By Sandy Banks Restorative justice is a wonderful concept; a way to make student discipline less punitive and more productive. But in Los Angeles Unified, it’s little more than a slogan, generally misunderstood and rarely applied. The district did a lot of chest thumping two years ago, when it became the first in the nation to...

It’s one thing when LA Unified’s Chief Financial Officer appears before the school board and warns of budgetary troubles ahead, based on current projections and obligations. That’s her job. It’s quite another when a panel of outsiders, brought in to take a fresh look, reaches the same conclusions and expresses them in a hair-raising way...

The effort to find a consensus candidate to follow Ramon Cortines into the superintendent’s office is playing out as difficult issues sometimes do in LA Unified, with good intentions undermined by political pandering and a bit of disingenuousness. While Steve Zimmer, the board president, has set in motion a thoughtful and reasonable approach to the...

By Joshua Leibner As LAUSD searches for a new Superintendent, there has been a call not to “politicize” the process by people who mysteriously or calculatingly believe that the job itself isn’t political. Well let’s disabuse everyone of that notion right now. There is nothing in human experience more political than Education. Whatever education you and I...

By Emilio Solano Growing up Mexican-American in a predominantly white community in Oregon, I never had a Latino teacher. I remember men of color working as security guards and coaches, but no one of my ethnicity led a classroom. Even in our textbooks, Cesar Chavez merited just a paragraph. While many Los Angeles residents know we...

Oh my, where to begin with this recent NBC Los Angeles “expose” on LA Unified allowing campuses to be used for film and television shoots. There are two angles to this story, the first is the accusation that production crews are disrupting learning and causing problems on campuses, leading NBC to conclude that the district...

UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl released a 12-minute video on YouTube today in which he asks members to vote for a dues increase. According to Caputo-Pearl, the union has not updated its dues structure since its inception 45 years ago, which now “literally threatens the future of UTLA.” In the video, Caputo-Pearl points out that UTLA’s...

By arguing in court that a 14-year-old girl was partly responsible for her own sexual abuse at the hands of her teacher has not only brought LA Unified a string of negative press, it has backfired terribly and now bought on a new trial. The state Court of Appeal has ordered a new trial in...

By Martin Blythe With severe drought and sustainability on the minds of the public and LAUSD Board members, now might be a good time to ask how agriculture and horticulture are faring in Los Angeles area high schools. The answer is: not well. They are among the programs most at risk of disappearing, just when they...

By Joshua Leibner What do the most recent California Common Core test scores mean? This is a question that deserves real attention, but the initial response is not encouraging. My last LAUSD principal told us four years that we are just “going to have to accept the testing pill” and get on with the program that would...