What Justice Is Being Restored? Restorative Justice in Unjust Schools

• In Event: Beyond Policy Change Performance: Examining the Real Impact and Limitations of California's School Discipline Reforms

Abstract

Restorative Justice is heralded as a positive intervention practice to address the disparate experiences of Black, Indigenous and students of color who are disproportionately suspended, expelled and subject to punitive discipline policies. While many studies show proper implementation leads to lowered suspensions, few have put these practices under a more critical theoretical lens to better understand the possibilities restorative justice offers and the ways in which it may fall short (Morrison, Blood & Thorsborne, 2005; Vaandering, 2010; Gregory, Clawson, Davis & Gerewitz, 2014). Our study applies the tenets brought forth by Critical Race Theory, LatCrit, Tribal Crit and Black Crit scholars to examine the restorative justice’s capacity to disrupt the larger institutional violences that lead to punitive discipline responses (Ladson-Billings, 1995; Solorzano & Bernal, 2001; Brayboy, 2005; Dumas & ross, 2016).

The research team began data analysis by coding interview, focus group data, and field notes of over 1000 observational hours from over 30 California secondary schools in urban, suburban and rural contexts. Researchers then developed a detailed case study for each school by identifying patterns and themes within excerpts and using thick description methods to capture each campus' story of change on the path away from punitive discipline measures. Using a four quadrant graph, our diverse research team then plotted schools using the x-axis as approach (exclusionary to educative) and the y-axis as purpose (domination/social control to liberation/democratic/liberatory education.) We found that the schools who implemented RJ were located further in the top-right quadrant (educative in approach and democratic/liberatory in purpose). By identifying the schools furthest to the top-right quadrant, we then returned to these schools and pulled all codes that mentioned restorative justice.

Our data indicates that within our school sample, there are promising implementation models in terms of staff training, hiring of RJ coordinators, and building community partnerships. At the same time, the majority of Black and Indigenous schools we visited were still struggling to implement restorative practices and were critically under-resourced in basic school infrastructure such as stability of administrators and educators, teacher development and collaboration opportunities, and resources for rich and rigorous curriculum. Full school culture shifts are still largely dependent on these types of resources that support long-term, sustainable structural change. On a broader scale, the statewide prioritization of RJ both popularized and legitimated RJ approaches while creating unsustainable markets where schools who already lacked resources were expected to “turn around” school culture with five years of grant support and little to no structural changes.

Our paper contributes to our understanding of the processes by which the transformative potential of RJ becomes aseptic through the violent impact of incremental change. Within this framework our role is to ask ourselves in daily meditation: are we restoring and transforming justice within ourselves so that we may utilize RJ as not a tool, but as a way of being to give voice to suffering so that abolition may be fully realized.

Authors

• Cecelia Jordan, University of San Francisco

• Lawrence Torry Winn, University of California - Davis

• Bianca N. Haro, Pitzer College