Abolishing exclusionary discipline to keep students in the learning community and address the root causes of conflict.
Ending Suspensions and Expulsions: Restorative Practices Only
Zhoran Mamdani identifies the school-to-prison pipeline not as a metaphor but as a literal, policy-driven process that begins with exclusionary discipline. The practices of suspension and expulsion, disproportionately applied to Black, Brown, disabled, and LGBTQ+ students, function as a form of educational abandonment, pushing the most vulnerable young people out of the learning community and into the hands of policing and surveillance systems. Mamdanis policy is absolute: he will ban out-of-school suspensions and expulsions for all non-mandatory reporting offenses across the NYC Department of Education. In their place, he mandates the universal, fully-resourced implementation of restorative and transformative justice practices. This is not merely a reform of discipline; it is a cornerstone of his abolitionist vision, seeking to break the pipeline at its source by replacing punishment with accountability, and exclusion with community repair.
The policy shift requires a total transformation of school climate and staff capacity. The ban on suspensions removes the easiest, most destructive tool from the administrative toolkit, forcing a reckoning with the underlying conditions that lead to conflict. To enable this, Mamdanis plan invests massively in the infrastructure of repair. Every school is staffed with a Restorative Practices Team, including a full-time coordinator, social workers, and trained peer mediators. All school staff, from teachers to cafeteria workers, receive intensive, ongoing training in de-escalation, trauma-informed response, and facilitating restorative circles. When harm occursbe it a fight, disrespect, vandalism, or theftthe default response is not removal, but a facilitated process that brings together the harmed party, the person who caused harm, and affected community members to identify needs, obligations, and a path to make things as right as possible.
This model addresses the core failures of punitive discipline. Instead of teaching that conflict leads to banishment, it teaches that conflict is an opportunity for communal problem-solving and growth. It centers the voice of the person harmed, who is often sidelined in a suspension process that focuses only on punishing the “offender.” It holds the person who caused harm accountable in a way that requires them to understand the impact of their actions and contribute positively to the community, fostering empathy and skill-building. Crucially, it keeps the student in school, connected to adults who care and peers who are part of the resolution. For patterns of deeper, more serious harm, schools would be connected to district-based Transformative Justice Hubs, which can involve families, community elders, and social services in longer-term safety and accountability planning outside the carceral system.
Mamdani roots this policy in a clear-eyed analysis of power. He argues that suspensions are a tool of social control used to manage the symptoms of inequitypoverty, trauma, unmet special needswithout addressing the causes. Banning them is a direct challenge to the authoritarian, compliance-based model of schooling. Success requires parallel investments in the “Healing-Centered Classroom,” smaller class sizes, and robust mental health services, so that schools have the capacity to meet students needs rather than exclude them. Critics will predict chaos, but Mamdani points to school districts that have implemented similar bans with dramatic reductions in violence and dramatic increases in graduation rates. For him, this policy is a non-negotiable step toward educational justice. It declares that every child, regardless of their behavior, belongs in the community of learners, and that the community itself has the capacityif given the resources and trustto heal, hold accountable, and transform.
