This is a guest commentary written by Viviana Sosa, a former LAUSD teacher, chapter chair, and House of Representatives member who joined the staff of Educators for Excellence Los Angeles  a little over a year ago: I grew up and went to school in South Los Angeles.  I became a teacher in the same types of schools...

In a wide-ranging Scholastic Administrator interview, LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy talks about the fight to make student achievement a meaningful part of teacher evaluations, his hopes for the $80 million that will be freed up if LAUSD gets a waiver from some of the burdensome provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind, and how he sees...

Here’s a good MSNBC segment to help understand the indictments against 34 Atlanta educators that came out on Friday, and what they mean for testing, teachers, and parents nationwide:

A recent New York Times article about states and districts finding that just two to six percent of teachers are rated ineffective (Curious Grade for Teachers: Nearly All Pass) — even using new student achievement data has set off a ton of chatter online about whether that percentage is too low, too high, just about...

“UTLA has treated the parents, the process, and the law with respect. They deserve real credit for their actions in this regard, and we recognize and appreciate the professional nature in which they have approached this important effort.” – Blog post from Parent Revolution (read full text here) Previous posts: You Say You Want a Revolution; Contrasting Reactions...

Start your week off listening to this panel discussion about politics, policy, and advocacy from last week’s 20th Annual California Charter Schools Conference in San Diego.  Featured panelists include Daniela Kim, a teacher with PUC Schools and a member of Teach Plus, Brian Johnson, former Assembly candidate and current VP of Leadership For Educational Equity, and Joshua...

Can’t live without education news between Friday and Monday? Check in here for news you might have missed or interesting tidbits that come in over the weekend: [widgets_on_pages id=”Twitter Live Posts”] As always, retweets (RTs) aren’t endorsements.

Rather than focusing on the school board election and the preservation of a superintendency, the coalition and the union should have attended to building a new education system in Sacramento and Washington, where the money and power reside.  — Claremont University professor Charles Taylor Kerchner in the LA Times.

UTLA Vice President Gregg Solkovits told LA School Report shortly before Wednesday’s House of Representatives meeting that the topic of the dual endorsed candidates for District 6  — Antonio Sanchez and Monica Ratliff — would likely come up, and apparently it did. The union didn’t decide to strip Sanchez of his endorsement immediately, but rather — according to a Friday morning...

With low voter turnout and sky-high spending, the cost per vote from Tuesday’s primary election — an average of $55 per vote across three districts — is pretty eye-popping. However, the rate varied widely across the three races: According to numbers from the LA City Clerk’s office and the LA City Ethics Commission, the per-vote...