Oakland, California They come to the enrollment office at 18, 19, or 20, often without transcripts, identification or immunizations. Some have massive gaps in their education and many speak little English. Any one of these would be reason enough for districts across the country to deny admission, but not here. With ample enrollment staff speaking...

Leer en español aquí George Lee, a third grade teacher at Camino Nuevo Charter Academy, speaks with the confident enthusiasm of someone who is where he belongs.  “I’m teaching in a neighborhood that I grew up in,” said Lee. “I’m really a part of this community, like, I have more of an obligation as an...

George Lee, maestro de tercer grado en Camino Nuevo Charter Academy, habla con el entusiasmo y la certeza de alguien que está donde debe estar.  “Estoy enseñando en un barrio donde crecí”, dijo Lee. “De verdad soy una parte de esta comunidad, o sea, siento una obligación como educador para realmente servir a las personas...

North Hollywood High School is a construction zone. On any day at the North Hollywood campus, workers at the center of the historic high school campus are busy erecting an auditorium, or gutting the school’s outdated pipes.   Kids and teachers pick their way past the ongoing work, oblivious to the chatter of construction workers who...

The Santa Ana Early Learning Initiative (SAELI), a collaborative supporting families with children ages 9 and under in Santa Ana, California, aims to boost reading and math outcomes for students in kindergarten through third grade, but instead of using approaches traditionally employed by schools and districts to boost test scores, such as tutoring or data analytics, its model focuses on...

Reading rates in LAUSD schools with the onset of the coronavirus, and Los Angeles students have yet to fully recover.  Just 43.1% of LA Unified students met state proficiency targets in reading in the 2023-24 school year, compared with 44.1% in the 2018-19 school year, the last before the pandemic. Meanwhile, Families in Schools is...

At John C. Fremont High School STEAM Magnet in hardscrabble South Central Los Angeles, students face an uphill battle against social and economic hardship, with violence from the neighborhood sometimes filtering onto campus.  This school year Fremont High has seen security-related lockdowns on a nearly a monthly basis, including an incident at the beginning of...

Federal prosecutors have indicted the founder and former CEO of the once-celebrated education technology company AllHere, accusing her of defrauding investors of nearly $10 million as the startup that made AI chatbots for schools fell into bankruptcy. Joanna Smith-Griffin, a Forbes “30 Under 30” recipient and Harvard graduate, was arrested at her home in Raleigh,...

The majority of states, 26, saw declines in high school graduation rates following the pandemic, new research shows. In 2020, for example, 10 states had graduation rates of 90% or higher, but only five did in 2022, according to Tuesday’s analysis from the Grad Partnership, a network of nonprofits working to improve student outcomes. But the...

A teacher union-backed incumbent has prevailed in a high-stakes LAUSD school board race,  dealing another setback to the nation’s largest charter school sector.   Charter-backed upstart Dan Chang failed in the Nov. 5 elections to unseat Scott Schmerelson, the longtime LAUSD educator and policymaker who won the election and will begin his third and final term...