Is Restorative Justice Exhausting?

3. It's the inertia that's tiring, not the move toward restorative practices

Movement is invigorating. Inertia is exhausting. Sure, all of us would be glad to take an occasional day off to recharge, especially in February, but most teachers and school staff enjoy their work. Most are also willing to work hard, as long as they see their efforts making a difference, but few things are more exhausting than energy expenditure that doesn't produce movement or having to do something again because it didn't work the first time. This is relevant because we now have lots of compelling data that Zero Tolerance or even just the act of suspending students doesn't actually work in terms of either changing the behavior of those who were suspended or creating more safety or better learning environment for everyone else. While it is fair to say that the jury is still out on the effectiveness of school-based restorative programs, the early studies (see, for example, here and here) are promising. Now doesn't that make you want to go the extra mile?

4. It's incongruence that's tiring, not restorative practices

Here's the paragraph describing Randy Spotts, the head dean featured in the Times article, and how he was first introduced to restorative practices.

Even before Santos and Dunlevy arrived, Leadership [High School] had deans to whom students turned for emotional support, including Randy Spotts, who has been at the school since 1995. In 1970, Spotts was one of a few black students who enrolled at a West Virginia elementary school that had desegregated a year earlier. His grandmother frequently reproached his school's administrators for the unequal treatment of black students. When Santos first spoke to Spotts of "the educational violence" experienced by students who are pushed out of schools through suspensions, Spotts immediately understood. For years, one of his primary responsibilities was suspending students. "My personality had always been more restorative," Spotts says, "but my practice, because of the models that I was inducted into, were not."

For someone like Spotts (and it should be noted that there are many Spotts in every school!), restorative approaches are often experienced as a sort of "coming home"--a new way of doing work that is more congruent with one's values and way of being in the world. For someone like Spotts, the shift to restorative practices may still be challenging but the frustration is more likely to be due to impatience with the pace of transition or perceived resistance from colleagues than with the process itself.

No one thought to ask him, but I doubt that Spotts is exhausted by the school's transition. To the contrary, the need to constantly rationalize (to one's own conscience) actions incongruent with one's values, typically takes a heavy emotional toll. But it's not just those with "restorative personalities" who are vulnerable. Every person with enough integrity to acknowledge (even if only to the self) that suspensions and other punitive discipline methods are not only ineffective (see #3) but also racially biased has to deal with the cognitive dissonance associated with regularly engaging in behaviors they know to be ineffective, if not outright counterproductive. A recent meta-analytic review published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology suggest that such "emotional dissonance may be added to the growing list of job stressors that lead to emotional exhaustion" (Kenworthy, Fay, Frame, & Petree, 2014). In short, it is the incongruence that is exhausting, not the restorative practice.

5. It's the lack of infrastructure that's tiring, not lack of energy or desire

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