By Nick Melvoin Last week’s Los Angeles Unified School Board meeting was a political circus. Scores of parents, students and advocates in a packed boardroom vied for a chance to speak as the board debated their futures in real time. And while the politics may interest an arm-chair social scientist—“everyone is in such a bunkered...

By Nadra Nittle As evidence mounts that punitive discipline makes students more likely to go to prison than to college, school districts in greater Los Angeles, such as Long Beach Unified and Lynwood Unified, are shifting away from suspending students or citing them for truancy. Instead, they’re making greater use of restorative justice programs, as...

By Caroline Bermudez With the Los Angeles Board of Education poised to consider the expansion of another successful charter school at its March 8 meeting, parents demanding more choice deserve to know what is driving the district’s questionable practices around charter review. There is an anti-charter narrative so strong that it defies reason, and few...

By Lida Jennings In many ways, Los Angeles is the birthplace of Teach For America. It was at University of Southern California 25 years ago that Wendy Kopp gathered 500 idealistic corps members for the very first summer training institute and launched them into teaching positions at high-poverty schools in Los Angeles and across the...

By Jeremy Loudenback In January, the Los Angeles Unified School District chose longtime local teacher and administrator Michelle King to head the nation’s second largest school district. The first African American woman to serve as district superintendent, King will oversee about 650,000 students at more than 900 schools across the city. LAUSD students include more...

By Evelyn Macias It should come as no surprise to any of us that nearly half of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s (LAUSD) high school students are not on track to meet their A-G (required graduation and college prep) courses to graduate, as reported last week by LA School Report. News outlets reported this...

By Shirley Ford I realized there was a problem as early as elementary school. I always knew that my boys were smart – they started reading me the newspaper in the evening when they were 6 years old – but they were clearly bored and not being challenged in school. Like so many young African-American...

  By Kathy Kantner, Rachel Greene and Juan Jose Mangandi Readers of LA School Report’s coverage of the Feb. 2 meeting of the Board of Education’s Early Childhood Education and Parent Engagement Subcommittee can be forgiven if they only perceived the heat in the boardroom but not the light. It would be unfortunate, however, if LA School Report’s overly...

By Richard Whitmire Recent big-dollar donations from pro-charter philanthropists leave traditional educators sputtering: Why don’t they just donate their money to us? Good question, and one that was raised in Los Angeles recently in light of a possible huge gift from philanthropist Eli Broad and others that appears headed mostly to charter schools. LAUSD board...

By Latosha Renee Guy “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eye of others…one ever feels his twoness—A teacher, and a teacher leader: two souls, two thoughts, two sometimes conflicting ideals in one body.” — The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Dubois Driving home...