By Issie Lapowsky On a cloudy Tuesday afternoon in San Marcos, California, Guadalupe Lopez is guiding me through Alvin Dunn Elementary’s concrete grid of a campus. Dressed in a black sweatshirt with Minnie Mouse ears on the hood, she’s striding along with the eager confidence of a soon-to-be 7th grader just weeks away from the first day of...

Report: Economy improves, but not for California’s poor kids In 24 states, the lot of poor children did improve slightly between 2013 and 2014, but in California, progress has been stagnant. KPCC Orange County says special ed students must comply with vaccination law Many parents who opposed the new vaccination law believed that special education...

By Eduardo Porter The wounds of segregation were still raw in the 1970s. With only rare exceptions, African-American children had nowhere near the same educational opportunities as whites. The civil rights movement, school desegregation and the War on Poverty helped bring a measure of equity to the playing field. Today, despite some setbacks along the...

Plan to boost charters splits L.A. Unified board Dividing lines quickly emerged over an ambitious plan to double the number of charter campuses across the city. Los Angeles Times Achievement gap points to ineffectiveness of decades of reforms Only 28 percent of African-Americans and 32 percent of Latinos who took the test in California met...

By Sandy Banks When it comes to handling sexual misconduct by teachers, the Los Angeles Unified School District loses even when it wins. The district was let off the hook by jurors in a lawsuit filed by a middle school girl who’d been coaxed into sex, on and off campus, by her math teacher. The...

Gov. Jerry Brown acts on student representatives, car seats, tow trucks The legislation sets clear guidelines for when student representatives are appointed to and removed from school boards. Los Angeles Times One in 6 school districts gives up on Medi-Cal outreach reimbursements The exodus is part of the fallout from a 2012 federal investigation that...

A record seven LA Unified educators  were among 16 who have been named Los Angeles County Teachers of the Year. They are now in the running for the California Teacher of the Year award. The state winner moves up to the national competition, which will be held next spring. “I am so proud of our...

By Jill Barshay For those of us who worry that Google might be making us stupid, and that, perhaps, technology and education don’t mix well, here’s a new study to confirm that anxiety. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) looked at computer use among 15-year-olds across 31 nations and regions, and found that students who...

Teachers union holds protest outside Broad museum on opening day Before art aficionados could get their first look inside Eli Broad’s new museum Sunday morning, they got an angry earful on the outside from teachers. Los Angeles Times LAUSD teacher says he spelled out ‘N-word’ during history lecture A teacher temporarily suspended says he referred...