The new spokesman for the Coalition for School Reform is a familiar face — Addisu Demissie of 50+1 Strategies, the Oakland-based strategist who ran the Coalition’s field operation in the primary. Demissie replaces Janelle Erickson, who recently took a job as campaign manager for Mayoral candidate Wendy Greuel. The Coalition was 1-1-1 in the primary.  It helped get...

LA School Report has learned that, on Tuesday, the 24th St. Elementary Parents Union selection review committee met and decided to recommend what’s being called a “hybrid” governance model for the school. Under the parent trigger law, a majority of parents at a low-performing school can petition to revamp the school in any number of ways,...

On Tuesday, Mayoral candidate Wendy Greuel launched what LA Weekly‘s Gene Maddaus is calling a “reboot” of her campaign, delivering a speech with a meaty education section that included strong support for “reform” ideas like charter schools and rigorous teacher evaluations. “I will fight to reform our public schools,” she said, according to text of the...

The day after the March 5 primary election, a tired-looking Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa mentioned off-hand that turnout for the LAUSD School Board elections was a dismal seven percent. A couple of weeks later on KPCC, he amended that number to 14 percent. So which is it? Neither, actually.  Voter turnout for the LAUSD races was initially reported...

Starting tomorrow, LAUSD teachers will vote on whether or not to adopt the “Initiative for the Schools LA Students Deserve,” which would have UTLA make a series of demands including higher pay, an end to school reconstitution, and stronger advocacy for these demands. But that’s not the only decision teachers will have to make.  On...

LAUSD watchers began speculating about who the next School Board President might be almost as soon as the results of the March 5th LAUSD primary election were known. The issue gained further immediacy when the School Board voted 4-3 this Tuesday to limit the term of President to two years. Unless the Board votes to waive the...

On Monday, Mayoral candidate Wendy Greuel gained the endorsement of the powerful LA County Federation of Labor — an umbrella group of county unions. Greuel is supported by nearly every large union in the city (with the exception of UTLA). But, intriguingly, it was a member of the UTLA leadership, Gregg Solkovits, who helped convince...

In a dramatic move that may be a sign of larger changes to come, the LAUSD School Board voted Tuesday afternoon to limit the term of the Board President to two consecutive one-year terms*. The swing vote in the 4-3 decision was none other than recently re-elected Board member Steve Zimmer, who had supported Board...

Tomorrow is the first LAUSD School Board meeting since the March primary. Many of the items (see agenda here) are familiar:  months-old resolutions that keep getting offered up and then postponed. But there are a handful of new and/or controversial items that may generate heated debate or difficult votes — including the proposed co-location of...

In September, I was talking about pension reform on my now-defunct weekly podcast, LA Redux with the LA Times’ David Zahniser, who covers City Hall (and is in my opinion one of the best reporters in Los Angeles). Zahniser said that he hardly ever uses the word ‘reform,’ in his stories, although editors sometimes ad it in. “‘Reform’ is just...