INCENTIVIZING BAD BEHAVIOR: Portland will consider race, gender to ‘support’ disruptive students.

Do “restorative practices” work? Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute talks with Harvard’s Jal Mehta about the gap between theory and practice.

“The idea here is that when an offense has been committed, students and an adult will come together to talk about the issue,” says Mehta. “Using a structured protocol, the offender will generally get to hear about what sort of harm they caused and offer some amends, and then the community gets to decide together how to move forward.” The problem is that it’s hard to implement.

The intentions may be good, says Hess, but the results are disappointing. He thinks restorative justice is “willfully naive” and ignores human behavior. “Wired to test boundaries,” children “benefit from norms, expectations, and predictability even more than grown-ups do,” he argues.

Plus: “Portland (OR) schools will design ‘support plans’ for disruptive students that consider trauma, race, gender identity/presentation and sexual orientation, reports Alec Schemmel.”

If Portland wanted to generate tensions between white kids/not-white kids or straight kids/not-straight kids — who were probably mostly getting along to begin with — what would they be doing differently?