Not only are students at Western Elementary School in south Los Angeles learning the basic math, reading and writing skills, but they’re also learning how to be good digital citizens. LA Unified, its Common Core Technology Project (CCTP) team, the Common Sense Media team along with students, parents, staff, and elected officials kicked off the...

Marc Litchman has an idea. As far as his campaign for Congress, challenging Representative Brad Sherman, a Sherman Oaks Democrat, it’s his only idea. He wants to break up LA Unified. But not into two districts, one on either side of the hill, as others have advocated. “We need six or seven,” Litchman said in...

The LA Unified Board meets this morning, with much of their business scheduled for a closed door session. In private, the six members will discuss various legal cases involving the district as well as updates on labor contracts and student discipline matters. At some point, in open session, they will consider an interim financial report...

A 30-year veteran of teaching in California school districts testified for the defense today in Vergara v. California, saying state laws protecting teacher employment are critical to maintaining teacher effectiveness in the classroom. Linda Tolladay, an eighth grade science teacher in the Madera Unified School District outside Fresno, told the court that replacing seniority with...

Rather than jump to conclusions in the case of allegations first reported here earlier this month, that a LA Unified School Board candidate, Genethia Hudley-Hayes, has numerous inaccuracies in her resume, we at LA School Report embarked on our own due-diligence. What we found were a series of repeated conflicts and inconsistencies over a number of years,...

While it’s not clear that ballot order has a significant impact, in a crowded field of 7, it can’t hurt to be first. But it takes some doing to figure it out. So LA School Report has un-scrambled the randomized alphabet drawing procedure the California Secretary of State used to determined the ballot order in the...

The field of candidates for UTLA president may be reduced by one. David Garcia, one of nine men challenging the incumbent, Warren Fletcher, has been dismissed as an LA Unified teacher, putting his candidacy in limbo. Garcia confirmed his firing in an email circulated on Friday and blamed it on his challenging the district on...

In its first analysis of LA Unified schools, Stanford University found that the typical student in a charter school made greater academic gains than a counterpart in a traditional school. “Charter School Performance in Los Angeles,” a report from Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), found that a student in an urban LA charter...

The defense in Vergara vs. California today put more distance between student-plaintiffs who described their teachers as ineffective and the teachers, by calling them to the stand to defend their effectiveness. Both teachers, Dawna Watty and Anthony Mize, directly challenged the assertions of their former students — Brandon DeBose and Elizabeth Vegara, whose sister Beatriz...