‘Restorative Justice’ Brings Violent Schools
The Education Department will no longer count racial disparities in K-12 school suspension rates as proof of discrimination, it announced on July 23. This is a welcome change, but it won’t automatically restore order in the thousands of schools pressured by the Obama and Biden administrations into adopting “alternative discipline” methods whose chief objective is race equity. Many such programs have come at the cost of student safety and education.
These methods go by many names, like “restorative practices,” “social-emotional learning” and, most telling, “restorative justice.” In lieu of suspensions, administrators invite offenders to reflect in a soothing place on the feelings and trauma that led them, say, to hit another student or disobey a teacher. Students may also be invited into a “restorative circle” with school staff and other students, where they can share their feelings, and others in the circle can talk with them about how peace in the community might be restored.
Reality often falls short of this vision. Concerns about restorative justice emerged soon after the Obama administration began pushing it. Public schools in Philadelphia that implemented it experienced “skyrocketing truancy, serious misbehavior, and declining achievement,” Manhattan Institute researchers observed in 2017. Other cities experienced similar results.
If any school district needed help diverting struggling children from a path that begins with school suspensions and ends in prison, it was the Little Rock School District in Arkansas. Its schools serve a student community that is 57% black, in a county whose 2024 black out-of-wedlock birthrate was 80%, where nearly three-quarters of students come from low-income households and roughly the same percentage fall below grade level in reading and math, according to 2024-25 data. During the 2021-22 school year, before its wide-scale adoption of restorative justice, this district of roughly 20,000 students had almost 2,500 instances of violence, bullying and weapons infractions.
Who could blame LRSD for forming a partnership with the Tendaji Community Development Corp., which claims its alternative discipline methods “promote cohesion among students and administrators while fostering a growth mindset and positive relationships”? LRSD engaged Tendaji in 2022, paying it almost $1.5 million between 2023 and 2025 alone to provide digital social-emotional learning tutorials, on-site peer mediation and “restorative circles,” among other services.
What followed was a catastrophe. Since the 2021-22 school year, districtwide assaults by students on other students have jumped 118%. Assaults by students on teachers and staff have climbed 151%.
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Much more on restorative justice, here.
