‘Restorative justice’ key to school’s success
New boys-only institution in D.C. survives first year and now boasts waiting list for this autumn
Like many of the WASHINGTON 100 or so freshmen who enrolled last August at Ron Brown College Preparatory High School, Zion Matthews had mixed feelings.
He’ll freely admit, as will many of his classmates, that he ended up at the new, all-boys’ school for one reason: His mother suggested — no, insisted — that he apply.
Ten months later, he concedes he is sold on the place, and he will tell you that girls “sort of like are the problem” in school. “It’s too much commotion,” he said recently. “It’s too much extra stuff.”
One of D.C.’s newest schools, Ron Brown is also its only singlesex public high school. Named after the first African-American U.S. Commerce Secretary, the school is part of D.C. Public Schools’ “Empowering Males of Color” initiative. The effort seeks to help the city’s young AfricanAmerican and Hispanic men, a group that has struggled for years: In the 2014-15 school year, just 57% of black males in D.C. and 60% of Hispanic males graduated on time, compared with 87% of their white peers, according to district statistics.
Nearly a year into the effort — students and staff bristle at the word “experiment” — Ron Brown is ready for more. The school year ended last month with about 90% of its entering freshman class still enrolled and has opened up waiting lists for both the incoming freshman and returning sophomore classes. The school will add new classes each fall and is expected to graduate its first seniors in 2020.
A couple weeks ago, new teachers arrived to begin training for the fall.
While single-sex classrooms in public schools have waned in the U.S. over the past five years, the number of single-sex schools is growing, despite legal challenges. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) last year said the boys-only structure “raises significant legal and policy concerns,” and that the district relied upon research that was “based on unproven and legally impermissible stereotypes.”
Karl Racine, D.C.’s attorney general, has said the initiative is constitutional because its rationale — to address the educational deficiencies of D.C.’s most at-risk students — is “exceedingly persuasive,” as required by the U.S. Supreme Court. He also said it doesn’t undermine opportunities for minority female students.
District spokeswoman Michelle Lerner said she wasn’t aware of any legal action surrounding the school.
Key to Ron Brown’s success, staffers say, is an unusual approach to discipline and teambuilding, introduced to students before classes began last August, that all but prohibits out-ofschool suspensions. “Restorative justice” offers victims the opportunity to confront classroom tormentors face-to-face.
If students get into a fight, for instance, they’re not suspended, as in other D.C. schools. They must come together with others in their class, in a circle, and talk openly about how the conflict affected them. Even bystanders are expected to take part. Students name names and don’t hold back.
The school’s psychologist and one of its founders, Dr. Charles Curtis, said last August that the confrontational approach is actually protective: “We want to say their names now, while they are alive.”
He said the circle also allows students to confide in others about family difficulties — at least four students lost parents over the school year, and several lost other family members.
Ten months later, Curtis is more devoted to the technique than ever, saying the identity development of young black men is “marred with expectations of criminality, expectations of pathology, expectations of aggression and hyper-sexuality — and all kinds of other stuff that people impose on them.”
The school’s approach: smother students in affection and, if you ask the students, sometimes overwhelming attention.
Teachers and staff inquire about their families. They talk almost non-stop about the future, about planning and risk-taking and second chances. After school, they offer rides home and walk students to nearby bus and sub- way stops.
“You can see that they actually do care for you,” said Matthews. “They don’t just leave you out in the wind.” (He recalled that at his middle school, uniformed guards, not teachers, patrolled the bus stop.)
The restorative approach actually requires a bigger commitment to discipline than simply sending misbehaving students home to their parents for a few days, said founding principal Benjamin Williams. For one thing, there may be nobody home.
Since August, the school suspended a total of four students for drug and weapons violations, a fraction of what most high schools experience.
Citywide, schools suspend about one in 10 students, though the rate is dropping. Across all city schools between the 2012– 2013 and 2014–2015 school years, the suspension rate for AfricanAmerican students fell from 16% to 13%, according to a 2016 study by the Center for Reinventing Public Education, a Seattle-based think tank at the University of Washington.
But an earlier study by D.C.’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education found that in the 2012-2013 school year, African-American students were almost six times as likely to be disciplined as white students.
For most offenses, Williams said, suspending students “is almost a cop-out for the school, because they’re not willing to deal with the aftermath of the situation.
They’re not willing to work with the student to get them to a point of forcing them to be accountable for those behaviors. It’s a process and it takes a lot of time.”
He estimated that it took until mid- October for most students to face the reality that no matter how badly they behaved, they wouldn’t be sent home.
Rashawn Harrington, 15, recalled with a laugh, “I was trying to do stuff to get suspended, but they wouldn’t suspend me.” Curtis, the school psychologist, said the circle has played a big part in students’ maturation. “I think it helps them shape their identity. When you make a mistake, it is a mistake. I’m not calling the police on you. I’m not suspending you from school for this thing you did. Instead, I’m telling you: You made a mistake. I’m telling your mom you made a mistake. I’m telling these men who care about you: You made a mistake. ... You have to own it.”
As students quietly began to understand how the system worked, principal Williams said, they’d take misbehaving classmates aside to remind them that suspension wasn’t an option.
“So you started to see a small shift,” he said. “This is transformative. We’re changing the way that they think.”
“You can see that they actually do care for you. They don’t just leave you out in the wind.” Zion Matthews