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“Thanks to the district’s successful approach to discipline, the number of days lost to suspension in 2010-11 plummeted to 26,286, from 46,006—an impressive 43 percent drop in one year… Today only a small fraction of our students get suspended, and the numbers are shrinking.”  – LAUSD’s Earl Perkins, in Education Week (A Successful Discipline Policy...

LA School Report‘s Hillel Aron will be Tweeting out key remarks and decisions from today’s Board meeting: Or you can watch along online by clicking here (no guarantees!). Previous posts:Board Preview: Charters, Dismissals, Tenure;Board, UTLA Have Different Plans to Reform “Teacher Jails”; LaMotte Proposes Limit to Garcia Presidency

Read this new Education Week story (Chicago Years Inform Ed. Secretary’s Views on Gun Violence) and you get the clear impression that the White House is reining in Education Secretary Arne Duncan on gun control right now. Usually unconstrained on policy issues, open to the press, and Obama’s go-to guy, Duncan’s post-Sandy Hook Elementary remarks have...

“When you were a kid you imagined that your teachers lived in closets and subsisted on coffee grinds and eraser gum,” notes this LA Weekly item (Cassandra McGrath’s Stories to Make You Cry).  Instead, the 28 year-old teacher has published an anthology of stories called “Rising From The Ashes,” featuring the work of former Belmont High School...

Coming in March, Oprah Winfrey’s OWN network is going to start airing Blackboard Wars, the six-part story of the attempt to turn around New Orleans’ McDonogh High School. Produced by Discovery and originally titled “Treme High,” the series features a challenging turnaround attempt undertaken through an organization called Future Is Now Schools, which was created by...

Los Angeles-based CItizens of the World charter network has applied to open a school in fast-gentrifying Williamsburg (Brooklyn), and the local NPR affiliate reports that its possible  arrival is creating both hope and concern.  While socioeconomically diverse and progressive charter schools like Citizens are somewhat familiar in Los Angeles, they remain new and unfamiliar on...

“In many states, perhaps all but I don’t know one way or the other, boards of education have to approve the receipt of all grants.  However, I am not aware of boards being required to approve grant applications,” says Donald McAdams, Center for Reform of School Systems (and 1990-2002 Houston school board member).  “If a superintendent was...

All around the nation, school districts are trying innovative things to make schools work better for kids. LAUSD has some of these elements – charter schools, for example, and federally funded merit pay. There’s no shortage of talented individuals, dedicated educators, and generous benefactors willing to help speed the process of change. But because of...

Sunday’s LA Daily News picks up on the Board of Education’s new requirement to approve grant applications ahead of time, reporting that a majority of the Board feared that Superintendent John Deasy and his staff had “hijacked” the grant application process but that their votes had set off a string of events that “could stem the...