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...

Update Nov. 20:  LA voters overwhelmingly approved a $9 billion bond measure to repair and upgrade LAUSD’s aging school buildings. Measure US was backed by LAUSD school board members, district superintendent Alberto Carvalho, the teachers union and local construction groups; and passed with 68% of the vote. Measure US would be LAUSD’s largest ever school...

Los Angeles Unified has revised its leading effort to boost academic outcomes for Black students after conservative Virginia-based activists filed a civil rights complaint, charging the program uses race as a criteria for admission. The district’s $120 million Black Student Achievement Plan had a clear goal: lifting the academic performance of Black students, who trail...

Los Angeles Unified is seeking voters’ approval for a $9 billion bond measure to repair and upgrade its aging school buildings.   The bond, which Californians will vote on Tuesday as Measure US, would be LAUSD’s largest ever and paid for with property tax increases. It requires a 55% majority in order to pass.  LAUSD Board...

LAUSD teacher and charter school booster Dan Chang is running to unseat incumbent Scott Schmerelson in LA Unified’s Board District 3, covering the West San Fernando Valley and Studio City.  Chang, who is endorsed by a statewide charter school group, is a math teacher at James Madison Middle School in North Hollywood, who routinely calls...

Former LAUSD teacher and principal Scott Schmerelson is running to keep his seat in LA Unified’s Board District 3, covering the West San Fernando Valley and Studio City.  Schmerelson, who is endorsed by the teachers union, is running for his third consecutive four-year term against upstart Dan Chang, a math teacher with a fondness for...

Next month, thousands of school board elections will be decided across the country. But perhaps none will be as consequential as a single, heated race for LA Unified’s school board, one that could help decide the fate of the nation’s largest charter school sector and second largest public school district. Once a fast-growing experiment in...

A week before classes at Los Angeles Unified began earlier this month, attendance workers tasked with fighting chronic absenteeism fanned out across the city, visiting the homes of children to make sure they’d show up for the first day of instruction.  Knocking on the doors where kids had repeatedly missed school, the workers told parents...

Parents, educators, and advocates criticized Los Angeles Unified’s bumpy rollout and collapse of its splashy artificial intelligence chatbot “Ed” – even as the district moved ahead with more projects powered by the cutting-edge technology. LAUSD last month shut down the chatbot after the firm hired to build it lost its CEO and furloughed workers. District officials...

The future of LA Unified’s heavily-hyped $6 million Artificial Intelligence chatbot was uncertain after the tech firm the district hired to build the tool shed most of its employees and its founder left her job.  Boston-based AllHere Education, founded in 2016 by Harvard grad and former teacher Joanna Smith-Griffin, figured heavily in LAUSD’s March 20...