In Los Angeles, a leaked draft of a plan to dramatically expand charter school access in America’s second-largest school district has become a lightning rod development for advocates of traditional public schools. The war of words intensified last week at the Huffington Post when American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten attacked LA charter expansion as “part of a coordinated national...

In the extensive U.S. News & World Report ranking of all the public high schools in the country, LA’s top 10 include four independent charters, three magnets and three traditional schools. The Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies was the top-ranked LA school and the only LA Unified school in California’s top 20. It was 18th...

Often, big social movements start with just one worried parent. That’s the case in Redwood City, just south of San Francisco, where two new charter schools recently opened their doors. In Redwood City, that worried parent was Maritza Leal, a mother of three who, along with her husband, played a major role in bringing a...

Angelica Lopez Moyes is amazed that her 1st-grade son can speak Mandarin. But she is concerned that his dual-language immersion program at Castelar Street Elementary School could  be jeopardized if a charter is co-located on the campus. Castelar, founded in 1882 and the second-oldest school in Los Angeles, has 570 students and is at about 75 percent...

On Friday, 19 students from seven LA Unified schools will participate in a cook-off that will send a team to compete nationally in Washington, D.C. Their task: to create a nutritionally balanced school meal for $1.14, the district’s lunch budget. Their challenge is not unlike one the massive LA Unified Food Services division is facing: how to feed more than...

On Friday morning, more than 100 parents were lined up outside Walter Reed Middle School in Studio City waiting for a permit to get their child into one of the district’s Schools for Advanced Studies. One dad spent the night on the school steps. No, it’s no April Fool’s joke. Getting into one of LA...

Despite the LA Unified school board reversing itself and denying El Camino Real High School’s attempts to develop two long-closed elementary school campuses in the west San Fernando Valley, the leader of the CHIME Institute told LA School Report he is not concerned the board will shut down his school’s plan to develop another closed campus in the...

The word “MiSiS” is not generally associated with happy endings at LA Unified, and neither is the district’s increasingly competitive relationship with its 221 independent charter schools, but that was the case earlier this month when the district and its charters announced they had reached an agreement on linking their student data systems to fulfill...

A new report that analyzed how effective schools and cities are at closing the “achievement gap” between students from low-income families and their more advantaged peers found that nine of the top 10 schools in Los Angeles were independent charter schools. The first-of-its-kind Education Equality Index from Education Cities studied data from schools in the 100...

Bernie Sanders isn’t the only progressive who is confused about charter schools. On the left, misunderstandings and mischaracterizations about non-traditional public schools abound, many of them spread by an educational establishment that fiercely guards its turf. One of the most popular misconceptions is that charter schools represent “takeovers” by wealthy corporate interests or rich conservatives...