*UPDATED LA Unified announced today that Deputy Superintendent of Instruction Ruth Perez is leaving the district and will be replaced by Frances Gipson, the current Local District East superintendent who will serve as chief academic officer. Perez, a former superintendent of the Norwalk-La Mirada school district, had been in her position since August of 2014 after she was hired by former...

Nonprofit is formed to advance charter-school plan in Los Angeles area Backers of a plan to greatly expand successful charters and other high-quality public schools in the LA area have formed a nonprofit organization. Los Angeles Times, by Howard Blume Low-income students ask educators to believe they can succeed A statewide coalition of students from...

A poll released today by EdSource and the Learning Policy Institute shows that the majority of California voters are concerned about the teacher shortage facing the state and support the state’s taking action to help fix the problem. The survey of 1,002 registered voters, which was conducted by the The Field Poll, found that 64...

Spending cuts. Layoffs. Early retirement packages. Reductions in benefits. These needs, which were among recommendations made by LA Unified’s independent Financial Review Panel on Tuesday, are the kind that would make any union leader lose sleep. But three full days since the doom and gloom report was presented at the LA Unified school board meeting, with recommendations that...

A former LA Unified teacher is suing the district for $12 million, claiming it failed to protect her from abuse, harassment and discrimination because she is a lesbian. Cathy Figel taught physical education at Marina del Rey Middle School for 13 years and claims to have endured anti-gay language, anti-gay graffiti scrawled in her work area; exclusion from...

Los Angles Mayor Eric Garcetti today announced a new program that will help identify students in LA Unified whose parents are veterans or active-duty service members so that they can receive extra resources available to them. Joining Garcetti at Leland Elementary School in San Pedro, where he announced the new program, were LA Unified school board...

On Dec. 1 it will be a year since FBI agents showed up at LA Unified’s headquarters with a federal grand jury subpoena and carted off 20 boxes of documents related to the district’s controversial iPad program. Since that day little if any new information has been publicly revealed about the investigation’s status, and that...

LA Unified school board member Scott Schmerelson is bringing a resolution before the board today, asking it to go on record opposing a plan by the Broad Foundation to add 260 new charter schools to the district over the next eight years. The plan has drawn rebuke from other board members and the LA teachers union,...

Among the 43 people identified by the Los Angeles Times this week as potential candidates for LA Unified superintendent were nearly a dozen with a background in charter schools or the reform movement. One of them was Caprice Young, a former president of the district school board, as well as a founder of charter schools, the former president of the California...

A report out this week from the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) found that California is just one of five states that has no formal policy requiring that teacher evaluations be tied in some way to student achievement measures. The report — State of the States 2015: Evaluating Teaching, Leading and Learning  — took a look...