Silos in the School: Understanding Restorative Practices in Chicago Public Schools

2 Abstract Restorative practices in schools have been found to mitigate negative effects of punitive and exclusionary practices. Because most research focuses on quantifiable student outcomes following the use of restorative practices, the field of education lacks an understanding of adult mindsets when learning about and implementing these practices. Acknowledging that school staff enact restorative practices as a policy through their role as street-level bureaucrats, this project focuses on how adults in Chicago Public Schools define, learn about, and implement restorative practices. Drawing on interviews with 19 participants and existing literature on school reform, I find that there is a tension between adult mindsets and structured learning attempting to change those mindsets. School staff and outside practitioners enter this work with understandings based on personal experiences and aspects of identity, making the processes of learning and implementing restorative practices highly personal. Meanwhile, the district framing of policy, high levels of autonomy, and low levels of oversight create significant variability in the learning and implementation of restorative practices. Based on these findings, I recommend that school staff and outside practitioners focus on peer-learning models that would engage adults with varying mindsets. I recommend that Chicago Public School aligns restorative practices more closely with restorative justice to ensure that implementation variability does not continue the harmful impacts of school discipline. The findings presented here may help guide Chicago Public Schools as they move to evaluate the effectiveness of restorative practices.