By Jane Mayer and Jesse Soza, Ed.D. Los Angeles Unified School District alone employs 27,747 teachers, which doesn’t account for the thousands more employed by charters (typically younger and more likely to burn out) or private school teachers. Based on statistics, more than 11,000 of these highly passionate and well-educated members of our society will...

By Jane Mayer and Jesse Soza, Ed.D. Teacher turnover in the United States is a silent epidemic — one that is eroding the core of our schools. Every year, over 1 million teachers enter and exit our classrooms, and in Los Angeles alone, 40-50% will leave the profession entirely within five years. This creates unstable...

By Jacqueline Elliot, Ed.D. When PUC Schools opened the first start-up public charter school in the San Fernando Valley in 1999, I never imagined we would be at the forefront of a movement that has grown to 274 charter schools in Los Angeles, serving over 138,000 students and thousands of students being the first in...

Note: This post originally appeared on Education Post. By Caroline Bermudez Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, writes about “a never-ending stream of charter scandals coming from California” in Valerie Strauss’ Answer Sheet, a blog more slanted than the Leaning Tower of Pisa. But as is typically true with Burris, her writing is long...

By Sonya Heisters There is a growing, and arguably overwhelming, array of ways to measure school performance. Many researchers and policymakers say that we’ve been measuring the wrong things and, in some cases, I think that those naysayers are on to something. Then, in Thursday’s California State Board of Education meeting, the board unanimously adopted a new accountability system that, in...

By Laurie Benn As a mother of seven children, I’ve spent a lot of time involved in my local public schools. I’ve always known that a good education was one of the most important things that I could give to my children. I was shuffled around in the foster care system from birth until I...

By Joshua Brown At the beginning of every school year, my students ask me what I did over summer vacation. This year, I have an answer that will surely mesmerize them: I cleaned caterpillar poop.  Let me elaborate.   I was fortunate enough to participate in a weeklong professional development fellowship to the Yanayacu Biological...

By Jane Mayer and Jesse Soza, Ed.D. Two previous articles in this series, here and here, have detailed the enormity and the complexity of the teacher turnover problem in our country: more than 1 million teachers entering and exiting the classroom every year, and somewhere between 40 percent to 50 percent permanently exiting within five. This lack...

In the long struggle to make the United States more just and perfect, court majorities have made some horrific mistakes. When that happens, the burden falls on dissents to provide hope for the future arc of the moral universe. Such dissents often come from the most distinguished jurists. Benjamin Curtis, for instance, was the first...

By Caroline Bermudez Nearly two years ago, Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez posed a question in an op-ed worth revisiting. “Is the L.A. teachers union tone deaf?” Based on a recent speech given by Alex Caputo-Pearl, the head of United Teachers Los Angeles, the answer is a definitive yes. The juvenile world of heroes...