Disparity In Education

Introduction Social Justice has many definitions and uses in education and has abroad meaning depending on context. In education, social justice is a term used on how to create equality, fairness and respect for all students. Social justice means educational equality for all despite social economic status or race. According to Marzano (2000a) a school principal controls many aspects in a school such as hiring teachers, insuring quality of instruction, and insuring time for the opportunity for student to learn. The principal can also affect students attitude and motivation about attending school by setting the appropriate school climate. Providing motivated students with a guaranteed and viable curriculum (Marzano, 2003) is one step towards
The idea of discipline is to look at what rules were broke, distribute the appropriate punishment and send the students back to class as soon as possible to limit the amount of time out class. But is this age old formal for discipline effective? According to the Kirwan Institute (2014) school discipline is heavily biased towards racial disproportionality. African American students are disciplined more often, received out of school suspensions more often and are expelled at a higher rate than white students. Implicit bias is implicated as the main reason for the racial disparity. Rather than allowing implicit bias to disproportionately affect students, restorative justice offers the victims an opportunity to address the offender's. The idea of restorative justice is to ensure the offender talks responsibility for their actions, the victim receives any needed services or compensation and the community (police, social workers, judges) do things with the offender rather than to the offender. There are three levels of restorative justice: partly restorative, mostly restorative and fully restorative. Partial restorative justice may be dialogue between the offender and the victim or the offender and the community. Mostly restorative provides victims with restitution. In the school setting restorative justice takes on a different look from an informal practice such as including affective statements that communicate people's feelings. The idea is to get the offender to reflect on what they have done and to think about all the people their actions have affected. More formal restorative justice practices include small impromptu conferences. In school this might look like the offender, rather than just receiving long discipline, the offender has to meet with the teacher and try to figure out the underlying root of the misbehavior. In the school setting, restorative practice takes time