Saying 'Restorative Practices Work Without Consequences If You Implement Correctly' Is a Cop-Out

So the publisher of Hacking School Discipline, Mark Barnes, tagged one of the authors, Nathan Maynard, and myself, asking if we could do better than removing students from learning opportunities.

And Nathan and I replied to each other a little bit.

You can read the exchange on Twitter.

And then Mark replied that if restorative practices, down here at the bottom, if restorative practices are put in place effectively, there is no need for consequences, which the authors of the book do not say.

Now, many of you have told me that your trainers on restorative practices have not said not to have consequences.

And many people have reached out to me and said, I am an expert on restorative practices and I do teach consequences.

So I've been wondering like where this idea of not having consequences comes from.

I think part of the answer is just that districts are trying to reduce suspensions.

They're trying to reduce consequences that make them look bad.

So even without being told by an author or an expert or a trainer not to have consequences, districts are implementing restorative practices without consequences.

And as we know, that does not work.

But I thought this was an interesting tweet from Mark because he's explicitly saying if you do it right, then you don't need consequences in restorative practices.

And I think we would know by now if that was true.

I think we would not have the thousands and thousands of comments that we've had and firsthand stories from educators about how restorative practices are just going so wrong when there are no consequences in place.

So I applaud Mark's boldness and being willing to say that publicly.

But I think we really have to look at the evidence that we have now of, you know, from all the schools where this has been tried and it has failed so miserably.

And I'm pretty passionate about this because so many people have gotten hurt.

So many learning environments have gotten destroyed.

And this has been really ironic that a lot of this has happened in the name of equity because It is affecting our students of color the most.

It is affecting our schools that our own children do not go to the most.

This is the kind of nonsense that we as educators, we would not put up with for our own children.

And yet it's good enough for other people's children.

Like this just seems really, really wrong to me that we are hypothesizing against all evidence that you can run a school without consequences.

You can compel students to come to an environment where natural consequences like retaliation are not allowed to operate, and then you can safely have students learn together with no consequences for behavior.

And even if there's violence, everybody has to stay in school.

Like, this cannot work.

This is malpractice to act like it can and to say without evidence that it can.

And honestly, it is gaslighting of educators to say, if you're doing it right, you don't need consequences.

That is not true.

Please stop spreading falsehoods like this.

And if things are not working in your school because there's a lack of consequences, please say something.

Please let me know.