More than 20,000 parents, students and teachers in LA Unified are expected to stage a “Walk-In” before school on Wednesday orchestrated by the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools to protest charter expansion and call for greater investment in public education. “We have coordinated this with the school district and the superintendent’s office,” said Alex Caputo-Pearl, president...

If anything, it was good television. LA Unified school board members confronted each other headlong in a dramatic discussion Tuesday night over whether charter schools were being treated fairly by the district. The discussion opened calls for a deep dive into how district staff comes up with its recommendations for denials or approvals of charter schools....

  In dual votes Tuesday about a long-vacant school in the west San Fernando Valley, the LA Unified school board halted a charter school that was previously proposed for the site and instead allowed a district school to pursue it. The school board gave a unanimous thumbs-up for Hale Charter Academy to pursue a proposal to develop a performing...

*UPDATED A number of charter school operators across LA Unified say the district and its school board are turning up the heat on them to an unbearable degree while using the Charter Schools Division and Office of Inspector General to make approval and renewals of charter schools increasingly difficult. They claim there has been an increase...

* UPDATED The LA Unified school board is expected on Tuesday to deny more applications for new charter schools and charter renewals than they may approve. This is the first time the recommended denials exceed approvals since the new configuration of the school board was seated last July. Already, the board has denied as many charters in...

By Richard Whitmire Recent big-dollar donations from pro-charter philanthropists leave traditional educators sputtering: Why don’t they just donate their money to us? Good question, and one that was raised in Los Angeles recently in light of a possible huge gift from philanthropist Eli Broad and others that appears headed mostly to charter schools. LAUSD board...

For all the successful magnet schools in LA Unified and elsewhere, they are not attracting as much federal support as charter schools. That was a stark message from the district’s federal lobbyist, who told a district board committee this week that Washington is increasing national support for charter schools by nearly 32 percent but by...

A delegation of educators from Beijing spent much of today visiting an Alliance College-Ready Public School to find out what they could incorporate into their curriculums. Members of the delegation seemed delighted in the idea of having a computer device for every student, which they don’t yet have in China. But, they were perplexed about...

In its latest effort to offset declining enrollment, LA Unified is wooing parents of children attending a private school in Woodland Hills that is shutting down after this academic year. The operators of Pinecrest Schools have notified parents that they intend to close the group’s last five campuses, a decision that creates a chance for...

Declaring that she has no intention of turning LA Unified into an all-charter school district, board member Mónica Ratliff chaired a board committee meeting yesterday that examined just what it is that makes charters different from traditional schools. For one thing, as she learned from a presentation to the committee, charter school teachers don’t have...