Black Student Suspensions Drop, But Huge Color Divide Remains

By Doug Oakley
Staff Writer
doakley@bayareanewsgroup.com
OAKLAND -- The school district here has reduced the number of suspensions of black students in the last three years, but they are still being taken out of school at a much higher rate than white students, according to a yearly report to the civil rights office of the U.S. Department of Education. 

In 2012, the school district promised to voluntarily reduce suspensions of African-American students after the office opened an investigation into whether they were disciplined more frequently and harshly than white students. 

The suspension rate for African-American boys and girls dropped from 14 percent to 10 percent between the 2011-12 and 2013-14 school years, according to school district data that will be presented at a school board meeting Wednesday. The rate for African-American boys dropped from 16.7 percent to 12.7 percent in the same period. 

"We've done a lot of work in terms of transforming school culture from punitive discipline to restorative practices," said Jean Wing, the district's executive director of research, assessment and data. "That's really been the cornerstone of reducing those numbers." 

Those restorative practices mean looking deeper into why a student is misbehaving and trying to solve the problem instead of just kicking them out of school for a day. 

But the disparity in suspensions between African-American and white kids still is huge. 

Last school year, 10 percent of all African-American students were suspended for a day or more, while just 1.1 percent of white kids were suspended. 

The most dramatic decline in African-American suspensions came in the middle schools, Wing said, "which was the biggest single contributor to the overall decrease we see in suspensions across the district." 

"We're providing more training around classroom management and cultural sensitivity so that teachers can interpret how some kids are," Wing said. "Part of our move toward restorative practices is to have a schoolwide culture where every adult and student knows how we are supposed to be in school." 

In other words, the rules are the same for every class and every common room and space on campus and everyone knows the rules at the start of the year, Wing said. 

"Some teachers are known for letting students do 'x' in their classroom, while others do not, so kids have to change hats all day long," Wing said. "We're trying to move away from that." 

According to the report to the school board, the district in the last three years introduced restorative justice programs at 23 of 86 schools, started tiered behavior intervention programs in 33 schools, and started the Manhood Development program in 16 schools. 

Theresa Clincy, the school district's coordinator for attendance and discipline, said giving children the rules and having adults hold them accountable is part of the equation in solving the discipline problem, but it also includes how to handle students when they know the rules but still don't follow them. 

"If there is a problem, we have a conversation with a kid," Clincy said. "Then if the child still cannot comply, we ask, 'Who can I get them to talk to so that they do?' It's trying to get a sense of why the child is misbehaving so they can continue to be in class instead of being suspended. And these are all considered research-based approaches that have been proven." 

Clincy said she is glad to see the numbers, which she called "ridiculously high four years ago," come down. 

She said the district was able to reduce the numbers because leaders "were finally able to locate some strategies that were successful in other districts, and we were able to implement them and provide the funding to do that." 

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