Unburdened by false humility, postmodern trauma activists claim to have understood for the first time what drives all of human suffering
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CATEGORY: SCHOOLS  Cade Brumley, Louisiana State Superintendent of Education Source: Louisiana Department of Education Read time: 2.5 minutes This Happened On July 29, 2024, the top administrator of a state education department issued a memo to district school leaders to promote stricter school discipline consistent with two new state laws. Who Did This? Cade Brumley is the Louisiana Superintendent of Education. He was selected in 2020 by a state board under a Democrat governor. In 2024, the governorship changed to a Republican, who, with majorities in the House and Senate, passed multiple laws to return to conservative cultural values in education and law enforcement. The Premise Brumley’s memo stated, “As we approach a new school year, please recommit to assertive discipline action to create safe and orderly environments where teaching and learning can flourish.” It also noted two new laws. One law replaces the phrase a “teacher may” have an unruly student removed from the classroom with a “teacher shall,” and protects teachers who do that from retaliation by school leaders. The other new law adds possession of knives and illegal drugs to behaviors requiring expulsion. Not mentioned in the memo is that the competing philosophy of assertive discipline in schools has been the practice of restorative justice. Developed in part as a response to zero-tolerance school policies of the 1990s, restorative justice advocates claim that suspensions facilitate a path to prison, and that punitive discipline is inherently racist because it is disproportionately given to Black students and minority groups due to structural racism and implicit bias [1]. Originally crafted for the criminal justice system, restorative justice does not have one standard definition. Common elements include emphasis on communication in face-to-face circles, often called peace circles, where victims express how the “deeds” effected them, and perpetrators, gently referred to as “doers,” take responsibility for their actions in apologies or service work. It must never be implied that the doer is a bad person [2]. At least three states passed laws (California, Colorado, and Minnesota) to make restorative justice government policy in public schools in the past decade. Many school districts have adopted it, including Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, Oakland, Philadelphia, and San Francisco [2]. Analysis To some in the criminal justice system, trauma is a guiding loadstar: victims of violence should not be re-traumatized by being forced to testify in formal proceedings, and perpetrators should not be newly traumatized by incarceration. Psychiatrist Judith Herman, inventor of the fictitious complex PTSD, devoted her latest book in 2023 to promoting restorative justice [3]. In the school system, negative impacts on perpetrators and victims are called “harms” instead of traumas. The emphasis is more on trying to correct perceived racial discrimination and reduce discipline disparities. Louisiana never formally adopted restorative justice in schools. An effort to enshrine the practice into code failed in 2013 in large part because there is no good evidence to suggest that it works. Only one study on restorative justice in schools has employed a randomized design, and had mixed results on suspension rates, and showed that academic outcomes actually worsened in grades 6–8 [2]. One other study employed a randomized design but it was narrowly focused on bullying, and failed to show an overall effect [4]. Both studies suffered from inconsistent implementation practices that may have weakened the effects. All other research in schools are uncontrolled studies [5]. Advocates can point to decreased suspensions in some, but not all, studies, but usually neglect to mention how that is circular. Suspensions decrease simply because restorative justice eliminates suspensions as a first response. Nearly all studies failed to measure underlying disruptive behaviors. The main evidence that advocates of restorative justice can cite is that teachers’ or students’ perceptions of school atmosphere improve, although even that is mixed. Further, perceptions don’t make anyone safer, develop academic skills, or improve lives in tangible ways. Why Is This Happening? Returning to assertive discipline may be seen as a correction to social justice types of reforms based on claims that racism causes children to be disruptive. For social justice movements to both energize the elites in power and create public buy-in, the time-tested progressive Leftist strategy is to identify a source of perceived oppression that is the cause of all problems, the thing one can point to with definitive clarity as the cause of all disadvantages and inequities in society. Trauma and racial discrimination consistently serve that purpose well. Evidence of causation has been harder to come by. REFERENCES [1] Gregory, A., & Evans, K.R. (2020). The Starts and Stumbles of Restorative Justice in Education: Where Do We Go from Here? Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/restorative-justice [2] Catherine H. Augustine, John Engberg, Geoffrey E. Grimm, Emma Lee, Elaine Lin Wang, Karen Christianson, Andrea A. Joseph (2018). Can Restorative Practices Improve School Climate and Curb Suspensions? An Evaluation of the Impact of Restorative Practices in a Mid-Sized Urban School District. RAND Corporation: Santa Monica, CA. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2840.html [3] Judith Herman (2023). Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice. Basic Books: New York [4] Acosta, J., Chinman, M., Ebener, P.,Malone, P. S., Phillips, A.,& Wilks, A. (2019). Evaluation of a whole-school change intervention: findings from a two-year cluster-randomized trial of the restorative practices intervention. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 48, 876–890. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-019-01013-2. [5] Studies are reviewed in: Sean Darling-Hammond, Trevor A. Fronius, Hannah Sutherland, Sarah Guckenburg, Anthony Petrosino, Nancy Hurley (2020). Effectiveness of Restorative Justice in US K-12 Schools: a Review of Quantitative Research. Contemporary School Psychology (2020) 24:295–308. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40688-020-00290-0 Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe here to a weekly email notice of new posts. Comments are closed.
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