UC Santa Cruz

Black students contend with negative stereotypes and biases about their racial identity, which adversely impact their experiences within school settings. These consequences are reflected in teachers’ disproportionate use of exclusionary discipline against Black students (Okonofua & Eberhardt, 2015; Okonofua, Walton, et al., 2016; Raffaele Mendez et al., 2002). To mitigate these harsh effects, school administrators are starting to incorporate restorative justice education (RJE) – a community-based approach rooted in understanding and rectifying harmful behaviors – into their school policies to reduce discipline disparities and to improve teacher-student relationships (Gregory et al., 2016). The scale measures teachers perceptions of how well the school incorporates cultural diversity and highlights marginalized student voices, reinforces healthy relationships with their students, and recognizes the importance of restorative discipline to challenge the longstanding harms resulting from disproportionate discipline.Current empirical research focuses on the implementation of teachers’ restorative practices (Anyon et al., 2014; Gregory et al., 2018), and whole-school restorative programs (Kehoe et al., 2018; Gregory et al., 2016). However, research has yet to develop a robust measurement tool for assessing restorative justice education (RJE) attitudes. Testing the psychometrics of an RJE scale is important to validate the perspectives of teachers and school staff and evaluate how well school administration implements the RJE tenets in their school climate. Drawing from district school data, I conducted secondary data analysis of the 2018-2019 California School Staff Survey, an online survey that measures the perceptions and experiences of K-12 teachers and school support personnel (WestEd, 2019). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses confirmed a unidimensional RJE scale with 27 items that included the three tenets of RJE. The scale had strong convergent validity, but the discriminant validity was problematic thus suggesting more analyses are needed. Results found that Black and Latinx teachers had more discerning views of their schools implementation of restorative policies and practices compared to White and Asian teachers. Similarly, teachers with five-to-ten years of teaching experience were also more likely to report that attitudes that were more critical than teachers with less than five years of teaching experience and teachers with more than 10 years of experience. The study developed the first quantitative measure – guided by theoretical tenets of RJE – to evaluate restorative practices in real-world academic settings. The scale provides insight on the importance of implementing a holistic RJE approach for student success. Further, the study offers suggestions for future research to evaluate the effectiveness of RJE with Black students.