Where books are all but nonexistent Forty-five million. That’s how many words a typical child in a white-collar family will hear before age 4. The number is striking, not because it’s a lot of words for such a small human—the vast majority of a person’s neural connections, after all, are formed by age 3—but because...

Charter, union unite on wanting LA Unified to pay retiree benefits for charter teachers The local teachers union has made rare common cause with a charter school: They are pressing to have the Los Angeles school district — not the charter — pay for costly retiree benefits that are due to teachers who worked at...

Nearly 1 in 4 students at this LA high school migrated from Central America — many without their parents At Belmont High, nearly 1 in 4 of its 1,000 students came from Central America, many as unaccompanied minors. They are part of several waves of more than 100,000 who arrived in the U.S. as children,...

‘Get to green’: California wants to grade school performance with colors instead of a single number For the last 15 years, a number between 200 and 1,000 told parents in California how good their child’s school was. Up next: They might have to decipher performance through a series of colored boxes. The latest proposal, presented Wednesday at a...

A handful of San Francisco elementary school principals facing an urgent need to fill positions for the fall have hired Teach for America recruits despite the school board’s vocal opposition to the organization. In May, the board severed the district’s partnership with Teach for America, which supplies enthusiastic if inexperienced teachers to thousands of schools...

New resources designed to make Common Core-aligned tests more useful California is providing a range of new resources to teachers, parents and the public to make Smarter Balanced tests and student scores easier to understand — and more useful in actually guiding instruction. The State Board of Education on Wednesday will discuss new parent and teacher resources that are available...

Meet the new LA Unified student board member The newest Los Angeles Unified School District student board member — elected by other high school student leaders in the district — will have a voice at school board meetings. At 16, she will be able to put items on the agenda up for discussion at meetings,...

Los Angeles conflict escalates as charter schools thrive Throughout the 1990s and well into the new millennium, the massive Los Angeles Unified School District barely noticed the many charter schools that were springing up around the metropolis. But Los Angeles parents certainly took notice and started enrolling their children. In 2008, five charter-management organizations announced...

Like Yelp for school: How a charter network uses student reviews to change how they teach A focus group-style exit interview has become part of the year-end ritual at PUC Schools. Over five weeks this year, co-founder Jacqueline Elliott spoke with all of the roughly 260 seniors graduating from the charter network’s high schools in...

Los Angeles Unified has most to gain from upcoming income tax initiative Already facing an uncertain budget future, Los Angeles Unified has the most to gain of any district in the state from passage of a ballot measure in November that would extend income taxes on the state’s highest earners. By Michael Janofsky, EdSource Cloning...