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Research Highlights Featured Chart

August 20, 2025

Suspension vs. restoration

Do restorative justice practices in the classroom improve student outcomes?

Tyler Smith

Source: smolaw

Over the last five decades, American schools have increasingly used suspensions as a way of addressing misconduct among students. While many administrators and teachers believe these suspensions are necessary to maintain an orderly classroom and promote accountability, they can also lead to long-term negative consequences, such as decreased educational attainment and increased incarceration.

In a paper in the 蝌蚪网 Review, authors , , and study an alternative, restorative justice approach, which emphasizes keeping students in the classroom and repairing harm through dialogue, accountability, and shared ownership of disciplinary justice. 

The researchers studied the rollout of a program introduced in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), one of America's largest school districts, serving over 340,000 students. Using a difference-in-differences-style research design, they compared student outcomes before and after the rollout of restorative justice programs across high schools within CPS between 2009 and 2019.

Figure 1 from the authors’ paper shows estimates of several student outcomes over an 11-year window centered on when the schools introduced restorative practices (indicated by the dashed vertical line at year 0).

from Adukia et al. (2025)

Panel A reveals that out-of-school suspensions fell when restorative practices began. One year after restorative practices (RP) were introduced, suspension days had dropped by nearly 0.2 days per student; five years after RP adoption, the reduction reached about 0.4 days. Panel B demonstrates that the decrease in out-of-school suspensions was not merely a shift to in-school suspensions. Panel C shows that there was no discernable change in absenteeism, indicating that students were in fact spending more time in regular classrooms. Finally, panel D provides evidence that student arrests—measured by Chicago Police Department data—began declining after restorative practices were introduced and continued falling over time. By year five, arrests had dropped by about 0.04 per student.

The findings suggest that policymakers should reconsider discipline policies that center on suspending students. Instead of removing students from learning environments, schools could invest in training teachers and staff in restorative practices that address misbehavior while keeping students engaged in education.