David Rein presumed that punishment would follow after a bully on the school bus shoved his middle school-aged son around, ordered him where to sit, and broke his glasses.

Months later, after learning that three other students had received the same treatment at the school in upstate New York, Rein was told that the tormentor got a free pass under the school’s “restorative justice” policies.

According to Rein, his son never received an apology.

“They swept it under the rug,” he said.

Like many parents, Rein was not even aware that his son’s school had such policies, much less that they have been adopted widely throughout the country.

“I can understand a get-out-of-jail-free for a first offense, but if it happens over and over and over again, it’s not restorative,” Rein told The Epoch Times. “It’s abusive to society.”

The practices found their way into school policies almost two decades ago, and became tied to federal funding during the Obama administration.

Chris Ognibene, a high school social studies teacher in New York state’s Schenectady City School District, said he sees minimal communication with parents about the disciplinary approach and little proof that it has helped decrease school violence or improve academic performance.

“It’s a permanent part of the district now that’s overused and under-delivered,” he told The Epoch Times. “They don’t think long term about modifying behavior.”

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It presents one scenario, in which the student’s teacher reprimands him for being late. He then gets into a fight in the cafeteria, upon which “school security intervenes ... [and he] ends up in juvenile detention for the day, missing valuable class time and gaining a record.”

In contrast to that “traditional discipline” scenario, We Are Teachers presents the restorative discipline approach, in which the student arrives late to school but is “greeted warmly by staff who notice his distress.” After “a small incident with a peer,” he is helped to dialogue with the other student, then “helps in a community project, which improves his mood” and enables him to bond with peers.

Teachers, counselors, and administrators can be trained to participate in the circles.

Many districts maintain full-time restorative justice staff; the Newburgh Board of Education recently voted to pay its program director more than $121,000 annually.

Most parents are not aware of restorative justice policies, which may be downplayed to maintain low suspension rates and high graduation rates, said Bob Capano, a retired teacher in New York state.

Capano told The Epoch Times that there was no public discussion earlier this year when a large school fight spilled off a Newburgh campus, with gunshots fired, nor when a teacher was attacked at a Newburgh school.

“Any information [on how the disruptive students were dealt with] is kept behind closed doors,” he said. “Anyone with common sense would see something is wrong.”

In Newburgh, several parents have expressed frustration on Facebook about district discipline policies.

As an alternative to suspension, the departments wrote, “successful programs may incorporate a wide range of strategies to reduce misbehavior and maintain a safe learning environment, including conflict resolution, restorative practices, counseling, and structured systems of positive interventions.”

The policy required districts to track and report suspension rates by race and ordered them to lower “disparate impact” ratios for non-white students, regardless of the individual district’s demographics.

According to the letter, black students without disabilities were more than three times more likely than their white peers to be suspended or expelled, and even though they made up only 15 percent of the public school population, they accounted for 35 percent of students who were suspended.

Following the Obama administration guidance, the Education Department in 2016 required states to set a “risk ratio” by which to gauge disproportionality in discipline.

That ratio is calculated by dividing the suspension rate for black pupils by the suspension rate for white pupils.

For example, if 50 out of 200 black students were suspended (a rate of 0.25), and 25 out of 500 white students were suspended (a rate of 0.05), the risk ratio would be five for the district.

Nonetheless, many school districts continued to use practices intrinsic to the restorative justice approach, including complex flow charts for disciplinary procedures, therapy speak, and group conversations, as an alternative to punitive methods such as detention, suspension, and expulsion.

Correspondence sent by the Florida Department of Education to the Alachua County public school district in the Gainesville area exemplifies how the federal policy was enforced, even after the Obama administration’s letter was rescinded.

The state agency, in a June 6, 2022, email obtained by The Epoch Times, told the district that its quarterly suspension rate of black students was above the state-determined ratio of 3.0, and therefore 15 percent of its special education grant for the approaching school year must be spent on reducing the ratio.

This determination was based on the racial breakdown of the entire district, regardless of whether there was a higher percentage of black students in the schools where most of the suspensions occurred than in the district as a whole.

In 2023, the Obama administration policy was effectively reinstated under President Joe Biden via a joint letter from the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, released to “confront the issue of race discrimination in student discipline.”

Schools need to highlight the increased confidence, growth, and maturity of those students who learned from mistakes and were not excluded from the classroom, she said.

Restorative justice practices will not succeed if teachers and administrators view them as a “parallel track,” Foster told The Epoch Times.

“There’s a list of very specific ideas to follow,” she said. “They can give students more chances and meet the state (risk ratio) rate, but suspensions still happen eventually. We need to remove suspensions from the school code of conduct, exhaust the process, and work harder so students learn from this.”

The People’s Think Tank promotes restorative justice as a tool for changing school culture, not just the behavior of individual students.

That teenager later murdered 19 students and two teachers in a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

“Restorative justice has been horrible,” Moms for Liberty cofounder Tiffany Justice said during the Teacher Freedom Alliance annual summit in Washington in July. “Kids have to sit in a kumbaya circle with their abuser and talk about what role they played as the victim.”

Meanwhile, suspension rates in Wisconsin have noticeably increased since the beginning of 2025 because “the pressure is off now,” said Will Flanders, research director for the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty.

“Softer, woke discipline policies are not a positive force,” he told The Epoch Times.

Aside from suspension rates, meanwhile, other indicators of behavior problems continue to rise.

The White House did not provide a progress report on Trump’s order to end restorative justice practices, but did respond to an Epoch Times request for an update.

“The Trump Administration is committed to restoring safety and order in American classrooms by ensuring school discipline policies are based on objective behavior, not [diversity, equity, and inclusion],” White House spokesperson Liz Huston said in a Nov. 25 email. “President Trump is promoting academic excellence and prioritizing the needs of students, parents, and teachers. ”

According to educational policy leaders and organizations, meanwhile, discipline reform should start with the adults closest to the classrooms: teachers and principals.

“These schools need immediate, structured support to reset expectations, restore order, and protect instructional time,” the Manhattan Institute report reads.

During a recent discussion on classroom management, panel members of the American Enterprise Institute highlighted other challenges for educators, including the rise of therapeutic culture and the loss of respect for teachers stripped of authority. In the resulting chaotic environment, they said, teachers get burned out and students who want to learn fall behind because of constant disruptions.

“If children don’t behave, then nothing else is going to be achieved,” Tom Bennett, founder of the nonprofit researchED organization, said during the event.

“No child flourishes in chaos,” he said.