“Evidence is closed,” Judge Rolf Treu pronounced from his seat in Superior Court today, thus drawing the curtain on two months of testimony in Vergara v. California. Since Jan. 27, lawyers representing nine students-as-plaintiffs and their adversaries — the state and its two powerful teachers unions — the California Federation of Teachers and the California...

As California gets ready to transition to a new assessment system, the state is set to rollout its Smarter Balanced Field Test starting tomorrow. As part of the field test, the state will be examining technological capacity and the quality of test questions, while helping students and teachers prepare for next year’s first operational test,...

SEIU Local 99, one of the most powerful and influential unions in the LA Unified School District, is holding an exclusive forum next week for union members to meet the candidates running for the open District 1 board seat. With more than 30,000 cafeteria workers, special education assistants, custodians, bus drivers and others, the union...

Via EdSource | By John Fensterwald One of the first school districts to finish a draft of the spending and accountability plan required by the state’s new school funding law is proposing to hire social workers to deal with the effects of troubled home lives, cyberbullying and other social and emotional issues hobbling students’ ability...

UTLA is headed in a new direction —  mostly veering to the left. Despite a low turnout, Union Power candidates claimed victory today, with wins in nearly every leadership position within UTLA, the nation’s second-largest teachers union. The progressive group — which plans to call for a strike if a new teacher contract can’t be...

The defense rested its case today in Vergara v. California after an examination of an LA Unified administrator that was designed to show that the state laws under challenge did not impede the district’s effort to get rid of ineffective teachers. On Monday, court resumes with the plaintiffs’ opening a short rebuttal phase of the trial,...

All that criticism of Warren Fletcher as a weak UTLA president and of Alex Caputo-Pearl as a campaign rules scofflaw apparently didn’t make much difference. They emerged as the top two vote-getters for the president of United Teacher Los Angeles in the first round of voting in the union’s 2014 election campaign and are now headed...

Public denied access to LA school officials’ iPad software demonstration Members of the L.A. Unified school board and a committee investigating the iPad project were given the first demonstration of the tablet’s educational software Wednesday evening – but the public wasn’t invited and a KPCC reporter was not allowed in the room. KPCC California public...

The defense in Vergara v California called its final witness to the stand today, a nationally-recognized expert on education policy, who provided testimony that heavily supported all the state laws under challenge in the case. Throughout the day, Linda Darling-Hammond, who teaches at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, said unequivocally that the California laws...

The board of directors of the Los Angeles teachers union, UTLA, voted last night to recommend that the union endorse three teachers for the vacant District 1 board seat. The special election is June 3. In recommending Sherlett Hendy-Newbill, Rachel Johnson and Hattie McFrazier, a retired teacher, the board chose to withhold endorsing the fourth teacher in...