The Restorative Practice Religion Worships the Underdog at Everyone Else's Expense

I think it's the worship of the underdog that's at the heart of a lot of the bad reasoning in restorative practice.

And I've said recently that restorative practice uses a lot of religious language, and I don't know that I made a great case for that in my previous videos, but it hit me today, what exactly is at the heart of this religious language?

What is being worshipped in this quasi-religion?

And I realize today, it's the underdog.

Whoever we can find in a given situation who is the worst off...

It becomes the object of worship.

And this is a weird thing.

Until you start to see it, until you start to see examples, it's a weird thing to even think of.

And it's just occurring to me today that what is happening in a lot of schools that are going way too far in the favor of the perpetrators of bad behavior in the classroom, violence against other classmates, violence against teachers.

What's happening there is the needs of the underdog are being elevated to the very maximum, to the very top.

And the needs of everybody else don't compare, right?

They're nothing in comparison to the infinite status of the underdog in this kind of weird religion.

And it's not a terribly organized religion.

People aren't saying all these things explicitly.

But when you hear things like, we need to center those who have been most harmed by our policies and practices, which is in the ASCD Ed Leadership article that I talked about in some earlier videos.

That's what's going on there.

The people who are most harmed to that thinking are those who have received the most consequences from discipline resulting from their own harmful behavior.

And when we center them, when we glorify, when we elevate, when we put them on a pedestal above everyone else, then we can feel good, like it feels good to have an object of worship.

But we're tossing out the needs of everybody else, and we're fundamentally changing the purpose of school, right?

believe is to ensure that everybody learns and when we Find an underdog and make their needs the only needs that we care about like this is a religious practice That is what is happening here And learning is suffering.

And, you know, I think the double tragedy of this is that, you know, demographically, in a lot of cases, all of the other students are very similar to the student that we have elevated as the underdog, right?

You know, because of the de facto segregation of American schools, the students whose needs are being overlooked are demographically very similar to whoever the underdog in the situation is, the student whose behavior is the worst.

So this idea that...

that we're helping anybody by doing this, I think just doesn't hold up in light of the evidence.

Like if you look at a school that has privileged the needs of the underdog, the student who is the most violent, the most disruptive, the, you know, the student who would have been expelled or at least suspended a lot until very recently.

We're not helping any demographic group of students.

We are not promoting equity in any way.

And in fact, we're creating two completely different worlds.

And I've seen this in the reactions to my videos.

A lot of people hear what's happening with restorative practice and they're like, what are you talking about?

That is nothing like what my school is like.

You're right.

It is probably nothing like what your school is like because this is the kind of thing...

that elites like you and me, that the policy class, that policymakers would never tolerate for their own children.

This is only something that people are willing to do to other people's children.

And that's what bothers me so much about it.

And somebody said, like, when are you going to let this drop?

Why do you keep going on and on about this?

We get that you don't like restorative practice.

I actually think this is one of the most critical issues that we're facing in our profession right now because it is completely destroying policy.

certain schools it is completely undermining their ability to accomplish their mission of educating all students in a safe environment and to get back to where we need to be we need to stop looking at our students who are ruining it for everybody else and stop elevating them to this this kind of divine status and say you know what all of our students deserve a safe environment all of our students deserve the right to learn and all of our students deserve to operate by fair clear consistent guidelines we need to go back to progressive discipline let me know what you think