A note on what this page is before it is anything else: what follows is a summary of an opinion column — one author’s argument, published on the Journal’s editorial pages, attributed to him throughout. We are carrying it because our clients include a lot of teachers and they will be talking about it, not because the desk has a position on school discipline policy.
What the Author Argues
Tony Woodlief, who identifies himself as president of Federalism in Action, opens with a policy change: the Education Department announced on July 23 that it will no longer count racial disparities in K-12 school suspension rates as proof of discrimination. He calls that a welcome change, and argues it will not automatically restore order in what he describes as thousands of schools pressured into adopting “alternative discipline” methods whose chief objective, in his words, is race equity. Many such programs, he writes, have come at the cost of student safety and education.
In his description, these methods go by many names — “restorative practices,” “social-emotional learning” and “restorative justice.” In lieu of suspensions, he writes, administrators invite offenders to reflect in a soothing place on the feelings and trauma that led them to hit another student or disobey a teacher; students may also be invited into a “restorative circle” with school staff and other students. He cites 2017 observations by Manhattan Institute researchers that Philadelphia public schools which implemented the approach experienced “skyrocketing truancy, serious misbehavior, and declining achievement.”
His central case study is the Little Rock School District in Arkansas. He writes that during the 2021-22 school year, before what he calls wide-scale adoption of restorative justice, the district of roughly 20,000 students had almost 2,500 instances of violence, bullying and weapons infractions. He states that LRSD engaged a community development corporation in 2022, paying it almost $1.5 million between 2023 and 2025 for digital social-emotional learning tutorials, on-site peer mediation and restorative circles. Since the 2021-22 school year, he writes, districtwide assaults by students on other students have jumped 118% and assaults by students on teachers and staff have climbed 151%. He also cites an internal survey indicating that fewer than half the district’s teachers said students treated each other with respect, that 40% of middle-schoolers did not feel safe, that more than half of elementary-school children were afraid to go to the bathroom, and that only 30% of teachers said their schools consistently held students accountable. He reports enrollment declining from 20,786 to 18,964.
He extends the claim beyond one district: his group’s continuing nationwide scan of school-system practices, he writes, has identified more than 600 school districts, comprising more than 9,200 schools in 41 states, that openly practice alternative discipline methods. He closes by calling on school board members, state lawmakers, governors and state attorneys general to investigate these practices in their jurisdictions and verify that children and teachers are being helped rather than endangered.
Why We Are Carrying an Opinion Column at All
Because a large share of the households this desk works with are teachers, administrators and school staff, and this column will be circulating in their staff rooms by Monday. We would rather summarize it accurately, label it clearly as one author’s argument in an opinion section, and let readers decide what they think, than pretend it is not being read.
What we do not do is take a side on the policy. Discipline philosophy is a matter for school boards, parents and voters, and reasonable people who work in the same building disagree about it in good faith. We have no professional standing to referee that argument and no intention of trying.
This is one author’s argument in an opinion section, and we present it as that — but we work with teachers every day, and classroom safety and discipline policy are working-conditions issues that show up in our office as burnout, early-retirement math, and 403(b) rollover timing.
Action: no trade, and no position on the policy. Whatever a district decides, the advisor-desk fact is nonpartisan arithmetic: when teachers feel unsafe, they retire earlier, and retiring earlier changes the pension calculation, the years-of-service multiplier, the health-bridge cost between the last paycheck and Medicare, and the sequence-of-returns risk on everything else. If you are an educator weighing an earlier exit for any reason, that math is worth running before the decision, not after. Worth reading, whichever side of it you land on.
- None · No position implicated · opinion-page summary