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...

LA Unified senior Kamryn Williams is studying for finals this week — in the Chrysler sedan where she lives with her mother and their dog.  Kamryn, 18, who graduates next month from Hamilton High School in Culver City and will attend college in the fall, is one of about 15,000 homeless students enrolled in Los...

The California Charter Schools Association last month filed a lawsuit against LA Unified over its controversial new policy barring charters from using classrooms in certain district school buildings.  It’s unclear if the CCSA will prevail in court, but the suit is already making an impact on the nation’s second-largest district.  LAUSD’s new colocation rules were...

Los Angeles Unified is pushing ahead with district-wide lesson plans based on the science of reading even after state lawmakers rejected legislation requiring the curriculum. About half of the 434 elementary schools in the nation’s second-largest school system have already adopted lessons aligned to the phonics-based science of reading, according to Superintendent Alberto Carvalho. The...

Even if they don’t win an Oscar, they’ve already won a makeover.  Surrounded by blocks of choking Los Angeles traffic, homeless encampments and garbage, a windowless warehouse encircled by a security fence is the unlikely setting for “The Last Repair Shop,” an inspiring documentary now up for an Academy Award on March 10.  “You don’t...

The nation’s largest experiment with charter schools is no longer growing. These days, Los Angeles charter leaders say their schools are just trying to survive. With tough, new policies, falling enrollment, and a hostile district school board, the decades-old charter school sector in Los Angeles has never faced headwinds so stiff, operators say. Los Angeles,...

Charter schools will be barred from hundreds of Los Angeles Unified District school campuses under a new policy that is among the most restrictive of its kind. The new rules, presented at a school board meeting Tuesday, prevent charters from being sited in campuses that have been identified as serving vulnerable students, accounting for roughly...