Schools talk often about student voice, but the harder question is whether students actually experience school as a place where their voice can shape what happens next.
That was the heart of my recent conversation on Restorative Works!, a podcast from the International Institute for Restorative Practices. I joined host Claire de Mezerville Lopez to talk about the Web of Rights, restorative practice, democratic schooling, and what it means to build school communities that serve students rather than simply manage them.
You can listen to the full episode via their website here: https://www.iirp.edu/podcast/the-web-of-rights-centering-student-voice-in-schools-with-dr-cameron-mccuaig
One of the tensions we explored is familiar to many educators. We want students to feel safe, respected, and engaged, but many of the systems we inherit still begin with compliance. Students are told the rules, corrected when they miss them, and often given very little space to understand why those expectations exist or how their own voice fits inside the community.
That approach may create order for a while. It does not always create responsibility.
The Web of Rights begins from a different place. It helps students understand that rights are connected. A student’s right to speak connects with another student’s right to be heard. A student’s right to play connects with another student’s right to feel safe. A student’s right to identity connects with the community’s responsibility to protect dignity and belonging.
In the podcast, I shared a classroom example from kindergarten, where three children wanted to play together outside, but their rights were overlapping in real time. One child loved rough-and-tumble play. One child was worried about being hurt. One child wanted to be part of the game but did not want certain kinds of touch.
A compliance-first response might have been simple: no wrestling.
But a rights-informed response asks a better question: what agreement could protect everyone’s rights?
The students worked toward a shared structure. One became the referee. They created a stop signal. They found a way for play, safety, and identity to exist together. The point was not that adults disappeared. The point was that adult structure helped students practise community.
That is where restorative practice and the Web of Rights meet so naturally for me. Restorative work cannot be only reactive. It cannot just be the card of questions we pull out after harm has already happened. The strongest work is preventative. It is built in the daily language, routines, agreements, and relationships that help students understand themselves as part of a shared community.
That is one reason this conversation felt meaningful. The International Institute for Restorative Practices has spent years helping schools, organizations, and communities think more deeply about relationships, repair, and community-building. Their work includes professional learning, graduate education, implementation support, research, and resources for people trying to move restorative practice beyond a single strategy or script.
That connects closely to how I think about the Web of Rights.
In my own work, restorative practice is not separate from rights-informed education. Both ask adults to take relationships seriously. Both require structure before conflict, not only response after harm. Both ask us to slow down enough to notice who has been affected, which rights are involved, and what kind of agreement could help the community move forward.
That is why IIRP’s ongoing work is important. Schools need more than isolated tools. They need training, research, implementation support, and communities of practice that help restorative ideas become part of the daily culture of school.
This is also why student voice needs structure.
Voice does not mean children make every decision. It does not mean adults step back from responsibility. In fact, meaningful student voice requires strong adult facilitation. It requires clear boundaries, developmentally appropriate language, and a shared understanding of safety, dignity, and responsibility.
When students are included in that process, school starts to feel different. Rules become less arbitrary. Conflict becomes more teachable. Repair becomes more possible. Students begin to understand that their voice is important, but so is the voice of the person beside them.
For educators and school leaders, that shift is not always easy. We work inside systems shaped by curriculum pressure, assessment demands, policies, staffing realities, and limited time. I understand that. I have lived inside those pressures too.
But I also believe we can build classrooms and schools where structure serves students more clearly.
Sometimes that begins with one small question:
Which rights are involved here?
That question can change the tone of a conflict. It can slow down blame. It can help students move from defending themselves toward understanding impact. It can help adults respond with more clarity and less reaction.
I’m grateful to Claire and the IIRP team for creating space for this conversation. If you are an educator, school leader, parent, or anyone thinking seriously about dignity, student voice, restorative practice, and the future of schooling, I hope you’ll listen.
You can find the episode on most streaming platforms, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and on the official IIRP website.
You can also explore more of IIRP’s work here:
And if the conversation connects with work you are already trying to build in your classroom or school, you can explore the free Web of Rights Starter Guide and other implementation resources.
The next step does not have to be large. It can begin with one classroom conversation, one shared agreement, or one moment where we pause and ask students to think not only about the rule that was broken, but about the rights that need to be protected.
There are moments in school when the paperwork is done, the policy has been followed, the adult response can be justified, and still, the child in front of us has not really been served.
I think most educators know that feeling. It shows up in small ways at first. A student is struggling, and the conversation turns quickly to behaviour. A teacher is exhausted, and the answer becomes another initiative, another expectation, another system to manage. A parent raises a concern, and suddenly everyone starts speaking carefully, as though the language of school has become more important than the child’s experience of it.
That is the tension the book I'm writing, is trying to name.
I have spent more than two decades inside public education. I have seen extraordinary educators do deeply human work in systems that often make that work harder than it should be. I have seen schools protect students, open doors for students, and give children a place to belong. I have also seen students quietly diminished by routines, assumptions, labels, and policies that were never really built around who they are.
So this book did not begin from a distance. It began from classrooms, hallways, staff rooms, parent conversations, school meetings, and the quiet knowledge many people in education carry but don’t always feel free to say out loud.
We keep saying public education is here for students. I believe it should be. I still believe public education is one of the few places where children from different families, cultures, languages, identities, abilities, and experiences are meant to learn alongside one another. That is worth protecting. I haven’t written this book because I’ve given up on public education. I’ve written it because I haven’t.
But protecting public education cannot mean protecting every structure public education has inherited.
Some of those structures were built for efficiency. Some were built for sameness. Some were built to make large systems easier to manage. Some were built in another time, for another world, around a much narrower idea of the student. And now, many of those same structures are still shaping children who are growing up in a world that requires creativity, flexibility, collaboration, critical thought, and the ability to live well with difference.
That contradiction shows up everywhere once we start paying attention. It shows up when we call a quiet classroom successful without asking who feels safe enough to speak. It shows up when we treat the same consequence as fairness, even when the students involved are carrying entirely different histories, needs, and circumstances. It shows up when a child’s movement, intensity, sensitivity, or questioning is treated as something to correct before it is understood. It shows up when student voice is invited only after the adult decision has already been made.
This is where I think schools have to become more honest.
A student is not simply a behaviour to manage, a score to report, or a problem to solve. A student is a person with rights. That sounds simple, but in practice, it changes how we understand almost every part of school life.
If students are rights-bearing people, then dignity, safety, voice, and belonging cannot be treated as extras. They cannot be offered when learning is smooth and withdrawn when learning becomes difficult. They have to be built into the structure of school itself.
That does not remove adult authority. It does not mean students get whatever they want. It does not mean classrooms become chaotic or expectations disappear. It means the authority adults hold has to be used in service of students, not simply in service of order.
There is a difference between a school system that manages students and a school system that serves them. A system that manages students is usually asking, “How do we get this child to comply?” A system that serves students is asking, “What conditions does this child need in order to learn, participate, repair, belong, and grow?”
Those questions lead to very different schools.
I think many educators already know this. They feel it on the hard days. They feel it when a student’s behaviour finally makes sense after someone takes the time to learn the story underneath it. They feel it when a conflict that could have become a punishment becomes a conversation, an agreement, or a repair. They feel it when students are given enough structure to use their voice well, and the room becomes more grounded instead of less.
Those moments are small, but they are not minor. They show what school can become when the system is willing to learn.
That is really the heart of School the System. For a long time, we have focused on schooling children into the existing structure. We teach them how to line up, wait, produce, perform, meet the measure, and adapt. Some structure is necessary. Schools need routines. Communities need agreements. Children need limits, guidance, and adults who can hold steady when things become difficult.
But structure should serve students. When structure starts serving the system more than the child, we need to be honest enough to notice.
This book is trying to name the moment when compliance gets mistaken for learning. When sameness gets mistaken for fairness. When silence gets mistaken for respect. When a child is asked to become smaller so the system can remain unchanged.
I don’t think we change public education by pretending educators are not trying hard enough. Most of the educators I know are trying very hard. Many are carrying far more than the public sees. But care inside a strained system is not enough on its own. Good people can still be handed tools that don’t serve students well. Thoughtful leaders can still be pulled into decisions that protect process over people. Caring educators can still participate in patterns they would never have designed themselves.
That is why the system itself has to become part of the lesson.
If schools are truly here for students, then schools have to be willing to learn from students. Learn from the student who withdraws. Learn from the student who keeps getting sent out. Learn from the student who asks why. Learn from the student who does well on paper but feels invisible. Learn from the parent who senses something is wrong but does not yet have the language for it. Learn from the teacher who keeps saying, quietly, “This is not working.”
That is the work this book is trying to begin.
Not a finished answer. Not a perfect framework. Not another promise that schools can be transformed if everyone simply follows the steps. Something more honest than that.
A call to look carefully at what public education has inherited, what it still protects, and what students are asking us to become brave enough to change.
The first draft is finished. The work of refining it is just beginning. And maybe that feels fitting, because the book is asking of the system what writing is asking of me right now: revise what no longer serves, keep what is true, and be willing to learn from what is in front of you.
If this is the kind of school conversation you care about, I’ll be sharing more behind-the-book reflections through The Schooling Signal as School the System takes shape.
A rights-informed look at what happens when schools mistake sameness for fairness.
It is May in Ontario, and in many Grade 6 classrooms, provincial testing is beginning to take up space in the room. Not just physical space. Emotional space. You can feel it in the reminders, the practice questions, the schedule changes, and the quiet pressure that settles over students who are old enough to know the test matters to adults, but not always old enough to understand what it really means.
This is where standardization stops being an abstract education issue and starts becoming a child in front of you.
Imagine a student who arrived at a new school in March. He is fluent in English, but he has not been learning inside Ontario classrooms for very long. His parents care deeply about academics. He cares too. He wants to do well. Then, as testing approaches, his behaviour begins to shift. He has verbal outbursts. He refuses work. He spends more time out of the classroom, taking extended washroom breaks or finding reasons not to stay in the room. From a distance, this could be written up as avoidance, disruption, non-compliance, or a problem to manage.
But his teacher knows him. She recognizes that this is not his usual pattern. She has built enough relationship with him to notice the difference between defiance and distress. So instead of reacting only to the behaviour, she finds the right moment and asks him a quiet question: what’s up? Not the passing-in-the-hall version. Not the casual version that does not really expect an answer. The kind of “what’s up?” a student can hear differently because the relationship is already there.
And he opens up. The issue is not laziness. It is not disrespect. It is anxiety. He is worried about the standardized test, worried about how he will perform, worried about what his parents will think, and worried about what this one moment might say about him. His teacher explains that yes, he needs to write the test, but no, it does not determine his marks. She also tells him she will speak with his parents. Almost immediately, the pressure lifts. The student begins to return to himself.
That moment matters because the teacher did not only see behaviour. She saw a child inside a system. And that is where this conversation has to begin.
Most educators are not against standards. Most parents are not against accountability. Most people who care about public education understand that children deserve access to strong literacy, numeracy, communication, and the knowledge needed to participate in the world around them. A functioning public system needs shared expectations. It needs coherence. It needs some common commitments so a child’s access to learning is not left entirely to postal code, family income, or the luck of the classroom they enter.
The problem begins when standards harden into sameness. There is a difference between saying every child deserves access to meaningful learning and saying every child should prove that learning in the same way, on the same timeline, through the same narrow measure. That distinction matters. A useful standard protects access. Over-standardization protects the appearance of order.
At its best, standardization grows from learning. People observe, test, revise, and notice patterns. Over time, they identify what conditions matter. Those principles become shared expectations so knowledge can be used reliably, safely, and at scale. In other words, good standardization is not supposed to control everything. It is supposed to protect what matters.
Electrical systems are standardized because some designs cause fires. Food safety standards exist because people learned, often through harm, which practices protect health. Measurement systems are standardized so people can build, trade, and cooperate with shared understanding. In those cases, standardization draws boundaries, not blueprints. It identifies what must remain consistent so that variation can exist safely. Within those boundaries, judgment, creativity, and adaptation still matter.
Education has not always remembered this. In schools, standardization may have started from a reasonable place. Shared curricula and common expectations were intended to reduce chance and inequity. A child in one community should not be denied important learning simply because the system around them is weaker, poorer, or less supported. That goal matters. But over time, the focus shifted. Instead of standardizing access to learning conditions, systems began standardizing learning itself. Measures replaced principles. Outputs stood in for understanding. What began as a way to support learning gradually became a way to sort it.
That is where the test can begin to replace the purpose. Scores, percentiles, and performance bands become not just tools for understanding learning, but proof of learning. What was meant to provide insight begins to define reality. And like any shortcut used too often, it starts to warp what it was supposed to show.
This is why the aviation comparison is useful. Aviation depends on standards.
Flight requires serious attention to safety, maintenance, design, and engineering principles. Lift, drag, and thrust cannot be ignored. Standards protect lives. But aviation does not require every aircraft to be the same. A helicopter, a passenger jet, a cargo plane, a hot-air balloon, and a rocket are not judged by one identical design. Each has to honour the principles that allow it to function safely, but each design is understood on its own terms. Standards protect the principles. They do not erase the model.
Education should learn from that, because education is not aviation.
In schools, the “cargo” is human development. It is shaped by language, culture, disability, trauma, confidence, relationship, identity, timing, family pressure, prior schooling, and a hundred other things that do not fit neatly into a performance band. Learning does not follow fixed rules in the way airflow does. Treating it as if it does is not only inaccurate. It is unfair.
When students begin from different places, with different supports, different histories, and different levels of familiarity with the system itself, the same test does not mean the same thing for everyone. The same timeline does not mean the same thing. The same instruction does not mean the same thing. The same response does not mean the same thing. This is where fairness gets misunderstood.
Fairness is not every student receiving the same measure and then pretending the result is neutral. Fairness is asking what each student needs in order to access learning with dignity. That does not mean abandoning expectations. It means refusing to confuse sameness with justice.
A rights-informed approach does not reject structure. It asks structure to justify itself. Who is this helping? Who is this leaving out? What does this measure show us? What might it be missing? What dignity might be at risk? What does the student understand about what is happening and why? Those questions do not weaken standards. They make standards more honest.
They also protect professional judgment. A teacher who knows a student well may see something a test cannot. They may see that a child is shutting down because of anxiety. They may see that language is interfering with performance. They may see that the student understands the concept in conversation but struggles to show it in the required format. They may see that what looks like refusal is actually fear. That knowledge should matter.
But in over-standardized systems, the number often speaks louder than the person closest to the child. That is a problem for students, because they can begin to experience school as a place where being measured matters more than being understood. It is a problem for teachers, because their professional judgment can be pushed aside by external tools that do not know the child. It is a problem for parents, because they may receive scores, levels, and reports without enough context to understand what those numbers do and do not mean. And it is a problem for public education, because a system built too heavily around standardized proof can start protecting its own narrative instead of examining its own impact.
This is not only about provincial testing. Standardization shows up in many ordinary school routines. It shows up when every child is expected to move at the same pace. It shows up when support is treated as unfair because not everyone receives it. It shows up when one behaviour response is applied to every situation because it looks consistent from a distance. It shows up when a child is asked to fit the system before anyone asks whether the system is serving the child.
That is why standards are not the problem. Over-standardization is.
Students deserve access to shared knowledge. They deserve strong teaching. They deserve clear expectations. They deserve adults who can say, “This matters, and I am going to help you get there.” But they also deserve to be seen clearly. They deserve systems that recognize difference without treating difference as deficiency. They deserve adults who can interpret behaviour with context. They deserve assessment that informs learning rather than defining the learner.
The goal is not to remove structure. The goal is to build structures that serve students well. A school system that truly valued learning would use data carefully, but it would not worship it. It would protect standards, but not sameness. It would trust educators to bring evidence, observation, relationship, and judgment together. It would include students in understanding what is being asked of them and why.
And when a child begins to disappear under the pressure of a measure, the system would not simply ask, “How did they score?” It would ask a better question: what did this moment reveal about what the child needs, and what did the system fail to see?
That is the work. Not abandoning standards. Not lowering expectations. Not pretending accountability does not matter. But refusing to let a standardized system flatten the human beings it was meant to serve.
If you are an educator trying to notice what standardized systems often miss, start with the free Web of Rights Starter Guide or the Classroom Dignity Check. Both are designed to help you look beyond compliance and begin naming the conditions students need for safety, dignity, voice, and meaningful learning.
