State politicians and educators are scrambling to cope with the fallout after the abrupt cancelation of an exam by the California Department of Education left over 5,000 high school students across the state — 492 of them in LA Unified –unable to graduate, despite having completed all other necessary course work. The California High School...

A middle-school teacher at LA Unified has been named one of five recipients of the 2015 California Teachers of the Year Award from the California Department of Education. Lovelyn Marquez-Prueher is an eighth-grade English teacher at Dodson Middle School in Rancho Palos Verdes. She has been teaching for 11 years, the last six at Dodson. Marquez-Prueher...

Nearly two dozen LA Unified schools were among the 424 elementary schools cited by the state today as California Distinguished Schools. The announcement came from State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson who said, “I applaud these strong, thriving schools that are making such impressive strides in preparing their students for continued success.” The 2014...

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,...

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...

A new survey shows how states are implementing data systems for evaluating students’ progress, but California, which has most public school students of any state, declined to participate this year. Patricia de Cos, Deputy Executive Director of the California State Board of Education, told LA School Report that her office was simply unable to fill out the requisite forms before...

In a sign of its growing presence in California, StudentsFirst, the nationwide education reform organization headed by Michelle Rhee, announced today the hiring of Jovan Agee as the organization’s California State Director. Agee, who served eight years as the director of political and legislative affairs of UDW/AFSCME Local 3930, a homecare providers union, will be...