The Promise of Restorative Justice in School Discipline

Purpose:  Effective school discipline practices promote school safety and create opportunities for youth to learn from their mistakes. In light of research demonstrating the limits of “zero tolerance” approaches in achieving these goals, stakeholders and scholars have increasingly advocated for the use of restorative justice (RJ) interventions in schools. Instead of excluding misbehaving students through suspension or expulsion, the RJ process brings victims and offenders together to acknowledge harm, repair relationships, and reintegrate students back into the school community.  Key elements of RJ are conflict mediation, family or group conferencing, and classroom circles.  The values undergirding RJ include empowerment, collaboration, and empathy, all of which are reflected in the NASW code of ethics. Despite this alignment, little social work research has considered the effectiveness of RJ in school settings.  This study considered whether student participation in an RJ intervention is associated with fewer subsequent discipline incidents and out-of-school suspensions.

Methods: The primary research methods was secondary analysis of administrative data from Denver Public Schools (DPS), the largest urban district in Colorado. 

Sample: This sample included all DPS students (n=10,705) referred to the office for a discipline problem in the 2011-2012 school year. The sample was 25% Black, 58% Latino, 10% White, 3% Multiracial, 1% Native American, 1.4% Asian, and 1% Pacific Islander. 60% were male, 63% were native English speakers, 21% were in special education, and 83% were eligible for free and reduced lunch. 7% of all students referred to the office (n=707) received a restorative justice intervention to resolve their discipline incident.

Measures: The secondary dataset was created by merging school-level compositional data with student-level discipline records and demographic information downloaded from the district’s student information system (Infinite Campus).  The independent variable was receipt of an RJ intervention in the first semester of the school year. Dependent variables were office discipline referrals and out-of-school suspensions in the second semester. Covariates included student racial background, family poverty, special education status, emotional disability, office referral reasons, and school composition. Previous research indicates these factors have significant relationships to school discipline problems and outcomes.

Analytic Approach: Separate multilevel regression models were created to estimate the relationships between receipt of RJ in the first semester and school discipline outcomes in the second semester. 

Results:  Accounting for student- and school-level demographics, including office referral reasons, students who received RJ in the first semester of the school year were significantly less likely to be referred to the discipline office (β = -.25, p <.001), or be suspended from school (β = -.06, p <.05), in the second semester. 

Conclusions and Implications: Findings from these multivariate, multilevel analyses add to theoretical, descriptive, and qualitative evidence of the effectiveness of RJ in schools. The results suggest that RJ is a promising approach for intervening with misbehaving students and keeping them out of the “school to jail pipeline.”  A critical area for future research is to conduct experimental studies of RJ in educational settings in order to demonstrate the causal impact of this intervention on discipline outcomes.