The Administrators Have No Clothes
How “restorative justice” makes a mockery of the rules.
There is a folktale written by Hans Christian Andersen called “The Emperor’s New Clothes” that seems particularly appropriate in our age of ignoring obvious truths in favor of feel-good do-goodery and mutual back-scratching. The story goes like this: There once was a vain emperor whose major cultural triumph was his fashion. He always wore the most beautiful and elegant clothes, and whenever he emerged from his palace wearing a new style, the whole city would adopt the same fashion within days.
One day, a trio of silk-spinning travelers entered the kingdom and inspired gossip of their having created the most beautiful clothes known to mankind. The emperor, obviously intrigued by these rumors, summoned the weavers to his palace and questioned them about their talent. The weavers confirmed their abilities and said they would be more than willing to make clothes for the emperor to show off to his whole empire.
There was only one catch, they said: Any man or woman who was inherently unworthy would not be able to see the silk. Instead, they would see nothing where the valiant and stout-hearted would behold the wonders of the finest clothes in the world.
Of course, the king took them up on their offer. Why wouldn’t he? He knew he was worthy; otherwise, he wouldn’t own the palace and everything else in the kingdom. So he set the weavers to work in the basement of his palace and furnished them with all the supplies they needed. The weavers began working and told the king that they would need a little while to complete the outfit. No worry, said the emperor; he was the king, and he could wait all the time in the world.
A few weeks into the waiting, the emperor became more curious about his forthcoming clothes. So, he sent one of his trusted advisers to observe the weavers at work and report back on their progress. The adviser went down and saw the weavers spinning away, but to his disappointment and growing fear, he could not see the silk itself. Not wanting to be seen as unworthy, however, he reported to the king that the silk was the finest he had ever seen, and that the king would be pleased to see it in its final iteration.
To get confirmation, the king sent down another trusted adviser, who again observed the weavers busying away and saw nothing on their spinning wheels. Like the previous adviser, the second one reported to the king that the silk was marvelous, so as not to be cast away from the palace as an unworthy adviser. The emperor sent a third adviser later, who again confirmed the beauty of the silk though he saw nothing in reality.
When the weavers finally announced that they had completed their project, the emperor prepared to wear the magnificent robes. When he approached, however, he saw nothing where the clothes were supposed to be. As with his advisers, the king felt a growing terror, knowing that he was unworthy to see the robes. And yet, he acted as if he saw the robes to ensure that nobody thought he was unworthy. He proclaimed the clothes the finest in all the land, and undressed to wear the robes. As he finished getting “dressed,” the three advisers cheered on the emperor and told him he looked fantastic in his new robes, though in reality they merely saw him standing naked in his palace.
The king, wearing nothing, took to his chariot and was paraded through the city. He held his head high and looked regal from the neck-up, but everything below was merely bare skin. The townspeople, who knew of the silk’s supposed magic powers, whistled and cheered on the king, though none of them saw what the king was apparently wearing. No one wanted to be seen as unworthy. So the emperor, in all his vanity, inadvertently exposed himself to the world, and nobody called him on his folly.
If you take this beloved folktale and substitute the words “school administrators” for “emperor,” “restorative justice” for “silk,” and “consultants” for “weavers,” you begin to understand the problems with today’s school administration and discipline apparatus.
Two weeks ago, I was in your mailbox complaining of the behaviors that today’s students exhibit towards their teachers. Today, I will attempt to explain one reason why those behaviors exist.
But first, picture this scene: Several times during one of my classes this year, I have had to call for the administrators to remove students from the class due to violent behavior. One time, a student slapped another across the face with his bare hand because he thought it would be funny. Another time, this same student viciously kicked the shins of four or five others in the class, all of whom laughed along with the student doing it and aimed kicks back at him. This same student once took a ball of putty, flattened it on his hand, and offered it to another student to smell it. When the student complied, the first student shoved the putty into the nose of the other one and laughed.
I have also had to remove students from this class for throwing balls of putty at each other (they get the putty from one student who apparently has Autism and thus carries the putty around as a sort of comfort item, and too easily relinquishes it to the malcontents around her), rubbing disinfectant wipes into the faces of other students after they have rubbed them on the ground to dirty them, and getting up onto desks and tables. One time, when another teacher came to observe this class to give advice on what I should do, a student in the class threatened him, effectively saying that he couldn’t wait until they were both out of school.
Each one of these behaviors is, in my opinion, a suspendable offense. The one student who has been kicked out multiple times should be in a school that deals specifically with kids with behavioral problems. And yet, so far, those students have collectively been assigned one-and-a-half days of in-school suspension.
The administrators have no clothes.
In the school district where I teach (which shall remain nameless), but also nationally, there is a push for “restorative justice.” This term refers to a toolbox of community-building exercises like restorative circles and mediations between students and teachers with a neutral third party. These practices are designed to reduce the use of suspension and expulsion as punishments for various poor behaviors, which serves to keep those troubled kids in school and learning, while simultaneously building trust between teachers and their students.
Proponents of restorative justice claim that this approach to discipline has positive impacts on school climate and culture. Moreover, reducing the number of suspensions and expulsions—which disproportionately affect black and Hispanic students, as well as poor students—is, they claim, a worthy goal and a necessary step to reducing systemic discrimination against low-income and minority students.
I will not delve into those latter claims right now. Rather, I want to explore the implications of these types of policies and my own experience with them in the classroom.
The implications, I believe, are easy to see. Just look at the paragraphs I wrote describing the behaviors I deal with on a daily basis in that one class. Instead of suspending these students—demonstrating to their parents that the school takes this type of violent and threatening behavior seriously—our school administrators have allowed these students to stay in school and create a violent learning environment. This not only affects teachers like me, who have to be on the lookout constantly for poor behaviors that could escalate to violent ones, but also the other students in that class who do not partake in the violence. Even though the innocents are rarely targets of the violence, they still observe it happen, and many of them likely fear getting too close to those other students.
Shouldn’t this in and of itself negate the claims of the “restorative justice” proponents? If the goal is to create a safe and respectful learning environment, doesn’t my experience alone prove that the opposite has, in fact, occurred? Where is the “justice” in allowing students to kick others’ shins with almost no consequence, or throw stuff around the room and at other students, or creating a lawless environment in which students fear for their own safety?
One could argue that my class is the exception, rather than the rule. Indeed, it may be that, in many cases, restorative justice has positive impacts on schools. I won’t deny that there is a certain appeal to holding mediations and thus repairing relationships with students rather than kicking them out of school for their poor behaviors.
But maybe restorative justice only works in schools in which a much lower proportion of students are repeat offenders. At my middle school, perhaps something like twenty percent of students could be described this way. You can hold all the restorative circles you want; this will not change the behavior of those worst-behaving students one bit. I once heard one of my students claim that the mediation he went to was “stupid,” and clearly did not change his mind about anything (this is the shin-kicker). If that doesn’t prove anything, I’m not sure what does.
The administrators have no clothes.
Every successful classroom manager that I’ve ever spoken to has emphasized the need for order and consistency, as well as swiftness and sureness of punishment, as the only way to manage a classroom that has such poor behavior or such high potential for misbehavior. Meanwhile, every administrator I’ve ever heard from, or education consultant, or restorative justice advocate, has emphasized building relationships with students one at a time, refraining from having students removed from the class or suspended for misbehavior, and generally building a kumbaya atmosphere. I think I know who to listen to here.
Some of this messaging stems from Massachusetts education regulations. Regulation 603 CMR 53.00, adopted in 2014, requires, among other things, that principals and school districts collect data on their suspensions and expulsions. These data include, among others, race and socioeconomic status. Moreover, “the principal shall further determine whether it is necessary or appropriate to modify disciplinary practice due to over-reliance on expulsion, in-school or out-of school suspensions…or the impact of such suspensions…on selected student populations compared with other students [emphasis added].”
Additionally, the Massachusetts school commissioner can review school data on discipline and “identify schools that need assistance to reduce over-reliance on long-term suspension or expulsion as a consequence of student misconduct [emphasis added].”
Therein lies the rub.
If you read between the lines, these regulations say that school administrators, from Principals all the way to the state commissioner of education, must decide on their own whether they are suspending too many minorities or poor students. In other words, by simply looking at the proportion of black and Hispanic students who are suspended against their population in the school as a whole, a number-cruncher can say that School X is arbitrarily suspending too many students of color and must therefore change its practices to conform with the norms. If a school administrator deems it “appropriate,” he shall “determine whether it is necessary” to change the way suspensions are handed out so that the school is no longer “over-relian[t]” on suspensions and expulsions as a form of punishment.
If you read the entire regulation, you’ll notice that there is no definition of “over-reliance” or “appropriate[ness].” These vague terms are left to the administrators to sort out themselves. So if an administrator believes in restorative justice and does not want to suspend “too many” minority students—never mind the underlying behaviors for which they are being suspended—that administrator can change the suspension practices to reflect his or her personal convictions.
The administrators have no clothes.
If we have rules—rules against threatening teachers, against violence in the classroom, against insubordination—and there are no consequences, then there are no rules. If we have students kicking each other, threatening teachers, defying them in the halls, and getting away with it with nothing more than a stern look and maybe a phone call home, we are not in control.
Kids are not dumb. In fact, because they have less impulse control, kids will often say what adults won’t. I left out the ending of the folktale because I think it applies perfectly here. When the emperor is waltzing about in his birthday suit, nobody calls him on it because nobody wants to be seen as unworthy. Yet one person does point it out. That person is a child, who says, “the emperor has no clothes.” That child sets off a chain reaction, humiliating the emperor, merely because he pointed out the obvious when nobody else had the courage (or the innocence) to do so.
My students do this every day. Why should they listen to me or any other teacher? Why should they follow the rules and be obedient? They know they won’t get punished for it. The student who threatened the teacher was never suspended for his words. He even said that, since nothing happened to him, none of it really mattered. How are we therefore supposed to raise kids in a world in which their actions will go unpunished? What will happen to these kids when they leave school and enter the real world, where the kid gloves come off and the powers-that-be actually care about misbehavior, violence, and insubordination?
The restorative justice crowd thinks it is doing persistent offenders a favor by eschewing suspension and expulsion in favor of restorative conferences and mediations. But it’s not. Rather, this system of addressing misbehavior merely reinforces the idea that students can get away with murder. The real world disagrees.
The administrators have no clothes. And because of that, we’re screwed.
A disclaimer: Due to a deeper consideration of some of the career risks I run in writing this newsletter, I have edited this and other newsletters to remove some identifying information that I included when I wrote it at first. I don’t think it will take away from the value of the newsletter, but you may notice some awkward repetitions of words or phrases (like “the Vice Principal”) to avoid identifying anybody by name. Thank you for your understanding.
You nailed it Gregory. Best post yet.
Nothing to add. You are right on it my man. I can’t believe we let it happen. It’s embedded. It’s gonna be a heavy lift to fix it.