By Caroline Bermudez More than once in California, it has taken a major lawsuit to try to propel long-awaited change for its schools. In 1999, the State Allocation Board was sued because of overcrowding in Los Angeles public schools. Last year, a coalition of groups brought a lawsuit accusing the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD)...

By Mauro Bautista  Most of us who grew up in Los Angeles in the 20th century had limited choices as to which school we attended. Most attended the local public school as determined by a zone of residence. Some of us, like me, attended a magnet high school and a few others attended private high schools....

By Andy Smarick  The ten-dollar founding father without a father, Got a lot farther by working a lot harder, By being a lot smarter, By being a self-starter. —John Laurens on Alexander Hamilton, Hamilton Seven years ago at the White House, Lin-Manuel Miranda described the premise of his still unfinished musical. And an esteemed crowd laughed. Miranda...

By Jeremy Loudenback Nearly a year ago, pro-bono lawyers from Los Angeles-based Public Counsel made national headlines by launching a landmark class-action lawsuit against Compton Unified School District in federal court in Los Angeles, arguing that the district had failed to address issues of childhood trauma that prevented students from receiving a quality education. In September,...

By Brent Walmsley When one considers that childhood obesity has more than doubled in children and quadrupled in adolescents in the past thirty years, taking steps to make sugary drinks more available to students represents the height of absurdity. Yet, after five years of implementing a policy in the best interest of student health, the...

By Peter Cunningham Across America, parents are demanding more and better educational options for their children while teachers unions and bureaucrats desperately fight to retain their monopoly over public school students. The latest front in the war against charter schools is in Los Angeles, where a study funded by United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) tallied up...

By Michael Vaughn The Los Angeles teachers union just spent $82,000 on a report that concludes that the thousands of Los Angeles families who are choosing to send their children to charter schools are costing the LA school district a half-billion dollars annually. The report “doesn’t fault charters,” according to the LA Times, “saying that...

By Caroline Bermudez When Steve Barr founded Green Dot Public Schools, a network of charter schools in the Los Angeles area, the district had gone more than 30 years without creating a new high school even as enrollment skyrocketed. And he did so in a no-holds-barred fashion. For example, in 2008, after the school district...

By Jeremy Loudenback As director of the School Mental Health unit at the Los Angeles Unified School District, Pia Escudero supervises more than 300 psychiatric social workers, clinical psychologists and other mental health professionals. She has also worked to create trauma-informed systems and therapeutic approaches in schools. Escudero was part of a team that helped...

By Iris Maria Chávez Ignorance is bliss, as the saying goes, and no state has taken that message more to heart than California. Alone among the 50 states, California stopped reporting accountability ratings for public schools in 2013 and was the first state in the nation to hit pause on accountability. Now, with responsibility for...