There’s a familiar, frustrating tension between practice and policy. When it comes to grading, devices, equity, choice, student behavior, and much else, there are yawning gaps between the views from inside and outside the schoolhouse. Worse, educators and policy types often wind up talking past one another. I think we can do better. To delve into this disconnect, I reached out to Alex Baron, the director of academic strategy at a District of Columbia charter school, an Oxford Ph.D., and a former early-childhood and high school math teacher. Together, we’ll try to bridge a bit of the practice-policy chasm.
—Rick
Rick: So, one point of endless frustration for policymakers and practitioners is when policies get adopted in ways that don’t make any sense. Educators wonder why policymakers dreamed up this idiocy. Policymakers wonder why educators can’t do it right. And then parents get frustrated that they’ve got to deal with the results.
A big part of the problem, of course, is that policymakers can tell teachers to do things, but they can’t make them do those things well. And schools are such complex, human entities that the key to making any meaningful change deliver is usually more about how it’s done than whether it’s done. I wrote about this at length some years ago in Letters to a Young Education Reformer, and it’s no less true today.
Meanwhile, teachers are constrained by norms, routines, and rules that limit what they feel able to do. It turns out that these formal and informal impediments are incredibly hard to change. As a result, well-intended dictates can fizzle or implode—frequently doing more harm than good. I’m always reminded of the aftermath of teacher evaluation, test-based accountability, and de-tracking, when a lot of lackluster classroom practice and dismal student outcomes would be met with a policymaker saying, “Well, that’s not the way it’s supposed to work.”
I’m concerned that we’ve launched into yet another cycle of this with school discipline, where deep-pocketed, well-meaning champions of “restorative justice” have produced a strategy that yields troubling results and makes students feel that their teachers have less control over behavior. We’ve seen the same kind of dismal payoff from the tech-buying binge that elected officials funded and superintendents embraced. And I can’t help but wonder if we’re about to do the same with strategies to curtail chronic absenteeism, such as by bribing kids to attend school, or promote evidence-based literacy.
I’m curious what you make of this. Are you less skeptical than I am? Do you have a strong take on what you’re seeing with discipline, tech, absenteeism, or literacy—and is it wildly different from mine?
Alex: During the post-COVID federal funding years (R.I.P.), our school had high-dosage tutoring. The tutoring provider had a prescriptive model, which didn’t jibe with our schedule. When the tutoring company reps visited our school, I braced for admonitions about implementation infidelity. Instead, after their observation, they said, “Wow, this is different from what we imagined, but it’s great. Can we share your approach with other schools?”
This goes to show that policy-practice implementation gaps can be features, not bugs. Just as preschoolers can see 80 uses for a pencil that adults could never imagine, schools can creatively implement policies beyond what policymakers envisioned. I’m not saying that this creative implementation is the modal scenario; instead, I’m saying that alignment between policymaker and practitioner need not be our North Star. Even if a policy “wasn’t supposed to be implemented that way,” it still might be working.
Rick, above you mentioned four areas with implementation friction—let’s start with restorative justice. Conceptually, restorative justice is simple: When harm occurs, the person who did the harm has to repair it with the aggrieved parties. Restorative justice doesn’t inherently obviate consequences like suspensions—though many districts have implemented it in that way. Instead, restorative justice simply involves stuff like restorative conversations and community service.
To me, whether restorative justice succeeds or fails depends on a school’s scale. Restorative justice in education presumes a web of relationships—constituting a school culture—that can be harmed and healed. When schools are too big or lack structures that promote community, restorative justice struggles: You can’t restore a relationship that didn’t exist in the first place and you can’t repair harm to a community that isn’t a meaningful entity.
But per our previous post, I’d say the issues with restorative justice are rooted as much in disagreements about the purpose of school as they are in the actual policy-practice gap. If you see schools’ paramount purpose as driving learning for motivated students, then you may be comfortable with a traditional punitive culture. But if you want schools to teach all kids—including struggling ones—the real work of building healthy communities, then you might tolerate learning disruptions that you otherwise wouldn’t.
What do you think, Rick? Is the real issue that restorative justice isn’t being implemented correctly, or is it that people disagree about schools’ underlying goals for discipline policy?
Rick: While I think you’re right that restorative justice gets us into competing views of the purpose of schools, I don’t see that as the most important disconnect. For me, the bigger issue with restorative justice is that it often feels like an ideology being sold as an intervention. By that, I mean that it gets pitched as a “better” way to maintain student discipline and address misbehavior but that those who champion it aren’t actually focused on those things. Rather, they’re focused on a romantic notion of how they think schools should work and how young people would ideally behave. Unfortunately, outside of boutique environments, the world rarely conforms to restorative-justice advocates’ rosy vision.
This is a common version of the policy-practice problem, I’d submit: Restorative justice is less about behavior and discipline and more about a notion of how things should work. Now, restorative justice is a bit of an odd case because much frustration with the tensions between policy and practice involves ideas like test-based accountability or teacher evaluation that are pushed by elected officials, while restorative justice emerges from the world of ed. schools and progressive activism. And these people are usually regarded as the good guys by teacher influencers.
But the problem is a familiar one: Those who’ve designed and piloted restorative justice have done so in select environments with a lot of resources, support, and sign-on. I’ll stipulate that this can work in those instances. But even so, it turns out to be really tough to do responsibly or well in chaotic schools where there’s a lot of skepticism from students and teachers. And worse, done poorly, there’s every chance that restorative justice will allow misbehavior and teach students to scoff at authority, aggravating issues with behavior and discipline.
In short, you’re surely right that it’s partly about goals, but I also think it gets to the fundamental disconnect between those in government, foundations, or academe who have a notion of how they’d like students and schools to be—and those in classrooms who have to wrestle with the practical consequences of these well-intentioned ideas.
Well, that’s how I tend to see it, my friend. Curious where you might agree and where you think I’ve got this wrong.
Alex: My family welcomed a baby girl in April. Thus far, restorative conversations with her have been disappointingly one-sided. But once she’s old enough, we’ll discuss why it’s wrong to take someone’s toy, use unkind words, or—when the treasured teenage years arrive—sneak out at night. When she’s older, we’ll also discipline her by taking her phone and grounding her; but to achieve sustained behavior change, she’ll need to understand her behavior’s impact, often via conversation with the people she affected. These conversations about harm, impact, and next steps are no-brainer parenting moves.
The point is: Most of us default to restorative practices when we’re redirecting kids with whom we have meaningful relationships. Restorative justice isn’t any more of an ideology than punitive discipline; we’re just so culturally steeped in the latter that, like our own bad breath, we no longer smell it as an ideology. Rick, you argued that restorative justice isn’t seriously concerned with addressing misbehavior, but I’d say the same about punitive discipline. Empirical evidence abounds that suspensions—used in isolation—don’t address the roots of misbehavior, but we do it because it comports with our underexplored retributive ideology.
That said, to your point, restorative justice also doesn’t work except in rosy environments, which applies more to one-to-one parenting than to educating; a school’s scale often requires educators to manage 30 kids, which leads teachers to use punitive discipline. Thus, I agree with you that many schools don’t have conditions that are conducive to restorative justice. The work of repairing relationships at school takes as much as or more effort than it does in adult life. In a social conflict, school leaders may talk with one student, then the other, and then bring them together with their families for a mediation. These things take time that teachers don’t have.
However, principals can’t give the requisite time because their policy bosses underestimate the investment required. In our last post, I noted that 74 percent of a D.C. school’s evaluation derives from math and ELA scores; in that environment, administrators may want restorative conversations but can’t practically implement them. If teachers shorten reading lessons in favor of a class circle to address students’ disengagement, the school may jeopardize their reading scores. To make restorative justice work, district policies and evaluation frameworks must enable schools to make time, invest in deans, and train staff.
It’s a tall order. If we don’t think schools’ purpose involves teaching conflict resolution, then I can understand your skepticism, pal. But if we want to educate kids for adult life in relational dynamics as well as academic ones, then there are no shortcuts. When done well, restorative justice is the gold standard to build student-student, student-teacher, and schoolwide culture. And when a strong school culture enables kids to take intellectual and interpersonal risks, the academic and human learning that occurs can be second to none.
