There a few really great charts in today’s LA Times article about our ever-sinking voter turnout, including the one above. The Times shows that voter turnout in Mayoral runoffs increases an average of 18 percent from the primary. But according to sources we’ve spoken with, voter turnout in School Board District 6 next week could actually be lower than it...

Here’s an interesting idea from School Board Member Bennett Kayser’s LA Times op-ed this morning: make the Department of Water and Power (DWP) give LAUSD a discount. “In San Francisco, public schools get deeply discounted electricity from the local utility under an agreement forged decades ago,” he writes. The DWP, one of the most powerful institutions in...

Just as record-breaking temperatures in Los Angeles are expected to subside by tomorrow, many of the heated LAUSD issues on the docket for tomorrow’s Board meeting may cool off into mere formalities by the time they come up for a vote. But a packed Board agenda and multiple union rallies could still make for a dramatic day...

The above graphic is from Barbara Jones’ excellent Daily News piece on Superintendent John Deasy’s push to dismiss more teachers. The article also includes a sidebar briefly summarizing 83 cases against teachers accused of misconduct in the last 15 months — accusations ranging from “showing students images of naked children” to “paying students to do his work, such as...

As Education Week reported last Friday, the nine California school districts collectively known as CORE (California Office to Reform Education) are busy revising their application for a No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waiver. The initial draft of the waiver application sent in by LAUSD and other districts was given to an anonymous peer review group established by the Federal government....

With less than two weeks to go until election day, the District 6 School Board runoff is remarkably sedate. Very little mail has been sent out for either campaigns, and Independent Expenditure (or IE) committee spending is down compared to the primary. Monica Ratliff still teaches every day at San Pedro Elementary, so her public exposure...

Tuesday afternoon’s KCRW Mayoral debate — about half of which focused on public education — began with a bold assertion by candidate Wendy Greuel: “There’s probably no other subject where my opponent and I differ than on education.” But in a debate that covered topics such as the publication of teacher ratings in the LA Times, the...