Urban Strategies Council Provides Analysis to African American Male Achievement Initiative

In late 2010, the Urban Strategies Council and Oakland Unified School District, in partnership with the East Bay Community Foundation, launched a bold new initiative aimed at addressing the disparities in educational and social outcomes for African American males in Oakland. This six-year initiative has been established with a set of seven key goals that reflect the massive disparities faced by young black males in our city and a set of strategies aimed at improving those outcomes and eliminating most disparities within six years. The goal areas are: the achievement gap, graduation, literacy, suspension, attendence, middle school holding power, and incarceration.

Recent key milestones include finalizing the development of indicators in the two goal areas for which data were not previously available (middle school holding power and the juvenile detention rate); updating the indicators in each goal area with data from the 2010-11 school year (where available);  assisted the research department of Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) in developing a template for tracking school-level attendance and chronic absence data; produced three reports on African American boys in OUSD – a multidimensional analysis of their well-being, an analysis of suspension patterns, and an analysis of attendance patterns. Each report includes extensive policy and practice recommendations.