Education is full of priorities: getting kids ready for kindergarten, getting children reading on grade level, developing students’ STEM skills, building social-emotional skills, addressing nature deficit disorder (children spending too little time outdoors), developing thoughtful citizens, training future workers to compete in a global marketplace, and so on and so forth. They’re all interlocked to a certain...

Summer is down time for education, but the California Teachers Association remains active on the policy front. Ever since its May 1 Day of Action — the message of which varied greatly depending on local issues — the union has tried to take advantage of huge legislative majorities and burgeoning school revenues to push its...

By Randy Jurado Ertll When I was growing up in California, I never read a book in LAUSD schools by a Latino or Latina author. And until college, I never had a Latino or Latina teacher. Gov. Jerry Brown recently signed into law AB 2016, which was spearheaded by former state Assembly member Luis Alejo....

By Chris Bertelli California State Assemblyman Tony Thurmond is running for California Superintendent of Public Instruction but it might be hard to tell why based on a couple of recent votes on one of the most important education issues facing the state. The East Bay Democrat sits on the Assembly Education Committee, which would seem...

These two responses are to a commentary posted Wednesday by David Tokofsky: Response by Evelyn Aleman Macias “Is it realistic to expect that the kids who would have been dropouts in years past will all be getting Cs or better in college preparatory courses?” is the line that stood out for me when I read...

By David Tokofsky Now that the dust of the school board election has settled and the mailers are in the recycling bin, the tough job of setting policy for the nation’s second-largest school district lies ahead for the new and returning members of LAUSD’s Board of Education. It is always good to ground policy on...

By Deborah Marcus When Dou’Jae Rice’s father was killed during her sophomore year of high school, the pressures of providing for her family could have forced the straight-A student to drop out. But that didn’t happen. Instead, Dou’Jae was able to tap into a network of support at LAUSD’s Hamilton High School that kept her...

By Richard Whitmire Without a doubt, pro-charter school forces took a beating over the past year. There was a big setback in Georgia, and the Massachusetts vote on allowing charters to expand was nothing short of a money-losing, brutish beatdown. Things only worsened with the election of Donald Trump and his appointment of the wildly...

By Seth Litt On Wednesday, May 17, Los Angeles families woke up to a new reality for education in the nation’s second-largest school district. Voters in two Los Angeles Unified school board districts voted resoundingly for change, electing two young progressive educators — both of them either current or former teachers — as our newest school board...