not restorative with the adults… it’s harder for them to implement that with their students, because they’re not practicing what they’re preaching…. My previous administrator would literally be like, “All right, we got to talk about this, like, let’s put the talking piece in the middle, where people at, what are you feeling, let’s just get it out” and how helpful that was for many reasons. Because, one, you just have a space to just get it out… But also you get to experience what it feels like for students to be in a circle, which is not always easy. Because I know I’ve been in circles that I felt uncomfortable, like, ‘Oh, should I share that?’ …or, ‘Did I overshare? That was scary.’ And so putting yourself in the shoes of the students…”
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 transforming school culture.
The need to end punitive discipline is urgent
Transforming relationships & values takes time
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 transforming culture 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. What do you understand about punishment in society? Who do you see carrying out punishment?
Share Experiences. Can you think of a time that you were in conflict with somebody you cared about or loved? How did you treat them, or how were you treated?
Envision. If we all knew the experiences one another has been through, how do you think the way we respond to one another in moments of harm or hurt change?
Explore. When you think about your own culture, what comes to mind? What do those things mean to you?
Share Experiences. Can you remember a time when a community member supported you in a way that felt important or unique? What was that like?
Envision. What are the steps we need to take to care for one another more strongly across the community? What parts of your culture are already contributing to that?
Make It Happen
The young people, educators, and parents we spoke with shared incredible examples of how they are transforming the culture 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 transform school culture and grow restorative justice.
- Recognize that school culture is multifaceted, and building a restorative culture requires rethinking all punitive aspects of school culture, including high-stakes testing and pressures of teacher evaluation. While administrators have limited power over these aspects of school life, they should actively seek to shift harmful aspects of school culture where possible. This may include pursuing creative strategies to build restorative justice work into existing school structures (professional development days, advisory, creating a restorative justice class, etc.), instead of asking staff to develop restorative justice through unpaid labor.
- Institute a restorative justice action team of staff, students, and parents to guide the development and implementation of restorative justice in the school, ensuring there is a critical mass of people within the school pushing this work forward, rather than a single individual or an external group. This group should be compensated for their time, or be able to participate during the course of their normal duties, not as an unpaid additional responsibility, or volunteer work.
- Use restorative circles in staff meetings and professional development to increase staff comfort and familiarity with the practices, foster staff buy-in, and normalize staff participation in restorative processes before beginning to use circle practices with students and families. This must include leadership participation.
- Develop restorative justice conversations and practice through community building efforts, building community trust and buy-in, before using restorative practices to respond to specific moments of harm.
- Assure that teaching staff and administrators actively participate in circles alongside students, breaking hierarchical norms within the community. By building buy-in with staff, it ensures the growth of restorative justice as a community-wide practice that is also breaking traditional structural norms
- Leadership must build in time and settings to unpack ideas about discipline, learn about the school-to-prison pipeline, and look at relevant NYC and school-based data (e.g., on suspensions and disparities), and how it all connects to growing restorative justice in schools. While these conversations should begin with school staff, they should grow to include students and their families.
Lily T. (she/her), school staff: Really [building restorative or transformative justice], it’s all relationship stuff. For example, one student who was a part of the young TJ [transformative justice] crew, he was newish and he hadn’t felt confidence to take any leadership roles as a 9th grader… He was also the only Muslim student in the young TJ crew at that time and he said that he wanted to do a peer to peer circle after the shootings that happened in mosques in New Zealand… and I supported him, co-planning it, and he identified some friends, to co-plan with him… [for the talking piece], he brought in his personal Quran and that gesture in him explaining to people how to do that talking piece different from how they typically use talking pieces, and then other Muslim students seeing a Muslim student is leading this…He was super hooked after that, and I definitely noticed an increase in the participation and requests for leadership roles that our Muslim students and our West African students specifically made after that circle. Or, [in general] we do a circle and… most of the people that showed up to a circle were the [student facilitator’s] friend group and they all participated and I’ve never seen them participate in any other realm in our school community.
Demand Policy Change.
Here are some key policies needed to better support our schools in transforming school culture and growing restorative justice.
- Fund positions that develop community and restorative practices in every school, including RJ coordinators, social workers, guidance counselors, and other support staff (e.g., community assistant, paraprofessionals) as determined by the school community, ensuring that all students have access to such support staff. These should be permanent positions with long-term funding sources to avoid frequent, disruptive staff turnover.
- Ensure that administrators, staff, and students have citywide opportunities to co-develop and reflect on the growth of restorative and healing-centered practices, including sharing innovative approaches across school communities.