Going Restorative,Staying Tough: Urban Principals’ Perceptions of Restorative Practices in Collocated Small Schools

Abstract

Drawing on data from a year-long multi-case ethnography of three secondary urban public schools implementing restorative practices, the current piece examines how principals negotiate restorative practices despite conflicting pressures to maintain order and compel obedience. I frame my inquiry through Sergiovanni’s (2000) concept of “systems” in the “lifeworld,” asking whether principals use restorative practices as systems in service of cultural transformation or merely as a replacement for suspension. Findings suggest tensions between principals’ purposes for implementing restorative practices and the pressure they feel to maintain an image of “school order” and “toughness” in the eyes of internal and external stakeholders. I close with recommendations for research and practice. I also make some preliminary recommendations for principal preparation.

Keywords

restorative justice restorative practices race and education school culture urban school leadership

The current study examines whether and how principals who have already committed to using restorative practices actually draw on restorative options or philosophies in the midst of disciplinary incidents with individual students. The 2014 Positive School Discipline Initiative, federal guidance from the United States Departments of Justice and Education, required districts to reduce overall suspension and address racial disparities in disciplinary outcomes (Gregory et al., 2010; Skiba & Knesting, 2001). Specifically, it recommended the use of preventative discipline practices, like restorative practices, intended to facilitate stronger relationships and more caring school culture (Cavanaugh et al., 2014). There is little qualitative data on whether schools’ adoption of restorative practices has actually shifted school culture, and less on how principals successfully negotiate implementation with pressures to maintain order. This has particular consequences in urban districts that underwent a “small schools movement” (Bronson, 2013; Meier, 2002) in the 1990s, transforming large schools into smaller, co-located schools that must negotiate security and discipline in common spaces or address incidents involving students from multiple schools (Lustick, 2017a).

Many urban districts, including Los Angeles, Oakland, Denver, and New York City, responded to the federal guidance by implementing alternatives to suspension and suspension bans, which have correlated with decreased suspension rates overall but have not necessarily resulted in narrowing racial discipline gaps (e.g., Hashim et al., 2018; Robert & Okilwa, 2018). These persistent racial disparities suggest that, while discipline policies may change, students of color are still more harshly and frequently disciplined. One could argue this is not noteworthy, since racial disparities in school discipline parallel the disproportionate rate at which Black, indigenous, and people of color face arrest, incarceration, and discrimination in all facets of US society. However, it is still likely that principals are responding to a number of conflicting pressures and factors in addition to their own values. For example, principals are beholden to internal and external stakeholders’ expectations for what a safe and orderly school environment looks like, and Vaandering (2014) has found that these expectations hold cultural sway even in a school ostensibly committed to non-punitive discipline. Zero tolerance policies created a “culture of control” (Nolan, 2006) in schools by shifting administrator mentality from educative to punitive. Overall school culture is not necessarily shifting with the change in policy.

Drawing from a year-long ethnographic investigation of restorative practice implementation at three urban secondary schools, the current piece focuses solely on principals’ perspectives and thought processes in making disciplinary decisions. A major finding of the aforementioned full study was that perceptions of internal and external stakeholder pressures were a major force in determining disciplinary decisions. Administrators—including principals and restorative coordinators—felt compelled to dole out punitive consequences when they feared not doing so would make them appear “soft” or not in control in the eyes of parents, other principals in the school, or external stakeholders.

To understand this finding more deeply, the current study examines principal data. This focus is justified by both empirical evidence from the larger study and existing literature from the field of discipline reform. In all three school sites, principals had the final say in disciplinary matters. Principals were responsible for bringing restorative practices to the school, either by initiating its implementation themselves or supporting a teacher to do so. Lastly, principals were responsible to all external and internal stakeholders: other principals in their buildings, district leaders, families, and students. Through messaging, hiring, recruitment, and informal interaction, principals crafted and promoted the image of their school, including its behavioral expectations.

Compounding these empirical justifications for examining principals’ roles, Payne and Welch (2015, 2018) have found principal effectiveness to be the strongest predictor of restorative practice, particularly in urban high schools. It seems that, if we can understand what prevents principals from enacting restorative practices, we can better understand what might prevent schools from enacting these practices with fidelity to federal guidance. Therefore, the current study asks: how did the three principals of these small, collocated urban public schools negotiate disciplinary decisions given the seemingly contradictory pressures they face from internal and external stakeholders?

New York City school principals are required to adhere to the Citywide Discipline Handbook. This handbook encourages leaders to use a restorative approach whenever possible, but prescribes exclusionary discipline (including suspension and expulsion) for violent or drug-related behavior. Moreover, zero tolerance policies are presented as an option for persistent minor misbehavior, such as insubordination. Leaders thus have great leeway in determining when to invoke punishment, exclusion, or dialogic approaches to discipline.

Presumably, this leeway benefits leaders and students, allowing flexibility to suit the particular student in a particular situation. Yet realistically, the student and matter at hand are likely not the only factors in disciplinary decision-making. Even principals who have implemented an official schoolwide plan for when and how to use restorative practices may find themselves suspending students to appease a stakeholder: another principal in another building, parents, teachers, and students. As I have written previously (Lustick, 2017b) they may even be seeking to appease what they imagine students, teachers, or other principals to expect. Given these varied internal and external influences, the purpose of the current study was to examine how principals in restorative schools make disciplinary decisions.

Restorative Justice in Schools

Restorative practices come from “restorative justice,” a theory of conflict resolution rooted in indigenous notions of community and personal responsibility. Initially developed as an alternative to the criminal justice system, restorative justice has more recently been adopted into practices for building and repairing school community (O’Connell, 1998; Thorsburne & Blood, 2013). While mediations and informal discussions can also serve as restorative practices, the circle is most common, and can be used to both build and restore community. A community-building circle might involve answering get-to-know you questions, practice empathy, build trust, and make connections. A restorative circle might involve discussing how one or a few students’ actions harmed others and the school community, and how that harm can be repaired (Amstutz & Mullet, 2005). Establishing and healing community are part of an ongoing process of strengthening students’ sense of responsibility to their classmates and teachers (MacFarlane et al., 2019; Wadhwa, 2016). Basing behavioral expectations on responsibility to others, rather than accountability to rules for their own sake, is the hallmark of restorative theory (MacFarlane et al., 2019).

Implicit in this theory is the presumption that staff facilitating restorative practices will treat all students equitably. This presumption deserves special attention in schools predominantly enrolling students of color. We must be attentive to the history of discipline in schools, which, like special education, has often leaned on “educative” language as a means of infantalizing and pathologizing students whose race, culture, appearance, or learning style did not fit dominant cultural norms (Kafka, 2011). Improving school culture for these children means creating discipline practices that are not only democratic in theory but that regularly facilitate and empower students to voice their perspectives and. For schools long entrenched in the zero tolerance culture of control, we cannot presume that a swift change in policy or ban on suspension will make for more equitable school discipline.

The field of educational leadership is robust with models for how principals can and should make decisions (Davis, 2004; Frick, 2009; there is evidence that elementary principal decision-making is informed by a combination of peer expectations; parental expectations; and fear of legal action (Findlay, 2015). However, there is scant literature on whether this differs at the middle and high school levels. There is also a dearth of research examining how secondary school leaders use restorative practices to explicitly resist deeply entrenched ideologies about behavior. Since racial inequality persists, even with restorative justice practices in place, it is important for scholarship to fill this gap.

Anderson and Cohen (2018) observe that holding districts to a certain metric—in this case, a reduction in overall suspension rates or discipline gaps—creates a perverse incentive to achieve the desired metric without creating the substantive change necessary to transform school communities. They recommend that principals shift their mindsets from high-stakes accountability and control to professional responsibility (Fenwick, 2016). This allows us to get at the real aspects of leadership that make restorative practices effective and sustainable mechanisms for shifting school culture and improving equity. Rather than compelling obedience to behavioral norms, an ideal school culture engages students authentically in prosocial behaviors and norms that benefit the individual and the school community.

Literature on Restorative Practices and the Racial Discipline Gap

District level case studies of restorative justice implementation in Los Angeles (Hashim et al., 2018) and Denver (Anyon et al., 2016) have demonstrated that restorative practices reduce rates of punitive discipline, but not necessarily for students of color. Moreover, in both of these studies, racial gaps in discipline remained—particularly for Black and Latinx students. Payne and Welch (2018) examined factors predicting the use of restorative justice in schools—both at the school level and with individual students. For every 1% increase in the number of Black students enrolled in a school, frequency of restitution (non-punitive discipline) went down by 0.923%; for every 1% increase of Hispanic students, this frequency decreased by 0.935%.

Using Restorative Practices to Close the Discipline Gap

Increasingly, literature is focusing on distinguishing between implementation that reduces the “racial discipline gap” (Gregory & Mosely, 2004) versus that which reinforces traditional patterns of power and racial inequality. Centering issues of equity allows principals to detect inequitable patterns in policy implementation and adjust their and their staff’s practices to close gaps (Skrla et al., 2004). For example, when one urban district in Virginia (Mansfield et al., 2018), narrowed, their discipline gap using restorative practices he authors attribute success not to the practices themselves but to the leadership’s commitment to racial equity, attention to professional development, and support for student voice.

What distinguishes an equitable approach to restorative practice implementation? Qualitative research on restorative practice implementation has identified its unique culture-building capacities. Hantzopolous (2013) contextualizes restorative practices at one alternative high school as part of a larger project through which students help create a humanistic educational environment. Wadhwa’s study of Padres y Jovenes Unidos, a community organization working to bring restorative practices to the Denver Public Schools, discovered that participants viewed their work as explicitly antiracist. New York-based researchers have also found that, when schools use restorative practices to talk explicitly about issues of racial bias, office referrals decrease and teacher-student relationships (particularly for Black and Latino students) improve (Gregory et al., 2016; Manassah et al., 2018).

Scholars advocate for close attention to the community-building aspects, encouraging close attention to equity (Schiff, 2018) and whether practices are being used to build responsibility to community versus traditional accountability to power. Vaandering (2014) examined teachers’ pedagogy in a school utilizing restorative practices, and found these practices were frequently either pushed to the side or coopted in favor of direct authority. A prior case study (Lustick, 2017b) examined one urban public high school using restorative practices to address students who were bullying a transgender student by refusing to use her correct name and pronouns. Rather than teach correct terminology around gender identity, school personnel disciplined the transgender student for engaging in violent behavior and placed the onus of responsibility on her to calmly and peacefully reinforce her correct name and pronoun. This is an example of how dominant culture can coopt restorative systems and marginalize vulnerable populations.

We must be careful to distinguish between restorative practice implementation that encourages “responsibility to community” versus that which compels “accountability to the status quo,” which is—in schools as well as our legal system—a semblance of order compelled by threat of punishment. Habermasian concepts of the relationship between rules and relationships—that is, systems and school lifeworld—can help us understand principals’ disciplinary decisionmaking.

Conceptual Framework: Restorative Systems and ‘Lifeworld’—Rooted Leadership

School leadership scholar Sergiovanni (2000) drew on Habermasian communication theory (1987) to develop a theory of “leadership in the lifeworld.” Sergiovanni was attracted to these terms because, with the emergence of standardized testing, the concept of rooting school systems in an organization’s unique culture was an appealing way to resist. Habermas calls on leaders to maintain a healthy balance between the lifeworld of an organization and the systems governing it. The lifeworld should, at all times, inform the systems, so that members—that is, staff and leaders—are operating from a place of relational trust and connection as well as following a protocol. When an organization does not root its systems in its lifeworld, the lifeworld becomes a function of the systems themselves. In this scenario, people may complete their professional duties, but persistent distrust and fear will erode organizational culture and likely impact productivity as well.

A lifeworld-oriented leader may select similar systems to one who is systems-oriented. The difference, Sergiovanni argues, is how authentically these systems become a site for transforming school culture. Anderson and Cohen (2018) lament the ways standards-based education has colonized school lifeworlds, replacing authentic, relational accountability with “external forms of accountability, including high stakes testing. . .and the threat of public humiliation if targets are not achieved” (p. 15). This leads to “contrived collegiality” and reduces opportunities for building healthy relationships and trust.

Restorative practices are routines, or systems. If they are rooted in the lifeworld, they will help foster responsibility among staff and students. They will both supplement and strengthen the unique school community. Restorative practices that are rooted in the systemsworld, however, strangle opportunities for authentic connection, resulting in scripted interaction and perpetual marginalization.

Table 1 is a visual representation of this framework, which I used to analyze my data. This table breaks down the boundaries between organizational culture (i.e., lifeworld) and society. Principals’ values drive their decisions, whether those values are more aligned with standard accountability or restorative responsibility. In turn, their decisions help to either perpetuate a traditional, punitive culture, or to resist that culture by supporting trust and relationships. (As it happens, principals were deeply torn between the two, as I discuss in my findings). The second row of Table 1 therefore depicts this “impact on school culture.” The final dimension of this framework (the bottom row of Table 1) represents the third dimension of impact that Habermas theorized: impact on society. Theoretically, principals who prevent traditional systems from colonizing their lifeworlds can also prevent traditional patterns of inequality in their outcomes.¹

Table 1.

RP Rooted in Lifeworld Versus Systemsworld.

Approach to RP implementation	Rooted in lifeworld	Rooted in systemsworld
Values	Responsibility to relationships	Accountability to authority
Impact on school culture	Promotes conflict resolution, trust, and relationships	Promotes punitive culture
Impact on society	Serves as a model for building inclusive community	Reflects status quo

Methods

The current study draws on data from a year-long ethnographic multi-case study of three New York City public, secondary, small schools, conducted in the 2013–2014 school year. Ethnographic multi-case study allows the researcher to understand the culture of a particular kind of school, and to develop a grounded theory about sites’ similarities and differences. In this case, triangulating interviews and observations at all three school sites allowed me to understand the external and internal pressures that compelled principals to, ultimately, capitulate toward punitive rather than restorative disciplinary decisions. To examine this phenomenon more deeply, the current study examines interview data with principals.

School Sites: The Utility and Limitations of Comparison

Yin (1994) argues that multi-case study allows us to learn not only about the nuances among cases but the nuances of a larger phenomenon. My purpose in the larger study was to understand restorative practice implementation at all three school sites, which presented both the complexity of individual school nuances and the crucial opportunity to see what trends they shared. All of the schools were public, urban, secondary schools (serving students between grades 6th and 12th) in New York City. All were roughly the same size—serving no more than 100 students per grade—and had the lowest suspension rates of all New York City Schools. Exact suspension rates had been redacted by the city comptroller’s office to maintain student privacy. Table 2 displays demographic data from the three other school sites. All school, student, and personnel names are pseudonyms. One school, Riveredge, was a transfer high school, serving non-traditional students in grades 9 through 12. Plainview served grades 6 to 12, and Bridgeport was a middle school serving grades 6 to 8.

Table 2.

Student Demographic Breakdown of School Sites.^a

School alias	Total enrollment	% Asian	% Black	% White	% Hispanic	% Other	% Free/Reduced price lunch
Plainview secondary school	550	0.8%	39.1%	1.8%	57.5%	0.8%	84.9%
Bridgeport middle school	350	37.5%	16.9%	15.1%	28.0%	2.5%	67.1%
Riveredge high school	260	1.6%	44.7%	6.7%	46.0%	1.0%	67.5%

Data taken from New York City Department of Education (2015). Figures have been slightly obscured to preserve anonymity.

At all three schools, principals followed the Citywide Disciplinary Handbook by using restorative practices to handle some behaviors, and suspension to handle others. Restorative practices included peer mediation, community-building circles for establishing relationships, restorative circles for healing harms, and restorative chats for informally addressing disruptive student behavior. Additionally, each school had a restorative coordinator who was in charge of facilitating restorative practices. Working under these restorative coordinators were deans, who served a combination of restorative and traditional disciplinarian roles.

Demonstrating the ambiguity of the handbook, restorative practices varied across schools in terms of type and frequency. Principals maintained leeway in determining whether, for a given incident, a student would face suspension; restorative practice; or some combination thereof. While all three schools ostensibly used community-building circles during homeroom, only Plainview had consistent participation from all teachers; at Bridgeport and Riveredge, teachers were allowed to decide how to structure their homerooms, though the majority did use circles at least part of the time. In Habermasian language, these systems were unevenly rooted in the lifeworld of the school; they were not mainstays of school culture, but optional activities that teachers could opt into, or not.

At the level of conflict resolution, there was variation in terms of whether restorative practices were ad hoc or a built-in system. Plainview and Riveredge engaged students in facilitating peer mediation, youth court, and restorative circles with other students. At Bridgeport, the restorative coordinator ran restorative circles on an ad hoc basis. Crucially, he also did the background work of conferring with students and parents before convening these circles.

Despite these variations, schools shared key characteristics relevant to the goals of the Positive Schoolwide Discipline Initiative. By official standards of accountability, these schools’ disciplinary structures were “working” by typical standards of accountability—that is, they had the lowest school suspension rates in the district (their actual numbers were redacted; district policy dictates that public records redact low suspension rates to protect the identity of individual students). These schools enrolled majority students of color and students who qualified for free or reduced-price lunch, so from a district-level perspective, their low or non-existent suspension rates were an additional signal of success. Given that one purpose of the Positive School Discipline Initiative was to reduce racial disproportionality in school disciplinary outcomes, these schools were appropriate research sites.

Data Collection

For the larger study, I spent roughly 300 hours over 3 months at each of the three school sites. I interviewed principals two to three times at each school. I also interviewed any other teachers, students, and administrators (e.g., deans and assistant principals) involved with restorative practice administration at the school. I observed restorative practices, and I requested the names of and interviewed several additional staff and students who had participated in restorative conferences earlier that school year. The current study, while informed by the findings of the larger study, focuses on interviews with school principals. Table 3 provides demographic information for these participants.

Table 3.

Demographic Information for Interview Participants.

School	Pseudonym	Position	Race	Gender
Riveredge	Cody	Principal	White	Male
Plainview	Kinu	Principal	Asian-American	Female
Bridgeport	Nelson	Principal	White	Male

Data Analysis

After an initial round of open, “In Vivo” coding (Saldaña, 2013, p. 7), I went back a second time and looked for similarities or patterns among the various In Vivo labels I had given to chunks of text. To explore the meanings of these codes, I also wrote analytic memos (Gibbs, 2008; Rubin & Rubin, 1995). Memos and open coding led to a list of deductive codes, which I then used to recode the data and break it into themes. My overall finding was that responsibility to school community existed at the school community-building level, but became rarer in instances where punitive discipline had been the norm. For the current study, therefore, I examined principal data, and recoded for “responsibility” versus “accountability.” Drawing on my conceptual framework, I discuss “responsibility” as lifeworld-based restorative practices, and “accountability” as systems-based restorative practice.

Positionality

My prior role as a teacher in Brooklyn, and my ongoing work as an activist in support of school discipline reform in New York City Schools and federally, place me largely in favor of non-punitive methods of discipline and a relational approach to classroom management. However, having worked in schools, I also understood the lived experience of teachers and administrators with limited time and high-stakes expectations for performance. I had originally become interested in restorative practices as a way to create space for the kinds of meaningful problem-solving conversations I wanted to have with students but for which I could not find the time. When I removed a student from my classroom for disruptive behavior, it was not because of the behavior itself or because I did not think the student capable of engaging in class material; it was not because of any shortcoming on their part. It was because I knew I would not be able to have the in-depth conversation necessary to understand and repair the conflict between us. I hoped restorative practices could be a space for authentic dialogue and relationship-building, but I also maintained compassion for the teachers and administrators in my study who—despite their philosophical commitment to non-punitive discipline—were still operating under the same constraints as myself and my former colleagues. In addition to analytic memoing, I engaged in personal reflection; journaling; and conversation with colleagues and mentors in order to process my data as a former teacher as well as a researcher. I worked hard to understand my school sites through the experience of my participants and the data, as opposed to my own experience and ideals.

Findings: Tensions Between Responsibility and Accountability

The objective of this study was to examine principals’ disciplinary decision-making, through the lens of responsibility to relationships versus maintaining a visage of order in the eyes of stakeholders. All three principals in my study felt caught between their ideological commitment to restorative practice (i.e., responsibility), and accountability to the punitive status quo. I present this finding in accordance with the categories Table 1 delineates: “values” and “impact.”

Values: How Principals’ Perceptions of Their Reputations Influenced Discipline

Principals implementing restorative practices were conscious of their image in the eyes of both internal and external stakeholders. They perceived that, while restorative work was preferable, displaying an orderly school environment (i.e., one that internal and external stakeholders would perceive as orderly) was first priority. To make this possible, punishment and exclusion were necessary; restorative chats and circles might address low-level misbehavior, but exclusion and zero tolerance policies had their place as well. For example, Kinu, the principal at Plainview, explained, “You have to know that what is best for the individual is not necessarily what’s best for the community, and you have to come up with something in the middle . . . knowing that you’re sacrificing at both ends.” She used this logic to explain the school’s ban on cell phones and food in class, as well as to explain a new program that year where frequently misbehaved students were assigned to a self-contained classroom all day with one teacher. I visited this class and saw half a dozen students sketching listlessly in notebooks, but Kinu insisted the program allowed these students more freedom in their learning and freed her school deans to have restorative chats with more of the general student population.

Nelson, the principal at Bridgeport, chose to hold a restorative conference for three young women rather than suspending them. The students had fought in their neighborhood—out of the school building—but the conflict had begun over an Instagram post, with words and threats exchanged in the cafeteria. Nelson explained that his choice to hold a conference rather than suspend the girls was only possible because the fight had not occurred on school grounds. If it had, he technically still would have been able to hold a conference rather than a suspension. However, he would have feared criticism from teachers that he was becoming too lenient. Nelson also explained that he was sending a message to the “ten percent of kids who always challenge the rules and the twenty percent who could go either way.” Ultimately, Nelson believed his power lay in his ability to suspend, not establish a sense of shared responsibility.

Cody, the principal at Riveredge, echoes Nelson in even stronger language, calling himself the “hammer” that complements the restorative coordinator’s relational approach. When a student named Darron was caught repeatedly trespassing on the second floor, Cody had to capitulate more to the second floor’s philosophy because all three principals “have to determine consequences [together]” to enter into the department of education’s online disciplinary tracking system. Another school upstairs might be open to “crafting a process,” meaning something restorative. A third school is open to but not familiar with restorative practices, meaning Riveredge staff would have to facilitate. Plus, Cody admits, trespassing “is so simple. We can fix it so he doesn’t do this specific behavior again. He has had the conversation about how this behavior affects other communities.” Darron had to attend a conference with his mother and Cody to discuss the implications of his sneaking onto other floors and disturbing classes in progress.

There is a clear consequence outlined by the Department of Education’s Discipline Code for a student traveling to another school’s floor in the building. A combination of bureaucracy and what Cody called “optics” entice him to use punitive discipline practices to address incidents that involve other schools in the building, even when he believes a restorative approach might be more valuable. Yet, towing the hard line with Darron was also how he saw his role as a principal, independent from outside forces. “I have to be the hammer,” he says. “That’s my role here. It’s not one I like to do, but when [Darron] curses and threatens a staff member, he’s suspended and that’s me who suspends him. And he comes back angry at me, and then we have to have that conversation.” Cody distinguishes his role from that of the restorative coordinator, who he says “helps [Darron understand that] Cody’s not mad at you, Cody wants the behavior to change, he’s just doing his job.” Cody sees himself as a means of order-keeping, punitive discipline, whereas he casts his restorative coordinator in the role of dialoguing with the student. The purpose of restorative practice is to encourage a stronger lifeworld—to encourage students to behave sociably out of a sense of commitment to each other and their teachers. By contrast, in this particular instance with Darron, Cody talks about restorative practices as a means of containing student voice and protecting order in school.²

Impact on School Culture

The Citywide Handbook left a lot of room for principals’ values to manifest in school policies and school culture. Yet, they spoke of clear external pressures compelling them to prioritize order over relational work. Part of maintaining this image of “order” was adopting zero-tolerance policies for certain school rules. Bridgeport issued demerits to students who received three warnings for disruptive classroom behavior, whether or not there was a restorative conversation at any point. As mentioned, Plainview prohibited students from having their phones out in class; eating or drinking during class; or wearing hats anywhere on the school premises. Regarding the ban on food and cell phones, Kinu explained that this policy saves time, in that teachers and deans can better support the majority of students in class. She marveled at “the amount of chaos that got reduced when we put those rules in place,” saying it “allows kids to recognize all these other things that they’re doing that maybe we otherwise wouldn’t recognize.” The ban on hats stood out, however, because it was a response not to internal stakeholders but to the police.

They would come in [to break up fights] and be like “that’s why they don’t listen to you, because you let them wear hats.” And it wasn’t worth fighting with the police, because then they’d be mad at us. It’s one of those political compromises that you make.

Kinu notes that this rule is hardest to enforce, because even the teachers and principals are not bought into it. However, she maintains that police will be more likely to help when needed if they believe the school is doing its part to maintain order.

Part of this milieu of “order” was demonstrating that punitive discipline would be swift and stern when deemed necessary, especially in instances where students or teachers from other schools in the building were involved. In other words, the more public the disciplinary incident, the more likely a school leader was to choose a punitive response. For example, Cody, the principal at Riveredge, explained that he tries to take a restorative approach to breaking up fights in the building, even when they involve students from other schools. When the alert comes in over his walkie talkie, he rushes to intervene and hold a restorative chat with students before school safety officers have a chance to get involved. However, violent incidents require an entry into the districtwide database. Only one entry per incident is allowed, which means that the principals must all agree on what happened and what punitive consequences will be assigned. Cody says the principals strive for “equity” among them, but given the traditional approach of the other principals in the school, decisions tend to skew punitive.

Kinu, the principal at Plainview, similarly feels responsible for displaying an orderly image to other principals. This was most evident in an incident she described involving two Black male Plainview students who were caught “trespassing” (the official term for students walking on floors not assigned to their own schools). A teacher at that school overheard one student saying “b*tch-ass” over and over again to the other one, teasingly, and assumed this was directed at one of their students who was nearby at the time. The teacher included this in their report. Kinu suspended the students because she felt it would appear disorderly to the other school if she did not. However, she held a restorative chat with them in which she revealed her suspicions that they had been racially profiled.

Like part of the conversation was about all the other things they were doing wrong, and then part of the conversation was about how they were potentially being misunderstood….And then at the end I just said, can I ask you a question? What race was the kid? And he was like, he was white. And I was like okay. And he was like, why did you need to know that? And I was like, I don’t know, I’m just trying to like understand if there’s some racial element to this because you were described as four tall black males. And you’re tall, you’re not particularly tall, I mean, you know, I don’t know, I want to just know, I’m just curious.

How did they respond to that?

They were like, okay! (laughs)

Kinu seems to detect this incident as one of potential racial profiling: a White teacher in another school attributed negative and dangerous intent to a group of Black teenagers, rather than presuming they were “joking around” or talking to each other. She clearly wants her students to realize she recognizes this racial dynamic. However, neither she nor the students go so far as to unpack or talk about racial prejudice as a “root cause” of the incident. Instead, the core of the issue is still the students” misbehavior: their trespassing onto the wrong floor, their cursing, and the harm they caused to a teacher and student in another school. Thus, even in a situation where the principal sensed racism, suspension was ultimately used to appear orderly in the eyes of the other schools’ officials.

Parents were another ever-present consideration in principals’ decision-making. Nelson, the principal at Bridgeport, describes an incident in which a high school on another floor, which had a specialized focus on teacher preparation, wanted to initiate a tutoring program with Bridgeport. However, Nelson reports that the parents of White and Asian students were concerned with their students interacting with “bad kids.” I asked him what he meant by this, and he at first blamed it on the age difference, and then admitted that he thought it was really about race.

Parents with younger kids, especially kids who didn’t go through high school yet, think that like older kids are doing older kid things and acting bad, I think the other part is race. The demographics of our school look very different from the demographics of the high school. Both high schools.

why do you think that is?

Fear of the unknown. Or racism [laughs]. However you wanna label it.

The data in this section demonstrate that when “community” included external stakeholders whose opinions could jeopardize the school’s reputation, principals defaulted to using punitive practices and zero tolerance policies to maintain a visage of order.

Discussion: Restorative Practices as Systems, Divorced From Lifeworld

As systems, restorative practices effectively reduced the need for suspension. These systems, however, were not rooted in the lifeworld of the school. In the context of specific disciplinary decisions, principals still valued maintaining an orderly school image over building stronger relationships and trust in the school lifeworld. They saw these decisions as symbolic as well as specific, sending a message to the broader school community about what behavior would and would not be tolerated. This was a response not only to their own ideas about discipline, but to what they perceived outside stakeholders—parents, other schools in the building, and even the police—would support. In terms of Table 1, and Habermas’s distinction between systems that are or are not rooted in lifeworld, we can see how these principals used punitive systems and authority even in conjunction with restorative practice. We also see that this impacted the school culture. This led, for example, to whole groups of students at Plainview being cordoned off into a vaguely-defined alternative programming; to a student at Riveredge facing suspension rather than the restorative opportunity to repair and reflect; and to the principal at Bridgeport only engaging restorative practice when he sensed it would not interfere with teachers’ respect for his own authority.

All three principals referred to using suspensions to either prevent or respond to physical altercations. However, they also talked about zero tolerance policies as a means of eradicating low-level behavior that they thought could lead to higher-level misbehavior. Demerits for class disruption are examples of this type of philosophy, as are outright bans on cell phones, food, drink, and hat-wearing. At Plainview, previously disruptive students were sequestered in their own classroom, denied access to general educational services.

None of these represents a major threat to student safety, but each is intended to send a signal that students are being closely monitored (and, in the case of permanent student removal, potentially infringes upon students’ rights). This creates a culture of control, one more aligned with accountability and punitive discipline than lifeworld-based trust. Demerits and other zero tolerance policies at these schools are more closely aligned with zero tolerance logic than restorative logic, especially considering that most zero-tolerance-based suspensions are in response to low-level incidents like “insubordination.” This parallels “broken windows” policing (Wilson & Kelling, 1982), which advocates heavy policing for petty crime as a means of discouraging higher-level crime.

Broken-windows policing was predominantly used in low-income urban neighborhoods, and contributed to mass incarceration and criminalization of people living in those neighborhoods, the majority of whom were people of color. While principals’ societal impact was not a focus of this article, it still appeared in the data: both Nelson and Kinu talk about choosing tougher discipline strategies to appease external stakeholders, despite recognizing the potentially racist motives of those stakeholders. In particular, the hat ban at Plainview was a direct response to pressure from the police, signaling that the Kinu ultimately ascribed more power to punitive discipline outside the school as well as in.

Conclusion

The purpose of this study was to understand restorative school principals’ decision-making around disciplinary incidents. School sites had restorative practices in place, which bespeaks an hypothetical commitment to responsibility. However, I also found that the value principals’ placed on accountability kept them from framing restorative practices as a means of cultural transformation. Implementing restorative practices may correlate with a reduction in suspension rates, but it will not necessarily change school culture unless those implementing it see their work as a means of cultural transformation and relationship-building. This requires a shift in how principals are trained in restorative practices, which researchers and principal training programs should take on as a component of climate and social justice leadership.

The Federal Commission on School Safety’s (2018) report signals a major political shift away from discourses on equity and toward discourses on safety and control. The Commission bases its conclusions, in part, on testimonies from teachers who report feeling unsafe and unable to manage their classrooms the option for suspension is not at their disposal. Indeed, if school principals implement non-punitive discipline practices without addressing school culture, schools will become less safe. On the other hand, if we blame restorative and other non-punitive practices for this lack of culture and safety, schools will remain vulnerable to the argument that we need more police officers, guns, and suspension to keep schools safe. It is thus imperative that school leadership not succumb to seemingly impossible tensions between restorative and traditional notions of accountability. Instead, we must equip principals and teachers with the tools to facilitate strong relational cultures where, as much as possible, conflict can be handled through relationship-building and communication, rather than removal or violence.

Recommendations: Creating and Sustaining Responsibility to Community

In articulating their theory of a “culture of care,” MacFarlane et al. (2019) recommend a 3-year implementation plan for restorative practices. This includes a year-long circle practice just among staff, so that they can practice cultivating a sense of responsibility among each other and thinking about what this culture would look like and require in their specific context. Their plan also details indicators for recognizing a strong school culture, such as teachers who treat students like “co-creators” versus “passive receptors”; teachers who focus on “relationships and interactions” rather than “rules and regulations”; and teachers who use disruption as an opportunity for social and emotional instruction rather than punishment. Setting clear expectations for what restorative culture looks like might mitigate the pressure principals felt from teachers to prove they were not, as Nelson feared, becoming lenient.

However, strategies for changing school culture do not address pressures my participants faced from external stakeholders, like parents and other principals in a shared building. Further research should more deeply investigate principal decision-making, especially if it allows us to understand what allows principals to implement restorative practices with an orientation toward relational responsibility rather than accountability. It would also be useful to investigate examples of restorative practice implementation that fully engage and earn the buy-in of external stakeholders, such as other principals in the building; school safety officers; parents; the police; and district officials. Principal preparation programs should introduce schoolwide approaches to positive schoolwide discipline, restorative practice, and social/emotional learning, as well as some of the dilemmas associated with their implementation. This will enhance the potential for internal and external stakeholders to buy into these efforts in their classrooms, as well as the development of best practices for administration.

Currently, these topics are taken up as packaged professional and preservice opportunities, through independent contractors who either partner with school boards, or private, non-accredited organizations like the International Institute for Restorative Practices that award degrees. Yet, these modules do not explicitly take up issues of marginalization and power. Leader and educator preparation programs, particularly those concerned with social justice, could naturally cover topics on discipline systems as part of their material on overall school culture-building. In many states (e.g., Commission on Teacher Credentialing & California Department of Education, 2014; Texas Education Agency, 2017), standards for principal certification include cultural proficiency and a demonstrated platform for cultivating community with internal and external stakeholders. The stage is set, it seems, for helping alleviate the internal contradictions our current discipline policy landscape presents for the urban school principal.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Hilary Lustick

Notes

Author Biography

Hilary Lustick is an Assistant Professor of Qualitative Methods at the University of Massachusetts Lowell College of Education, where she teaches in the Educational Leadership EdD and Research, Education and Evaluation PhD programs. Dr. Lustick studies restorative practices, social emotional learning, and other preventative approaches to school discipline and climate. She also studies the role of emotion in critical reflexivity, and how we can mentor rising scholars to recognize and privilege emotional ways of understanding data.

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