Board member Monica Ratliff’s effort to quantify how much LA Unified spends on legal defenses to redirect the funds toward student safety improvement programs, ran into a barrage of opposition this morning as the district board began a long day of meetings. Ratliff introduced two resolutions in an open session meeting. One seeks to add an...

Board Member Steve Zimmer has food on his mind. When the LA Unified school board gathers again tomorrow, Zimmer will be seeking a detailed and comprehensive look at how the district spends more than a $100 million to buy food and deliver meals to students throughout the district. He is proposing a wide ranging resolution to...

Members of the LA Unified school board as well as several administrators suggested today that the district should delay using the results of the 2014-15 Smarter Balanced computerized test as means of measuring academic growth next year. Their views came a day after officials from statewide educational organizations told the California Board of Education that...

Building on her success investigating LA Unified’s controversial iPad program, Board Member Monica Ratliff is now asking for an overall examination into how the district allocates support for legal matters as a way to find added funding for improving school safety. In two resolutions set to come before the board next Tuesday, Ratliff is calling...

* UPDATED As contract negotiations plod along between LA Unified and the teachers union, UTLA, the issue of class size reduction has taken on a new urgency for Superintendent Ramon Cortines, who plans to shrink the number of students in middle school and high school classrooms by the end of the year. “I’m not going...

The head of Parent Revolution said today that LA Unified has reversed course, lifting the ban on using the “Parent Trigger” law this year to overhaul failing district schools. “As one of Superintendent Cortines’s first moves, it’s a sign that the district will be respectful of the law,” Ben Austin, founder of the group that...

Last week’s election for California Schools Superintendent, was widely framed as a battle between the teacher unions that backed incumbent and victor, Tom Torlakson, and refomers who supported Marshall Tuck. But a new survey suggests voters were more interested in how public schools are funded. The poll, conducted by Lake Research Partners on behalf of the American...

After Tuesday’s two-hour MiSiS meltdown, Superintendent Ramon Cortines called for Microsoft to send in the cavalry and the Seattle-based company responded by sending a total of one — count ’em, one — expert to help with the glitch-plagued student data program serving 650,000 students. The system crashed when too many teachers logged on to update...

Oops. Despite efforts by Superintendent Ramon Cortines and LA Unified‘s Information Technology team to get MiSiS back on track — or at the very least, semi-functional — it seems that the data management system remains unreliable. The system went down between 2 pm and 4 pm yesterday, he said in a memo to staff. It...