Under pressure from local community leaders, the federal Office for Civil Rights will look at whether low academic achievement of African American students results from discrimination — intentional or not — by the Los Angeles Unified School District.
“It is unfortunate that it required the civil rights community to demand from the Department of Education that children be provided educational equality,” added Lee, who is president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Los Angeles.
Officials with the federal agency said in March that they would focus on English learners at L.A. Unified because the district has about 220,000 — more than any other school system in the country. English learners, most of them Latino, make up a third of students in the nation’s second-largest school system. Black students make up 10.8% of enrollment.
“The message being sent to Los Angeles’ African American community is that the devastation to black students being caused by the failure of public education is of little consequence to you or your department,” a coalition of black leaders wrote in a May 21 letter to the federal Department of Education.
The expanded inquiry will compare five largely black elementary schools in Carson, View Park and Hawthorne with five largely white elementary schools in Bel-Air, Tarzana, Studio City and Encino.
Yes, this is off-topic, but since there have been a number of “school” threads here… 😉
Sounds like an article from The Onion.
For those who aren’t familiar with L.A., they are going to compare schools in Beverly Hills (and other, very high-end areas) with those from some of the roughest parts of L.A. because it simply must be the schools’ fault that their precious children aren’t performing well [/sarcasm]. Nobody ever bothers to look in the mirror (it can’t be the parents’ fault!).
