By Susan Frey The Oakland Unified school board voted unanimously Wednesday night to eliminate willful defiance as a reason to suspend any student and to invest at least $2.3 million to expand restorative justice practices in its schools. “If we are to ensure that success for Oakland children is not determined by cultural background or neighborhood,

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By: Sarah Zahedi  | April 15, 2015 When high school sophomore Mykia Moore got into an argument with her best friend over a boy last year at Augustus Hawkins High School in South Los Angeles, the dispute quickly escalated into a physical fight. “She thought I wanted her boyfriend, because he texted me saying he wished

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The main body of this report documents gross disparities in the use of out-of-school suspension experienced by students with disabilities and those from historically disadvantaged racial, ethnic, and gender subgroups. Click here to read the Report.

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Most major California school districts still fall short in boosting support for foster students, as the state’s revised school funding system now requires, a new study says.

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“At this school, they go all out around the student’s emotions,” Jameisha, a 12th grader, told us. “They ask, they listen. I don’t wake up and think, ‘Oh I hope this don’t happen.’ I think, ‘I’m OK. I’m fine. I’m ready to learn.'”

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By Earl Ofari Hutchinson of The Huffington Post The focus has been intense on the wildly disproportionate number of black students who are suspended or expelled from America’s public schools. But what has flown quietly under the radar is the even more wildly disproportionate number of black students who are arrested on high school and

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By Mychal Denzel Smith of The Nation This post first appeared in The Nation. The school-to-prison pipeline, to my mind, is the most insidious arm of this country’s prison-industrial complex. Under the guise of protecting our children, we push many of them out of school and into prisons, limit their opportunities, fail to and/or undereducate

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By Molly Knefel | Rolling Stone What happens to education when students, from preschool to high school, are subjected to disciplinary policies that more closely resemble policing than teaching? Around the country, advocates are collecting data illustrating the devastating effects of what they call the “school-to-prison pipeline,” where student behavior is criminalized, children are treated

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