By Martin Blythe With severe drought and sustainability on the minds of the public and LAUSD Board members, now might be a good time to ask how agriculture and horticulture are faring in Los Angeles area high schools. The answer is: not well. They are among the programs most at risk of disappearing, just when they...

By Joshua Leibner What do the most recent California Common Core test scores mean? This is a question that deserves real attention, but the initial response is not encouraging. My last LAUSD principal told us four years that we are just “going to have to accept the testing pill” and get on with the program that would...

They’ve been talking about these new statewide tests in terms of setting a baseline for the years ahead. That’s fine as far it it goes. But here in LA Unified, we should think of the results in another way: As a redline. Statewide, more than half of students taking the test (56 percent) failed to meet...

Another charter war is brewing in LA Unified. But the early warning shots are taking aim at ambiguity, not facts. The flashpoint was two sentences in an Aug. 7 story in the LA Times that described a meeting at which three major foundations discussed plans to expand the number of charter schools in the district. The...

By Dan Walters California’s public schools saw an enormous enrollment surge during the 1950s from the post-World War II baby boom. It overwhelmed many school districts’ capacities to build new facilities, and one response, enacted in 1957, was called “lease-leaseback.” The law authorized a district to lease a school site to a contractor for a...

It was a bombshell of a story on Saturday, the LA Times reporting that a group of foundations is exploring plans to expand the number of charter schools within LA Unified to serve many beyond the 100,000 students who now attend charters in the district. What would that mean exactly? Unclear for the time being....

For more than a year, students, parents, community groups and even LA Unified members, themselves, have demanded greater transparency in how the board conducts the business of the nation’s second-largest school district. Too often, critics say, the board moves with no apparent effort to broaden the conversation or even allow the public to watch the...

Editor’s note: In the LA Times yesterday, Diane Ravitch argued passionately that the future of public education in Los Angeles depends on whom the LA Unified board selects as its next superintendent. She wrote, “The ideal superintendent would have the courage, and the support of the board, to resist those who seek to undermine and...

On my last day with LA School Report I’d like to take a minute (or ten) to do some navel gazing — reflect on the things I’ve learned as an education reporter covering this behemoth school district, a job for the most part I have truly enjoyed. First, the things I won’t be missing about...

That was quite a board meeting yesterday, with more emotion on display than Nixon or LBJ ever showed in announcing their decisions to leave the White House. The first wave came in The Long Goodbye to Bennett Kayser, whose bid for a second term was thwarted by a member of the group he most detests,...