Oakland Schools Using Restorative Justice to Increase Graduation Rates, Reading Levels

Zero tolerance policies have failed students for decades, and they disproportionately affect students of color, Oakland Unified School District officials said this week. But they’ve got a better plan.

District superintendent Antwan Wilson and other officials said at a news conference Wednesday morning at Lakeview Elementary School that restorative justice programs have had a measurable impact on school behavior and educational outcomes by keeping kids in class rather than sending them home as a disciplinary measure. The district said they’ve documented a 60 percent increase in graduation rates and a 128 percent increase in reading levels for students at schools that use restorative justice.

“We can’t increase student achievement by finding ways to keep our students in the streets,” Wilson said. By way of example, Wilson pointed to suspending students for skipping school, which he said makes no sense. Moreover, these practices affect students of color at a disproportionate rate, district officials said. In one case, implementing restorative justice practices reduced suspensions for disruption and willful defiance among African American students by 40 percent in one year. In 2005, the OUSD implemented a restorative justice program at Cole Middle School, which has closed in the years since.

“Something special happened at Cole,” Director of Behavioral Health Initiatives Barbara McClung said. “We successfully eliminated that racial disparity in three years.”

Ten years later Cole Middle School has turned into an administrative office, but restorative justice practices are now being used in 24 OUSD schools. The district’s stated goal is to expand these programs into all of it’s more than 80 K-12 schools by the year 2020. There will be challenges, however, including funding and parental buy-in, district officials said.

In an executive summary distributed at this morning’s press conference, OUSD officials said the vast majority of parents were unlikely to be familiar with or trained in restorative practices. Those include “harm circles,” which are used to facilitate a group discussion between the offending student and the people affected by his or her actions regarding the personal consequences created for all the parties involved when a conflict arises. “Rather than punishing that behavior or focusing on the rule that was broken, we focus on the harm that was created,” said Restorative Justice Program Manager David Yusem.

“Usually when someone breaks a rule or law or harms someone we just punish them and there’s no learning going on,” Yusem said. “This process allows students to understand the impact of what they’ve done and then seek to make it right.” OUSD officials said in schools that have implemented restorative justice disciplinary practices, students frequently ask for harm circles rather than fighting to settle their differences.

They hope that restorative justice could help to close the school-to-prison pipeline. Some of the other programs involved in this effort have included Positive Behavior Intervention and Support, African American Male Achievement, Manhood Development and Social-Emotional Learning. Statewide, the number of students expelled or suspended has dropped two years in a row as the California Department of Education works with districts to implement innovative new programs, including restorative justice. In the 2013-14 school year there were 49,987 fewer suspensions than in the previous year, down 15.2 percent. There were also 1,655 fewer expulsions in the same time frame, down roughly 20 percent, according to a prepared statement from the CDE.

Before these programs were implemented, the single biggest cause of suspension or expulsion by percentage was “willful defiance.” Last year there was a 47.7 percent drop in the number of students expelled for defiance-related offenses, CDE officials said. However, a racial disparity continues to adversely affect suspension rates for African American students, according to the CDE.

By Bay City News

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