Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears weekly at LA School Report The California Teachers Association recently named Joe Boyd as its new executive director, replacing Joe Nuñez, who was mysteriously ousted in July after six years on the job. Boyd was most recently the executive director of CTA’s counterpart, the California Federation of Teachers. The executive...

As educators scope out their work during the early ramp-up of the school year, one important item on their to-do list should be building connections with students’ families and learning about their lives outside of school. This isn’t just a sensible idea: Modularity Theory, a framework that explains how to optimize system performance, illustrates why...

Tuesday, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has the opportunity to give families and teachers a powerful tool to transform our kids’ education by publicly releasing growth data. They’ve already crunched the numbers. Fresno, Oakland and Long Beach school districts have released it publicly and California is one of only two states that doesn’t...

Los Angeles Unified leaders were right to abandon plans for a single rating system for schools, which would have been a giant step backwards for school performance transparency. Those same decision makers should double down by making Los Angeles school academic growth data available to schools and parents. The state of California has made significant...

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears weekly at LA School Report For the next three weeks, United Teachers Los Angeles will conduct a campaign targeted at its own members. The goal is to persuade them to approve a UTLA endorsement of Sen. Bernie Sanders for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president of the United States. Chapter...

This is an excerpt from Charles Cole III’s self-published dissertation Beyond Grit & Resilience: How Black Men Impacted by the Crack Epidemic Succeeded Against the Odds and Obtained Doctoral Degrees. It’s been lightly edited. Research on Black males over the past decade has created a pervasive set of ideas that Black men are a difficult...

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears weekly at LA School Report By all accounts, it’s a great time to be a California union activist. Statewide political offices are in Democratic hands. The legislature is solidly liberal. The state GOP shows no signs of life. Government revenues are up. Government spending is up. Where is there a...

There’s no shortage of ideas about how nontraditional practices are taking off in K-12 schools, but often scant data to back them up — let alone data that can surface patterns and blind spots where we may not be paying attention. The Canopy project, a collaborative initiative led by the Christensen Institute that reimagines where...

Last week, Democrats made history as 12 candidates crowded the debate stage, the most ever to participate in a single debate. With so many candidates and topics to cover, it’s hard to have a substantive conversation on any of the issues — especially education, which received only a scant mention last Tuesday (and was raised...

For parents of children with disabilities, finding a school where the adults not only care about what your child needs but are capable of providing it can be life-changing. Over the last 12 months, researchers at the Center on Reinventing Public Education and the National Center for Special Education in Charter Schools fanned out across...