Education Report: California lawmakers to reconsider "zero-tolerance" student discipline laws
Posted: 04/15/2012 12:00:00 AM PDT
This is a sampling of The Education Report, Katy Murphy's Oakland schools blog. Read more at www.IBAbuzz.com/education. Follow her at Twitter.com/katy murphy.
April 12
This week, we wrote about the large number of California schoolchildren who received an out-of-school suspension in the 2009-10 school year -- 7 percent of all kids in grades K-12, 13 percent of those with disabilities, 7 percent of Latino students and 18 percent of black students, according to estimates from the UCLA's Civil Rights Project, which used data from the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights.
In Oakland, one out of every four black boys was suspended that year, according to the study.
Those percentages estimate the number of children who were suspended from school at least once during a single school year. In other words, if a girl was sent home three times between September and June, she would only show up once in that calculation.
As we reported, California's public schools are required, by law, to suspend or expel kids who are caught selling