OUSD Lets Feds Monitor Discipline for Black Students

Oakland Unified's governing board voted unanimously last week to let the feds make sure black students in the district aren't treated unfairly when it comes to classroom discipline. 

The agreement with the U.S. Department of Education ends an investigation by the federal agency into the disproportionate number of suspensions and expulsions given to OUSD's black students, according to the Los Angeles Times. 

The newspaper reported that while black students account for 39 percent of OUSD's enrollment, they represented 61 percent of expulsions last school year. 

Numbers released by the Department of Education in March showed that at Claremont Middle School, black students, who were 66 percent of the school population in 2009, received all of the expulsions, all of the in-school suspensions and 87 percent of the out of school suspensions for that year. 

The suspension and expulsion statistics school districts provide to the California Department of Education don't include student race. But, in the 2010-11 school year, Claremont Middle School recorded 289 suspensions.