A group of Mar Vista community members and parents is mounting a protest againt LA Unified school board member Steve Zimmer over his support for a Mandarin immersion elementary school slated to be built in their Westside neighborhood. The $30 million school, currently dubbed the Mandarin and English Dual-Language Immersion Elementary School project, was approved by the...

With 154 schools under his supervision, Robert Bravo can never be in as many places as he wants or talk to as many educators as he’d like. But every Thursday, Bravo reaches hundreds of teachers and principals from around the district, and even some from as far away as Pakistan and Russia, with his weekly...

The LA Unified School Board’s Successful School Climate Committee got an update on the district’s diversion program, not only with statistics but also with a student who said it had changed his life and his mother, who said she “thanks God” for it. The program, which has been in effect since the beginning of the...

A mediator from the state’s labor board met for the first time yesterday with negotiators from LA Unified and the teachers union, UTLA, to move contract negotiations forward. But the result was a gulf between the sides that remains wide as ever. How wide? “At this time, the union’s economic demands remain $774 million dollars...

Four Democratic California lawmakers joined forces yesterday to promote new bills aimed at creating more stringent regulation of the state’s charter schools. If passed, the package of bills would bring big changes to the charter schools, including a requirement that they be run as non-profits, that charters be considered government entities and that all of...

The Associated Administrators of Los Angeles (AALA) elected a new president on March 19, with Juan A. Flecha winning 60.16 percent of the vote. Flecha beat Randall Delling, who received 39.84 percent, according to AALA’s newsletter. Flecha will take office July 1 and will replace Judy Perez, who is retiring. “He is currently assigned as Administrator...

California is extremely vulnerable to fraud at charter schools and as a result can expect to lose $100 million in wasted tax money in 2015, a new report released today finds. The report from the Center for Popular Democracy, Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment and Public Advocates found that there are “structural oversight weaknesses” in...

The details of a lawsuit filed last week were shocking: a teacher at Paul Revere Charter Middle School and Magnet Center in Brentwood allegedly used offensive racial slurs in class, and said that black people were not smart. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of a mixed-race student at the school and led to the removal the teacher,...

*UPDATED Scott Schmerelson says he is “feeling pretty good” these days, and the longtime LA Unified educator, counselor and principal certainly has lots of reasons for it. Schmerelson emerged from a logjam of five challengers to finish second in the March 3 school board primary election, good enough to make the May 19 runoff against District...

A team from Westchester Enriched Sciences Magnet won first place in the 2015 Aspen Challenge: Los Angeles competition at last Saturday, beating out teams from 15 other schools. The challenge asked students to propose solutions to global problems, and Westchester’s 10-member team took on water sustainability awareness in Los Angeles, according to a LA Unified press...