Restorative practices at scale

Restorative justice as a formal Western framework is most commonly traced to Howard Zehr's work in the 1970s and 1980s, but the underlying ideas predate it substantially. Maori practices in New Zealand (which produced the family group conference model now used in juvenile justice systems internationally), Navajo peacemaking, and Mennonite victim-offender mediation all contributed. The Western frame has often been criticized for borrowing the practices while erasing the traditions that produced them. A serious implementation acknowledges the lineage rather than treating restorative practice as a Western innovation.

When restorative practice migrated into schools, it picked up a wider scope: not just response to harm but proactive community-building. Daily or weekly circles in which students check in, share, and build relational trust are the foundation. Conferences after harm are built on top of that foundation. A school that runs conferences without the circle foundation is asking students who have no relational trust with each other to do the most demanding relational work of their lives in front of adults they may not trust. It does not work, and its not working is then cited as evidence that restorative practice does not work.

Meta-analyses of school-based restorative practice consistently show: reductions in suspension and expulsion, reductions in racial disparities in discipline (though usually not elimination), improvements in school climate measures, and small to moderate improvements in academic outcomes. The effects are larger in schools with multi-year implementation, larger when staff have meaningful training, and smaller when the practice is grafted onto an unchanged discipline regime. The evidence is not as strong as advocates sometimes claim and not as weak as critics sometimes claim. It is genuinely good evidence for a meaningful intervention.

Oakland Unified is the most studied large-district implementation in the United States. The reforms reduced suspension rates substantially, particularly for Black students, and improved several school climate measures. They also produced uneven implementation across buildings, with some schools transforming and others adopting the language without the substance. Independent evaluations have been careful: the gains are real, the failures are real, the average across the district is positive, and the variance across schools is enormous. The variance is the lesson. A district-wide policy does not produce district-wide practice; what it produces is district-wide permission, and the buildings that take the permission seriously transform.

Restorative practice is genuinely difficult to do well. Facilitating a circle in which a teenager who has been harmed is in the same room as the teenager who harmed her, and producing a process in which both can speak and be heard and arrive at something that resembles repair, is a high skill. Most teachers receive a few days of training and are then expected to perform the practice. The result is uneven, sometimes badly so. Schools that have invested seriously — full-year cohort training, ongoing coaching, dedicated restorative coordinators in the building — produce dramatically better outcomes. The investment is real but small relative to the cost of suspending students and processing the consequences.

Restorative practice is sometimes misapplied in ways that produce harm. A common pattern: a student who has been harmed is pressured into a restorative conference she did not want, and the conference is treated as the school's response, leaving her feeling that the harm was insufficiently addressed. This is not restorative practice; it is a misuse of the form. Genuine restorative practice is voluntary on the part of the harmed party, and the absence of a conference does not mean the absence of accountability. Schools that do not understand this produce restorative experiences that re-traumatize. Zehr and others have been clear on the voluntariness point; the application has often failed to follow.

Restorative practice and trauma-informed practice are complementary but distinct. Trauma-informed practice changes how staff understand and respond to dysregulated behavior; restorative practice changes how the community responds to harm. A school doing one without the other is partial. A school doing both is much more likely to produce the climate change the practices aim at. The integration requires explicit planning — they are often taught as separate programs with separate trainers, and the connection has to be made deliberately.

A realistic implementation timeline for a single school is three to five years. Year one is foundational training and the beginning of community-building circles. Year two extends circles into the daily routine and begins formal conferences. Year three integrates the practice into the discipline code itself, including formal alternatives to suspension. By year four or five, the school is doing the work with sufficient depth that turnover does not break it. Districts that fund a one-year rollout and expect transformation produce predictable disappointment.

A facilitator's racial identity affects the dynamics of a restorative process, particularly when the harm has a racial dimension. A circle facilitated by a white teacher in which a Black student is being asked to account for harm done to a white student, with no preparation for the racial dynamics in the room, can reproduce harm. Implementations that take this seriously train facilitators in identity dynamics, pair facilitators thoughtfully, and ensure that students of color have access to facilitators who share their identity when the situation calls for it. Implementations that ignore this produce restorative processes that students of color come to distrust.

A common objection is that restorative practice does not work for serious harm — for fights, weapons, sexual assault. The honest answer is that restorative practice was developed initially in the context of exactly this kind of harm, in criminal justice contexts where the alternative was prison. The harder cases are not outside the practice; they are the cases the practice was built for. What is true is that serious harm requires more skilled facilitation, more time, more victim preparation, and clearer boundaries about when a conference is appropriate. A school that has only the lightest version of the practice cannot handle the harder cases. A school that has built the deeper capacity often can.

The most common failure mode at scale is leadership turnover. A superintendent or principal who championed restorative practice leaves, and the successor either does not believe in it or does not protect it from internal opposition. Within two years the practice has eroded. Sustainability requires institutionalization: policy language, staffing lines, contractual commitments, parent and community governance. Practices held in place only by the will of an individual leader do not survive that leader's departure.

Implementing restorative practice well costs money — for training, for dedicated staff, for protected time. The cost objection is real but should be set against the cost of the current system. Suspensions cost instructional time, dropout costs lifetime earnings and tax revenue, and incarceration costs more than any of these. A serious cost-benefit analysis of restorative practice against the status quo it replaces favors the practice. The objection survives because the costs of the current system are absorbed by students and families, not by school budgets, and the cost of the alternative would be visible on the budget line.

A parent at the collective scale, on this issue, has three operational moves. First, learn whether the district has a restorative practices initiative, what year of implementation it is in, and how much per-school funding it receives — and compare that to peer districts. Second, build the parent constituency that will defend the practice when, three years in, a high-profile incident produces pressure to revert. The defense matters more than the launch. Third, hold the district accountable for racial equity within the practice itself: who is facilitating, whose harm is being centered, and whether the practice is being applied disproportionately to discipline students of color in new language while leaving white students under different rules. Without that accountability, restorative practice can become a more humane name for the same sorting.

Zehr, Howard. The Little Book of Restorative Justice. Rev. ed. New York: Good Books, 2015.

Zehr, Howard. Changing Lenses: A New Focus for Crime and Justice. 3rd ed. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 2005.

Morgan, Dominique. Becoming Each Other's Harvest: A Black Queer Theology of Liberation. New York: Routledge, 2023.

Morris, Monique W. Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools. New York: The New Press, 2016.

Skiba, Russell J., Mariella I. Arredondo, and Natasha T. Williams. "More than a Metaphor: The Contribution of Exclusionary Discipline to a School-to-Prison Pipeline." Equity & Excellence in Education 47, no. 4 (2014): 546–564.

Gregory, Anne, James Bell, and Mica Pollock. "How Educators Can Eradicate Disparities in School Discipline: A Briefing Paper on School-Based Interventions." Bloomington, IN: Equity Project at Indiana University, 2014.

Davis, Fania E. The Little Book of Race and Restorative Justice: Black Lives, Healing, and US Social Transformation. New York: Good Books, 2019.

Pranis, Kay. The Little Book of Circle Processes: A New/Old Approach to Peacemaking. Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 2005.

Boyes-Watson, Carolyn, and Kay Pranis. Circle Forward: Building a Restorative School Community. St. Paul, MN: Living Justice Press, 2015.

Jain, Sonia, Henrissa Bassey, Martha Brown, and Preety Kalra. Restorative Justice in Oakland Schools: Implementation and Impacts. Oakland, CA: Data in Action, 2014.

Augustine, Catherine H., John Engberg, Geoffrey E. Grimm, Emma Lee, Elaine Lin Wang, Karen Christianson, and Andrea A. Joseph. Can Restorative Practices Improve School Climate and Curb Suspensions? An Evaluation of the Impact of Restorative Practices in a Mid-Sized Urban School District. Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2018.

van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking, 2014.