A provocative look at NYC’s disciplinary shift: fewer suspensions, more serious incidents, and a debate that won’t go away
What happens when a city embarks on a reform of school discipline that leans heavily on restorative practices? New York City provides a front-row seat. The latest data show a paradox: suspensions have fallen sharply in the first half of the 2025–26 school year, yet assaults on campus have nudged upward. The numbers aren’t a simple good news/bad news chart; they illuminate deep tensions about how to balance safety, accountability, and inclusion in public education.
Restorative justice is the frame most often invoked by officials as the driver behind the decline in suspensions. The Department of Education points to restorative practices, peer mediation, in-school counseling, and referrals to external mental health providers as the toolkit for keeping students in classrooms while addressing disruptive behavior. What makes this particularly fascinating is how quickly a reform ideal—priority given to relationship-building and conflict resolution—has become the default lens for evaluating school climate and safety.
But if the goal is safer schools and better student outcomes, the data present a puzzle. The six-month window from July to December 2025 shows 9,193 suspensions, an 8.3% drop from the prior year. The headline drop looks significant, until you notice that serious assaults rose—from 103 in 2024 to 109 in 2025, a 5% increase. In the most severe category of discipline—superintendent suspensions lasting six days or more and typically administered outside of school—there’s a steeper drop: 1,608 cases in the latter half of 2025, down 21.6% from 2,052 in the same period of 2024.
My take: the numbers suggest a district that has deliberately traded some level of punitive consequence for conflict-resolution processes without fully solving the root causes of violence in schools. What many people don’t realize is that the metric most public discussions latch onto—suspensions—may not be the best proxy for safety or long-term behavior. Jennifer Weber, a researcher from the Manhattan Institute, argues that suspensions are an imperfect barometer that have already been weakened by policy choices and administrative discretion. If you take a step back and think about it, a system that discourages suspensions while still reporting rising assaults could be signaling a shift in where authority and consequence reside: more inside the school through counseling and mediation, less in the punitive outside setting.
From my perspective, this is less a triumph of “woke” discipline and more a frictional moment in modernization of school governance. Restorative practices, by design, ask students to confront their impact on others and to repair harm. The problem arises when harm goes unaddressed or when the rubric for what qualifies as disciplinary harm—bullying, violence, repeated disruption—becomes too diffuse to trigger predictable responses. Linda Quarles’s comment—“If I say I don’t want to face my bully, I become the problem”—captures a real anxiety here: students, teachers, and parents worry that accountability vectors have become muddled, that the line between support and punishment has blurred.
There’s another layer worth underscoring: the urban education context is contending with enrollment declines and chronic absenteeism. Weber notes that fewer students in a school means fewer suspensions on paper, but that doesn’t automatically translate to safer classrooms or better student outcomes. In other words, the denominator is shrinking, which can make raw suspension counts look healthier even when the underlying behavioral issues persist. This is a reminder that raw stats can mask the quiet, persistent problems—the kind that show up in classrooms as ongoing disruption, stress among staff, or students who normalize conflict as a daily rhythm.
Beyond the classroom, crime data from the NYPD complicates the narrative. The seven major index crimes observed in schools declined to 264 in the first half of the school year, down from 290 the year before. The broader implication here is that, despite the uptick in serious assaults, the overall safety landscape might still be improving when viewed through a wider lens. The drop in weapon recoveries—3,487 total in the period, down from the prior year—also signals potential shifts in what is happening on campuses, though the reasons for this trend are multifaceted: policing practices, reporting habits, and the effectiveness of prevention programs all play a role.
This is where the conversation should head next: are we measuring what actually matters? If suspensions aren’t the best proxy for classroom safety, what metrics should guide policy? More robust tracking of bullying incidents, incidents requiring staff intervention, student mental health turnover, and short- and long-term academic impacts could offer a fuller picture. The real-world challenge is to align reform goals with outcomes that matter to students’ educational trajectories and to teachers’ ability to teach in an orderly environment.
What this really suggests is a broader question about public schooling in a time of reform. The city’s investment—reportedly more than $100 million on restorative justice programs since 2015—signals a long-term commitment to changing how discipline works in urban schools. The key trade-off remains: can restorative justice deliver durable behavior change without sacrificing safety or accountability? Critics warn about the risk of “band-aid” policies that reduce punitive measures without addressing deeper behavioral problems. Proponents argue that the approach builds trust, reduces exclusion, and supports students who might otherwise drift away from school.
In conclusion, the NYC data tell a story of cautious optimism tempered by caution. Fewer suspensions suggest schools are embracing alternatives and keeping students in classrooms, but the uptick in serious assaults is a wake-up call that the reform agenda cannot become a replacement for real discipline. If there’s a takeaway, it’s this: reform should be multi-faceted, data-driven, and relentlessly focused on outcomes that matter—safety, learning, and the opportunity for every student to thrive. The next phase should insist on clear, transparent metrics for safety and behavior, paired with targeted supports that address the root causes of violence and disengagement, rather than relying on a single lever to pull.”}
