But looks can be deceiving. Most weeks, this school sends students to work in high-rise offices, tech firms or a coding center it runs downtown.

In fact, the building’s past history as a neighborhood elementary school may be the only reminder of the big, comprehensive and often unsafe public high schools from which it’s often a refuge. 

Offering a dizzying array of internships, college courses and dual enrollment opportunities, Building 21 challenges nearly all of the conventional wisdom about what an urban public high school should do.

Unlike most urban high schools, Building 21 is small: Enrollment is capped at 400 students, with classes of just 25 or fewer.

It operates under a complex set of that stress the importance of relationships. When conflicts arise, teachers must help resolve them quickly, interfering as little as possible as students work things out. The school was among the first in Philadelphia to introduce so-called , an alternative to traditional — often harsh — school discipline. Instead of a lecture or suspension for misbehavior, students often find themselves deep in conversation about what happened, talking with teachers, counselors and classmates to get to the bottom of a conflict and resolve it. These practices, the school maintains, also teach problem-solving skills.

In operation for a decade, it also boasts something most Philadelphia schools don’t: a 94% graduation rate for the past two years. At last count, the district’s four-year graduation rate .

Nabeehah Parker, a 20-year veteran of the district, came to Building 21 in 2022 to run its partnership program. Her goal, she said, was to make it a place where students can have the same opportunities as students at selective schools.

To that end, the school offers a veritable revolving door of experts coming in to teach classes and students heading out for face-time with employers.

It features the kinds of risk-taking and experiences often reserved for students in elite schools. Yet it admits virtually anyone, with open-enrollment policies that match those of the city’s big neighborhood high schools.

Principal Ben Koch started out as a Spanish teacher here, building its world language program around a concept called “.” Instead of memorizing vocabulary lists and conjugating verbs, students act out stories in the language they’re learning. The audience responds to the actors in a kind of interactive linguistic improv. 

“I saw that just take off,” he said. Students took more risks, retained more vocabulary and learned to speak in full sentences. 

Simultaneously, he organized a class trip to Costa Rica, where students hiked the rainforest, ziplined, helped repaint an elementary school and worked at an elder care center. 

Closer to home, students learn bioscience through a mobile program sponsored by the Pennsylvania Society for Biomedical Research and game design with a teacher who created a mobile app to help schools track inventory. In a cosmetology class, teacher Samantha Bromfield focuses on ensuring employable skills, believing that “everyone should know how to do a range of everything.”

The school’s open-admissions policy is a draw for many families, said Parker, the partnership coordinator. The opportunity for any student to attend, no matter their grades or behavioral record, is “something that parents are looking for.”

But it also means much of Building 21’s energy is spent getting students’ skills up to the level where they can reliably pursue their interests. 

That often takes the form of individualizing assignments and basically personalizing student performance levels. In an English class, all students are writing about topics they’re interested in, but one student may be tasked with writing a cogent essay based on a reading, while another may write one that does more with the reading, incorporating specific details or answering complex questions. 

“What we’re trying to find is that sweet spot where you’re not ignoring the truth of what ‘unfinished learning’ looks like in high school — and you want kids to find themselves and get engaged,” said co-founder Laura Shubilla.

If some of that isn’t sexy or new, she shrugs it off. A lot of what works in education, including systemic differentiated instruction, simply isn’t. “I would say probably we’re more intentional than innovative.” 

As a result, while the school gets a lot of visitors, it doesn’t often appear in the news. These days, one of the main things the school is known for in Philly — a district plagued with decrepit building conditions — is its three-month closure last spring after inspectors discovered . In May 2023, one day after it reopened, shut it down again, just hours after a big celebratory barbecue. 

“Four o’clock in the afternoon,” Shubilla recalled, “the ceiling fell in.”

A ‘backwards-mapped’ curriculum

The school offers four years of competency-based learning, in which mastering skills takes precedence over seat time. Since students progress at their own rate, each enjoys what amounts to an individualized education.

It turns the idea of grades on its head, offering students the opportunity to submit and re-submit work until it meets high standards. Assignments are graded on a 2- to 12- point scale. If a student hands in a writing assignment that’s adequate or only touches on a few competencies, it might earn an 8 or 9 or lower. If she wants to earn a 10 or 11, she can refer to a chart that lays out the skills associated with such a piece of writing: It must have a compelling hook and strong point of view, cite evidence and acknowledge other perspectives.

Earning a 10 or higher means it’s as good as something a college student — or at least a college-ready student — might produce.

“We did a lot of studying on what it takes to be successful in college and on a job,” said co-founder Chip Linehan, “and we sort of backwards-mapped from there.”

Hassan Durant, 17, a senior, said the curriculum is challenging but worth the effort. “It pushes us to think harder and more on a college-based level,” he said

Understanding how to move up the grading scale was difficult at first, but many students now welcome it.

“A lot of people that I know that feel like they should have scored higher go to the teachers and ask, ‘What can I revise? What can I work on? What can I fix and change to take this from an 8 and bring it up to at least a 10?’” Durant said.

After years of traditional learning and report cards, he said it was difficult to get his parents to understand the subtleties of competency.

He recalled telling his parents, “I’m not really failing, and I wouldn’t say I’m passing, but I am getting the work done and doing what I have to do so that I can pass.” 

Roots at Harvard, MIT

Co-founders Shubilla and Linehan created Building 21 after meeting at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education in 2011, where they studied with renowned scholar . 

Elmore pushed students to rethink everything. “His question was always, ‘Why does this thing called learning have to take place in this place called school?’” said Shubilla. If not, he would ask, what would you replace it with?

She and Linehan soon realized that they had similar answers: Both believed school should start with an “anchor learning site” connected to opportunities elsewhere.

So they designed a school that both brings in experts from outside and gently pushes students into workplaces. Linehan likes to think of it as making the school “as permeable as possible.” 

Elmore, who died in 2021, also pushed students to confront their biases. More broadly, Harvard’s Graduate School of Education urged teachers to confront bedrock views about their own authority and interact more patiently with students.

“Their saying was, ‘You can’t transform the sector until you transform yourself,’” Shubilla recalled.

Building 21 opened in 2014, and now operates two campuses, one here and another in nearby . Beyond that, its curriculum is open-sourced, readily accessible to other educators wanting to try their hand at competency-based learning. 

The school’s name is a sly nod to MIT’s fabled , which for 80 years served as coded shorthand for a center of innovation. After World War II, it became home to dozens of researchers and technologists, including MIT’s legendary , widely seen as the first group of computer hackers.

Mastering skills preoccupies much of the first two years here, but the final two take on a different cast, with juniors spending large chunks of the day connecting what they’re learning to their interests through internships and senior projects. 

Last spring, Durant, the senior, spent a lot of time downtown at , Building 21’s IT pathway program, to learn the Python computer language. He’s also in the middle of a paid “externship” with , an engineering software company that specializes in infrastructure. The company — one of 83 outside organizations that partner with the school — sponsors five such positions each spring and summer. 

Last fall, Durant was also enrolled in a public speaking class at La Salle University, one of three colleges where Building 21 students can sign up for dual-enrollment classes. Building 21 also runs three dual enrollment classes onsite through Harrisburg University.

Like many schools that emphasize project-based and competency-based learning, it puts seniors through “capstone” projects that often summarize their learning, scratch an itch or answer a nagging question.

In one case, a student who wanted to start a theater program visited stages at nearby schools and returned to Building 21 with a detailed proposal to create a homegrown initiative, complete with budget, staffing projections and recommendations.

Another surveyed the African-American history curriculum and came away with a keen observation: When it came to Black Americans, it relied heavily on “the oppression narrative” of slavery, racism and subjugation, Shubilla recalled. “And her question was: ‘Why is there not more Black joy in the curriculum?’” 

Not only did teachers listen, they spent the following summer staring down the student’s complaint and eventually concluded that she was right. They redesigned it. 

One teacher that teaching about racial trauma opens a wound for many students of color that teachers often fail to consider. So the school added more readings and projects built around “enlightenment and empowerment,” such as a study of the crusading journalist and others.

Taken together, the experiences resonate with students, who mature quickly as they approach graduation.

Aaliyah St. Fleur, 18, a senior, admitted that she wasn’t really focused on the big picture until last fall, when she met a group of Black women doctors from the University of Pennsylvania Children’s Hospital at a medical conference. She now wants to be a neonatal intensive care nurse — or perhaps a gynecologist.

More importantly, she realized that if she wants to be a doctor, she has to get serious about school. 

“I was on my grades, but iffy about it,” she admitted. “But then once I did the trip, I was like, ‘OK, my GPA has to be higher.’”

Most schools might not sympathize with a student realizing in the spring of her junior year that she must focus to get into medical school, let alone college. But Parker, Shubilla and others said she’s got time to begin building a transcript that will help get her there. Likely it will take a big investment in dual-enrollment classes come this fall, when she begins her senior year. 

No one understands that better than Aaliyah, who knows that her time in high school is short. “I’m actually paying attention.”

On a brisk February morning with snow on the ground, children arrived at Tsé Bit A’í Middle School in Shiprock, on the Navajo Nation in northwestern New Mexico. Word in the hallway was something was afoot: Substitute teachers were waiting in each classroom.

The children’s 35 regular teachers were spotted, sitting in a large circle in the library. Students paused at the doorway to watch.

The teachers, along with school counselors, were training in a new disciplinary approach, often referred to as “restorative justice,” which seeks to rebuild relationships, not simply punish the student who caused the harm. It’s a model New Mexico’s state education department has begun testing with a pilot project in a few other school districts.

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Rooted in the belief that everybody has a role to play in addressing harm, restorative justice largely relies on people talking and listening carefully to one another.

“I was raised in circles like this; it’s a traditional practice,” said Principal Pandora Mike, who, like much of the school’s staff and nearly all of its 414 students, is Navajo. “Restorative Justice is about self-regulation, responsible decision making. You really want to help students do a lot of reflection on their own behaviors, their own actions.”

In addition to “circles of sharing,” the program promotes communication through classroom respect agreements to build a greater sense of community among students. When rules are broken, it focuses on mediation. And it seeks to help students understand the root of their misbehavior and how they might do better.

Proponents say it’s a more effective and less harmful disciplinary approach than removing kids from school through long-term suspensions or expulsions, which are tied to lower graduation rates and a higher risk of incarceration.

That’s particularly important for Indigenous students. In New Mexico, Native American students are expelled far more often than any other group and at least four times as often as white students, according to an by .

One school district 90 miles to the south of Tsé Bit A’í, Gallup-McKinley County Schools, is responsible for most of that disparity. Gallup-McKinley has a quarter of New Mexico’s Native students but accounted for at least three-quarters of Native student expulsions in the state during the four school years ending in 2020.

The school district’s expulsion rate was far higher than the rest of the state, according to New Mexico education department records. The district contested that finding, saying some long-term suspensions were mistakenly classified as expulsions. But Gallup-McKinley’s rate of removals from school for 90 days or more, regardless of what they were called, remained far higher than other districts across the state, an analysis by the news outlets confirmed.

While Gallup-McKinley has not embraced restorative justice as an alternative to exclusionary punishments, more than a dozen New Mexico schools have, including some serving Navajo children. Twelve statewide are participating in a new state pilot program, but Tsé Bit A’í and Cuba Independent Schools, both of which serve large Indigenous student populations, initiated the change on their own.

In 2020, leaders from all 23 of New Mexico’s federally recognized tribes , including a shift from harsh discipline and “criminalization of Native children” to restorative justice and peacemaking approaches.

The stakes are high. Expelling and suspending students frequently doesn’t address the underlying problems and can even backfire, making misbehavior more likely, said Daniel Losen. Losen is the director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and senior director of education at the Washington, D.C.-based National Center for Youth Law. He studies racial disparities in school discipline. Pushing children out of classrooms increases the risk of a child dropping out of school or winding up in the criminal justice system, he said.

Students – particularly students of color – are often punished harshly and at higher rates for vaguely defined, catchall minor infractions like disorderly conduct, Losen noted. “That’s where the largest racial disparities are usually found.”

At Gallup-McKinley, for example, disorderly conduct was one of the most frequent reasons for expulsions between the school years 2016-17 to 2019-20, but the term wasn’t even defined in the district’s discipline policy until the 2022-23 school year, after the news organizations asked district officials about this and other facets of student discipline policy. Statewide, Native students were expelled for disorderly conduct at least 76 times and law enforcement was involved in 193 such incidents. About 90% of these incidents occurred in Gallup-McKinley schools.

Overuse of punitive discipline just pushes kids into an adversarial relationship and discourages them, said Tsé Bit A’í Assistant Principal Dannell Yazzie, who is Navajo. Her school is using classroom circles focused on relationship building, Yazzie said, then disciplinary reconciliation circles in the coming school year. She’s put together a team of teachers.

But there are critics.

“Restorative justice means no consequences,” said state Rep. Rod Montoya, a Republican who represents the neighboring town of Farmington, adding that talking circles can disrupt teachers’ instruction time in the classroom. “Teachers are not psychologists.” Montoya said he’s written to school superintendents asking that they not adopt restorative justice practices.

A decade ago, the New Mexico Center for Law and Poverty spotlighted two school districts next to the Navajo Nation for harsh disciplinary practices in a scathing report: Gallup-McKinley County Schools and Cuba Independent Schools district, on the eastern edge of the Navajo Nation.

In the years after, the Cuba school district adopted talking circles as the first response to most student misbehavior but Gallup-McKinley has not. Cuba’s expulsion and out-of-school suspensions have all but disappeared, according to the district’s reports to the state.

Victoria Dominguez, a counselor in Cuba schools, said just holding a talking circle between students or cliques after an altercation can reveal how the school’s rumor mill can cause students to react to falsehoods or misunderstandings without checking to see if they’re true.

The size of circles depends on who is involved and is willing to participate. It might gather a counselor and two students who fought, for example, or larger groups populated by students, family members and teachers.

If students are at odds, Dominguez and their principal will bring them in to talk things out. Problems often stem from misunderstandings, and social media cell phone apps like Snapchat have made things worse, fueling the rumor mill, she said. If a problem persists, they’ll sign non-contact agreements to avoid one another as a cool-down mechanism, or bring in the students’ family members for a talking circle.

“[T]he number of fights has declined significantly with talking circles,” Dominguez said. “It’s been a huge turnaround for the district.”

She doesn’t always wait for an infraction to get kids together to talk. “I’ve pulled kids together to say there’s a rumor circulating that you are going to fight at lunch. We’re doing a mediation circle.”

Cuba has a high population of students who lack secure housing, and who suffer from sleep deprivation and hunger, Dominguez noted. Fostering a culture of communication can help. Sometimes, by asking questions and listening closely, problems at home can be identified and addressed by the district, she said.

“If a teacher’s explaining a really cool math concept but a kid hasn’t eaten in three days or is wearing the same clothes for four or five days, [they are] not going to be able to pick it up,” she said. “In high poverty communities, a lot of times, students are told their truths – they are not given an opportunity to speak their truth, to tell their story from their point of view, uninterrupted. To be heard.”

Cuba district has seen attendance improve since adopting talking circles, she said, with fewer out-of-school suspensions and fewer missed days.

But until recently, just a handful of New Mexico schools in the state used talking circles. So last year, the state Public Education Department announced a $237,500 federally funded pilot program to expand restorative justice in schools, with the goal of reducing suspension and expulsion rates – and ultimately, improve graduation rates.

A dozen schools across the state agreed to have some of their teachers trained and then train their colleagues through the PED pilot program.

Monte del Sol, a public charter school in Santa Fe, sent two 10th-grade students, a counselor and administrators to the state’s training. The 10th-graders facilitated the school’s first disciplinary remediation circle, with two groups of 8th grade girls.

It didn’t bring an immediate breakthrough, but Amy Garcia, one of the student facilitators, said it was a good start. “Not everybody is super comfortable with talking about how they feel,” Garcia said. “We did come to an agreement where they would at least give each other their space.”

Restorative justice proponents like Emma Green, who runs the state’s pilot program, see student misbehavior as a red flag that something’s wrong in a child’s life, and an opportunity for constructive intervention – to discover the underlying problem, mediate and help the child take responsibility for how they’ve affected others, and to connect the child to needed support.

But student support services are in very short supply in much of the state, skeptics point out. They question whether restorative justice will work across the state.

Making a student who has been victimized sit down with the student who bullied or victimized them can retraumatize that child, Montoya said.

When he asked the state public education department whether talking circles would be used even in cases of bullying or physical violence, he was told that is up to individual school districts, which have wide latitude in setting discipline policies.

Restorative justice facilitator Randy Compton, from Boulder, Colorado, said talking circles won’t resolve every problem. With a case of mild bullying, a talking circle might be appropriate, he said, “but at the extreme end, a child who bullies others will often just manipulate the process. In those cases, you would not necessarily want to put the child and the student who bullied them in a talking circle.”

In addition to trainings at Tsé Bit A’í Middle and Shiprock High School, Compton also has trained staff at Albuquerque Public Schools and the Aztec, N.M. school district, and schools across the U.S.At Tsé Bit A’í, assault, drug and tobacco offenses still will automatically involve out-of-school suspensions, Yazzie said. Upon their return to school, students will attend counseling interventions to discuss their behavior and how it impacted others.“People think we just sit in a circle and sing Kumbaya, but it’s not like that,” she said. “It’s not without consequences. And we will discuss why children behave in a certain way. It needs to be both. We’re providing them with an opportunity to learn and think about their behavior.”Tsé Bit A’í is adopting restorative justice practices in stages, Yazzie said.

From initial training sessions to successful implementation, programs typically require three to five years to become a smoothly operating part of a school’s discipline culture, Compton said.

But that can be a challenge in New Mexico, where schools struggle with staff turnover. Teachers and administrators come and go frequently. Just as a school begins to make progress, trained staff and organizers will move away, and their replacements must then be convinced to invest their time and energy into learning an unfamiliar approach to student discipline.

Ultimately, university teacher training programs will have to make restorative justice part of their regular curriculum so that newly arriving teachers already understand the concepts and practices involved, Yazzie said.

“The [college] textbooks definitely do not teach this,” Dominguez agreed.

For now, it’s up to schools and districts.

Green echoed Yazzie’s point that restorative justice is not about abandoning consequences for student misbehavior.

“Letting people off the hook is absolutely not restorative,” she said. “The foundation and the heartbeat of restorative justice is accountability.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Source New Mexico maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Shaun Griswold for questions: info@sourcenm.com. Follow Source New Mexico on and .

Many advocates explain these discrepancies by noting that neutral-to-negative results come about when schools cherry-pick restorative practices — a here, a there — without fully committing to a schoolwide culture shift. When this happens, schools end up neither assigning consequences (as traditional discipline would do) nor truly addressing underlying issues (as restorative justice ought to do). 

They’re right. Restorative justice has limited chances of success if the whole school community fails to embrace values like . School culture isn’t the full story, though. I know, because I taught at a school where restorative justice genuinely worked, and we had something else essential: a robust staff. All the well-meaning culture shifts in the world can’t accomplish much if there aren’t enough adults in the building.

Restorative justice requires , and those relationships can’t flourish when teachers have too many students. Consider my teaching experiences. 

• School 1 (a restorative justice school): Each term, I taught about 40 students in all my classes combined. I really got to know them. I saved their get-to-know-you surveys for regular reference; gave detailed, personalized feedback on assignments; and chatted with them between classes and during lunch.
   
• School 2 (not a restorative justice school): I taught as many as 175 students a semester. I graded unending piles of papers every “free” moment, giving minimal feedback beyond rubric markings. When I did have the rare opportunity to connect with students, there were enough minutes in the day for only a tiny fraction of the number I taught.
  

It’s simply not possible for teachers to develop meaningful relationships when classes are packed and teachers stretched thin. But what’s more, restorative practices are time-consuming. 

Take, for instance, the restorative conference. At School 1, we called them STACs: student-teacher-advocate counselor conferences. When a student and I were struggling to communicate in the face of some challenge — incomplete work, disruptive classroom behavior, you name it — we could schedule a STAC to share each of our perspectives, discuss possible solutions and create an action plan. These conferences were genuinely helpful for students and teachers alike. But they also occupied many of my planning periods. If I had been scrambling to grade for lengthy rosters, or if I had STACs with dozens and dozens of students, it would have been impossible. Restorative justice takes time that a lot of teachers don’t have, and there isn’t a way around that besides improving student-teacher ratios. 

Having a strong team of also helps a ton. Our advocate counselors were trained social workers, and teachers relied on them to facilitate our conferences and to provide insight into individual students’ perspectives. This was possible because our counselors also had manageable rosters, so they were able to develop meaningful relationships with their students as well. 

But while the School Social Work Association of America a ratio of 250 students per social worker, no state comes close. The national average is 2,106 students per social worker — almost 10 times the recommended number. In fact, many social workers have to among multiple schools, which makes it harder for them to feel belonging within any community — creating yet another obstacle to establishing an effective restorative justice program. 

The good news is that restorative justice has the potential to benefit all students, and especially those of color. When done right, it can and improve ,, and — all measures by which students of color tend to face a disadvantage. 

The bad news, though, is that children of color remain most likely to attend schools that are and/or experiencing , factors that on the educators who remain — overloading their workdays and pushing effective restorative justice further out of reach. Teachers of color , particularly for students of color, yet their retention rates are worse than those of white teachers — and might be getting in the aftermath of remote learning. 

, too, have seen their workload increase with the rise in . On top of that, for many Black and Hispanic students.

Advocates who care about restorative justice need to do more than talk about culture shifts. Pushing restorative justice forward without making a corresponding investment in human resources will prove fruitless at best, and harmful to students and teachers at worst. Improving teacher retention and growing school social worker teams are essential for enabling restorative justice to produce consistent benefits for all students— and especially those at the greatest disadvantage.

This essay originally appeared

Each school year,  from school. But there are huge disparities in who those students are. According to a study published in American Psychologist Journal, . For example, the Indiana Department of Education data shows, “Black students in Indiana  to get an out-of-school suspension than their white peers, and twice as likely to receive an in-school suspension…”

While those numbers should be unsettling for every parent, they’re especially worrisome to Black and Hispanic families – who see that pattern of disproportionate discipline repeated in state after state – and have to live with the too-common view that their kids are just more disruptive than other kids.

Bad behavior happens with all groups of students, of course. And schools need to take measures to protect students and staff or preserve order in the classroom. (According to the U.S. Dept. of Education School Discipline Laws and Regulations, there are  at the 133,090 U.S. public schools: in-school suspensions, out-of-school suspensions, law enforcement referrals, school-related arrests; and expulsion). But when those measures are shaped by the teacher or administrator’s bias, an unclear or unfair disciplinary code, or the reluctance of schools to try to resolve the underlying conflicts that started a problem, it’s the Black and Hispanic students who too often pay the heaviest price.

There are ways, however, that parents of color can be on guard against excessive discipline and see to it that when their kids misbehave, the response is no different than it would be for a white child. Here are three important factors to consider and five things to do to help your child navigate disciplinary issues.

3 discipline issues to consider

1. Zero-tolerance discipline policies can be damaging

The imposition of  discipline policies in many schools, which include strict mandates for punishment and no consideration of any underlying circumstances of the offense or offender, has affected all students, especially Black and Hispanic students. According to the American Psychological Association (APA), zero-tolerance school policies continue to face criticism for inflexibility. Nevertheless, a zero-tolerance policy still exists in 87 percent of all public schools and is .

But stiff mandated punishments don’t always fit the crime. Two years ago at  outside Boston, 15-year-old Marcus Leitch, who had no previous disciplinary issues, garnered local news attention when he was suspended for 90 days after a fight with a student he said bullied him. The school ultimately reduced the punishment to less than a month – but only after his mother enlisted the help of a .

The school’s discipline policy hasn’t changed because the punishment was consistent with their . It states, “Administration reserves the right to increase the length of a suspension to any number of days up to and including ten (10) for a short-term suspension and ninety (90) for a long-term suspension. This would be done in situations that are considered to be severe or for repeated disciplinary transgressions and/or in situations where corrective measures have not been heeded by the student.”

Even though the suspension was reduced, Marcus still struggled at home, not understanding the severe punishment for what he called “self-defense.” “I don’t know what to do for him,” said his mother, Kerry Sullivan. “He’s not the same child, and it infuriates me.”

2. Educator bias can mean more severe discipline

Bias on the part of teachers and administrators can be a real roadblock to fair discipline for Black and Hispanic students. In 2019, an extensive  found evidence of a racial disparity in school discipline, noting that while bias was not always present, it certainly was there sometimes. Interestingly, they suggested that the association between racial bias and disciplinary disparities was strongest in counties with a larger white population. In addition, the absence of positive portrayals of African-Americans in the media, they found, could lead to greater community bias and make teachers quicker to discipline Black students. “It is possible,” they wrote, “that living in a region in which Black students are disciplined to a greater extent than white students exacerbates and/or reinforces the explicit racial biases of the community.”

3. Restorative justice promises fairer discipline in schools

The presence of bias and the inflexibility of zero-tolerance policies highlights the need for greater nuance in dealing with students of color.

Disciplinary initiatives like  are a popular alternative since they aim to build a healthy classroom community to deter volatile situations. These programs enable offenders to own their actions, mediate their problems, and propose solutions within a school community or classroom. It is intended as a first disciplinary response, before harsher penalties later, if needed.

Restorative Justice programs have been supported by 21 states (and the District of Columbia) since 2011. According to the Center for Poverty and Inequality, “ and connectedness, promotes student health and well-being, lowers discipline rates, and reduces racial disparities in school discipline.” It also has the big added benefit of keeping students learning in school instead of out on the streets.

Shavonne Gibson, former assistant superintendent for teaching and learning for the Washington, DC Office of the State Superintendent of Education, has . She believes this alternative is valuable, as opposed to a zero-tolerance policy, since the program holds students accountable without out-of-school suspensions. “If we continue to exclude students from their learning environment due to discipline, we continue to put the students often who need us most, further and further behind.”

But there has been some criticism of this relatively new discipline practice. Dr. Mikhail Lyubansky, a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign professor, published a Psychology Today article describing “Nine Criticisms of School Restorative Justice.” For example, one practice involves students meeting in a classroom circle to hash it out. This, Dr. Lyubansky writes, “.” Furthermore, he argues, the goal of restorative justice should not be contingent on , and because the program’s goals are often framed around “mutual understanding,” there will inevitably be premature reconciliations with “unmet needs” for all parties involved.

So caught between zero-tolerance policies, implicit and explicit bias in schools and communities, and the uncertainties of a new way of discipline, what’s a parent to do?

5 ways parents can navigate discipline issues

1. Ask for the school discipline policy when your child first enrolls. Know before trouble arises what the school’s discipline code is, and ask for a printed copy of it. (). Find out if your child’s school has zero-tolerance discipline policies. And remember that in a handful of states,  can still be used on younger children – and is used most often in . So be sure to ask about school discipline up front.
2. Find out if the punishment fits the misconduct. Ask the school for a detailed account of your child’s alleged misconduct and why the specific consequence was enforced. Then ask about the history of similar misconduct at the school and how those incidents were handled. This should help you understand if the discipline is fair or misplaced.
3. Find out if the school has a restorative justice program. Since fewer than 25 states’ legislation supports restorative justice programs, there’s a chance your child’s school does not. Be sure to call and find out. If they do, ask about the specific practices of the program and look for online information about it. Lastly, talk with your child about the program, and ask if the experience with restorative justice is working. To find out about establishing such a program in your school, go to George Lucas Educational Foundation’s website to find . The main goal is to engage the school community: “Seek school broad support and generate interest and commitment through education and trust building.”
4. Push for your child’s school to hire Black and Hispanic teachers. Do not hesitate to inquire about the diversity amongst the school’s faculty.
   
   Studies have found that when both the student and teacher are Black, there are fewer suspensions and expulsions. Moreover, research has also found that Black students’ academic and behavioral success typically improves when they’re represented amongst faculty, .
5. Don’t be afraid of asking for help beyond the school. Sometimes, despite a school’s repeated denials, bias is clearly involved in deciding on discipline. If you haven’t resolved the problem at the school to your satisfaction, you may have to reach out to someone at the district level, or even contact the NAACP, as Kerry Sullivan did in Massachusetts, the , or another group that can help you redress unfair punishment.

Every disciplinary scenario is not the same. So take your child’s case step-by-step. Listen to your child’s account of the incident that caused the problem and write it down (what happened, who was involved, how it started, and the date and time). Then start by talking with the teacher or school official who was first involved with the incident. If you’re not satisfied, document that exchange too, and proceed to the next higher level – which could be a department head, dean, assistant principal, or principal – before making an appeal at the district level. While it’s always best for parents to know the rules of the school beforehand, remember that none of those rules ever say that Black and Hispanic students should be treated worse than everyone else.