Many parents are unaware of the ‘restorative justice’ policies that replaced traditional discipline in 1 in 3 schools to level suspension rates across races.
David Rein presumed punishment would follow after a bully on the school bus shoved his middle school son around, ordered him where to sit, and broke his glasses.
Months later, after learning three other students had received the same treatment at the school in upstate New York, Rein was told the tormentor got a free pass under the school’s “restorative justice” policies.
His son never received an apology, Rein said. “They swept it under the rug.”
The school district in Newburgh, New York, is among more than 1,450 districts—serving around 19 million students across all 50 states—that use restorative justice practices. Those numbers are according to district websites and Defending Education, an organization that tracks left-leaning policies in public education.
A primary goal of the restorative justice approach is to reduce suspension rates for black and Hispanic students; an article on restorative justice in the journal of the National Education Association states that traditional disciplinary policies “often are nourished by implicit biases and institutionalized racism.”
Like many parents, Rein wasn’t even aware his son’s school had such policies—much less that they are adopted so widely nationwide.
“I can understand a get-out-of-jail free for a first offense, but if it happens over and over and over again, it’s not restorative,” Rein told The Epoch Times. “It’s abusive to society.”
President Donald Trump targeted such policies earlier this year in an executive order that stated the government will no longer tolerate risks to children from school discipline “based on discriminatory and unlawful ‘equity ideology.’”
The practices found their way into school policies almost two decades ago, and became tied to federal funding during the Obama administration.
Chris Ognibene, a high school social studies teacher in New York’s Schenectady district, said he sees minimal communication with parents about the disciplinary approach, and little proof that it has helped decrease school violence or improve academic performance.
“It’s a permanent part of the district now that’s overused and under-delivered,” he told The Epoch Times. “They don’t think long term about modifying behavior.”
