How should universities handle cases of student misconduct? While universities cannot make decisions about whether a criminal offence has been committed, they can judge whether there has been a breach of their own code of conduct. This guidance, building on a UUK and Pinsent Mason publication from 2016, sets out principles and practical case…

Problem behavior disrupts classrooms across the United States, impacting student learning. Despite the adverse consequences, teachers often exclude disruptive students from school as a punitive and default response to problem behavior. Alternatives to exclusion are becoming increasingly popular in many school districts to improve behavior and keep…

Restorative justice (RJ) is both a philosophy and a set of practices meant to repair harm and maintain connection in the face of wrongdoing. While RJ is becoming increasingly popular among K-12 educators and in schools, emphasis is typically on its social justice applications, including its use as an alternative to zero-tolerance discipline…

This article reports on a critical policy analysis of discourses related to school exclusions. The management of problematic student behaviour is one of the intractable problems facing education systems today. Despite being ineffective, school suspensions and exclusions are commonly used in many countries as a discipline strategy to manage student…

Restraint and seclusion are frequently misused in schools, leading to harmful outcomes for students. There is currently no federal law regulating these practices, which has led to inconsistencies in state and district policies. This policy paper aims to provide a brief background on current definitions, case law, and policies and provide teachers…

The conventional school discipline system is invisible to most students and teachers until it gets activated (typically by a discipline referral), at which time, students and school staff alike know what to expect: Some kind of investigative process, which usually consists of questioning the involved parties and reviewing available video footage…

In May 2023, the Civil Rights Division (the Division) of the U.S. Department of Justice and the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the U.S. Department of Education jointly released this Resource on Confronting Racial Discrimination in Student Discipline. The Resource demonstrates the departments' ongoing commitment to the vigorous enforcement of…

Zero-tolerance discipline in schools has resulted in disproportionate referrals, suspensions, and expulsions for Black students, students with disabilities, and low-income students of color. Restorative Justice (RJ) seeks to intervene in these patterns by emphasizing community interconnectedness and a discourse of harm, accountability, and repair.…

Nearly every country today has universal primary education. But why did governments in the West decide to provide education to all children in the first place? In "Raised to Obey," Agustina Paglayan offers an unsettling answer. The introduction of broadly accessible primary education was not mainly a response to industrialization, or…

The students at Southern Methodist University (SMU) did not have a favorable view of the Office of Student Conduct & Community Standards. To change this connotation, the staff members developed a new innovative sanctioning model to allow students to select their educational sanctions. The model is inspired by restorative justice and is in line…

A dysfunctional educational system has been identified as one of the causes of academic dishonesty in the Eastern Europe. This paper describes a case study based on data collected at one Czech university (N = 660) and presents measures that have been taken at the institution after it. The case study combines quantitative self-reported data and…

In this article Matthew B. Kautz theorizes schools as unique carceral institutions with the capacities to criminalize, surveil, discipline, and punish and demonstrates how they have mobilized these unique abilities to establish social control. By tracing the development of school disciplinary policy and practice following "Brown v. Board of…

This article is an interview with Carla Shalaby, coordinator of social justice initiatives and community internships at the University of Michigan, who advocates for a more humanizing approach to student discipline. Her research focuses on the critical role that students and teachers play in the ongoing struggle for justice. She is the author of…

The George Floyd incident caused severe anxiety in a lot of people, especially children and adults of color. These types of tragic incidents tend to happen to Black and Brown people more often than any other group. Experiencing or witnessing violent events like this can lead to trauma--and teachers must realize that the events of last year may…

In 2016, the federal government rescinded a 2014 disciplinary guidance package that had served as a much-needed resource to schools and districts across the country, a decision that the Center for Learner Equity (CLE) opposed. As documented in a 2019 CLE analysis, disciplinary removals cause students with disabilities to lose instructional time…