HSE Hires "Restorative Practices" Group that Promotes Racist Ideas
They want a "fundamental change in the nature of relationships" at school
HSE has at least for now paused its sizable (six-figure) expenditure with Child Advocates—an organization that knowingly tolerates and promotes a variety of racist ideas, such as the idea that whiteness is “understood to be evil” and is “exploitative”. Now HSE is paying a different organization called the “International Institute for Restorative Practices” (IIRP) to run trainings for district staff. Is this organization any better than Child Advocates? Let’s have a look.
IIRP specializes in “restorative practices,” which they describe on this webpage. The idea is that, after there has been wrongdoing of some kind, the victim and the perpetrator are (voluntarily) brought together to discuss what happened and resolve the conflict. In some cases, this involves what IIRP calls a “restorative circle” in which a whole group of people (such as class in a school setting) gathers for discussion.
These “restorative practices” may sound like a good idea at first. Certainly I’m all for teaching kids how to productively resolve conflict. However, as it turns out, the practices are sometimes used as a tool of political activism. Indeed, the IIRP website is very troubling in this regard:
This document on the IIRP website is about “navigating whiteness in the restorative practice movement”. It contains the racist statement that “whiteness” is a “social construct” that is used to achieve “maintenance and exertion of power and privilege over non-white individuals and communities”.
There are a bunch of articles (here, here, here, here, here) on the IIRP website that cite or talk positively about Critical Race Theory by name.
This article on the IIRP website explains that restorative justice can play an important role in allowing teachers to “sustain critical conversations about inequities” that they believe will make students uncomfortable.
Relatedly, consider this resource, which gives you a sense of what these “critical conversations” might look like: kids being asked to participate in a “Racism Stops with Me Circle” in which white kids are asked to talk in front of a group about their supposed “white identity” and their “privilege” and their “racist outcomes”.
I don’t know if these “racism” circles are the sort of thing that HSE wants to do with IIRP. But, in any case, I see enough here to know that IIRP is promoting racist ideas: it is obviously racist to characterize a whole racial group as essentially defective (point 1 above). Why is HSE hiring a group like this?
A second concern is that these practices will be used in situations where they are insufficient to achieve the needed correction of serious misbehavior.
For example, consider what happened in a school district in Massachusetts. A kid got repeatedly bullied, and the bullies clearly needed a heavier hand than the “restorative practices” approach was going to offer. However, because the district was sold on comprehensive use of these restorative practices, and refused to change course when that approach was plainly not working, the bullied kid’s mom ended up having to pull him from public school altogether.
Or consider an even more terrible example: in this case in Seattle, a kid who had been involved in various armed robberies, and who normally would have been incarcerated in a juvenile detention center, was instead put in a restorative practice program. He subsequently robbed and murdered a fifteen year old boy. So I guess restorative practices didn’t work in this instance.
Murder is thankfully unlikely in HSE schools. But the point remains: if HSE is going to implement restorative practices, they should use them selectively, in low-stakes cases, and make sure not to get carried away. At most, these practices should be regarded as one among many tools.
Unfortunately, this limited use of “restorative practices” is manifestly not what IIRP recommends. For example, here the IIRP Director of Training said (emphasis mine):
Restorative practices are not new ‘tools for your toolbox,’ but represent a fundamental change in the nature of relationships in schools.
In other words, IIRP sees the move to restorative practices as constituting a fundamental change, and not just as one disciplinary tool among many. Parents need to therefore be aware that, if HSE follows IIRP’s vision here, we could have some serious problems.
To date, from what I can tell, HSE has spent about $15,000 so far with this group, and no doubt there is much more to follow. (HSE has also spent additional thousands with other organizations over the last few years on “restorative justice” trainings.) I have no idea why HSE would want to pay so much money to IIRP.
On November 30, I emailed Superintendent Yvonne Stokes and Assistant Superintendent Matt Kegley and asked whether they were aware of the materials on the IIRP website that I linked above. Two weeks later, they have not responded to me.
But really, what can they say? There are two possibilities, and neither one looks very good. One is that they were aware of these materials and just did not care that IIRP is promoting racist ideas. The other is that they were unaware of the materials, and they didn’t bother to take a few minutes to search the IIRP website, even though they know about the controversy we already had earlier this year over promotion of racist ideas by Child Advocates. Drs. Stokes and Kegley either didn’t bother to look or they didn’t care, and either way they’ve let us down.
Let’s remember all of this when we vote for school board next fall. Let’s get a school board that will put an end to all of this racist nonsense.
[Correction (14 Janurary 2022): an earlier version of this post reported that HSE had concluded its payments to Child Advocates. Superintendent Yvonne Stokes has clarified that the payments are on pause, and that the future of the district’s relationship with Child Advocates is not yet settled. The post has been updated to reflect this correction.]