KIPP Raíces Academy School in East Los Angeles celebrated its National Blue Ribbon Schools award on Tuesday. After the ceremony, LA School Report caught up with the school’s founding principal, Amber Young Medina, who opened Raíces in 2008 and is now the managing director of KIPP LA Schools. This is an edited transcript of the conversation. LA School Report:...

The National Blue Ribbon Schools award given out each year by the federal government is considered among the highest honors a school can achieve, and of the 335 Blue Ribbon schools in 2015, only one was from LA Unified. That school, KIPP Raíces Academy School in East Los Angeles, celebrated the award today in a...

The 2017 LA Unified school board elections are still more than a year away, but that isn’t stopping Nick Melvoin from officially throwing his hat into the ring of the District 4 race. The District 4 seat is currently held by board President Steve Zimmer, who has yet to officially declare he will be running...

LA Unified appears to be making significant progress on its projected graduation rate this year through a “very personalized approach,” with a new report stating the district may even surpass last year’s record rate of 74 percent. A January progress report obtained by LA School Report showed that only 54 percent of seniors were on...

LA Unified’s graduation crisis is hitting every local district and nearly every large high school, from the San Fernando Valley to the South Bay, and from East LA to the Westside. Recent internal progress reports obtained by LA School Report show only 54 percent of seniors are currently on track to meet their “A through G”...

Only roughly one in two LAUSD high school seniors is currently on track to graduate, and the district is scrambling to get extra assistance to an estimated 15,000 students in danger of being left behind this June. According to internal district reports obtained by LA School Report, an estimated 54 percent of seniors are on track to...

*UPDATED A number of charter school operators across LA Unified say the district and its school board are turning up the heat on them to an unbearable degree while using the Charter Schools Division and Office of Inspector General to make approval and renewals of charter schools increasingly difficult. They claim there has been an increase...

A group of six California school districts, including LA Unified, this week unveiled a new school accountability system that represents a far more complex and intricate way of ranking schools. Simply put, it is not all about standardized test scores anymore, and the school with the highest scores may no longer be the highest ranked...

Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of the LA teachers union, UTLA, has been warning for months of “dangers” ahead, imploring his members to dig deeper in their pockets to fight them. He will soon find out if the message resonates among the union’s 35,000 members, now that ballots have gone out, asking for a $19 monthly raise...

It appears that the LA Unified school board is headed for a showdown with the giant chicken industry. As the second largest school district in the nation, LA Unified has traditionally been one of the largest purchasers of chicken in the country but in late 2014 adopted much stricter guidelines for the food it buys....