This is a guest commentary from veteran Oklahoma City high school teacher John Thompson, who writes about school reform issues at the Huffington Post, This Week In Education, and other outlets: NPR’s Rachel Martin, in Superintendent’s Effort To Do Right By His Kids, nailed the essence of LA Superintendent John Deasy’s zealotry, as well as the hubris...

While high-profile School Board votes are often said to be “baked” ahead of time — negotiated and known by the key participants well before the public vote — it’s not at all clear that was the case yesterday at the LAUSD School Board meeting, where the result was a 5-2 vote for Richard Vladovic as...

Earlier today, veteran LAUSD teacher and Incubator School founder Sujata Bhatt posted some thoughts about the backlash against a set of new standards and tests called the Common Core:  There’s been a lot of hullaballoo suddenly about the Common Core. Symptomatic of the strange political times we live in, the Tea Party Right and the...

While laid-off teachers and ardent school reform critics may be all aglow over LAUSD School Board member Steve Zimmer’s “Pacino-esque” speech on behalf of the proposed teacher hiring/ class size reduction resolution last week, perhaps it’s not quite yet time for anyone to declare victory. Last Tuesday, the LAUSD Board debated and ultimately passed a...

This is a guest commentary written by LAUSD math teacher (and Hope Change Choices blog host) Rustum Jacob about some teachers’ decision to transfer out of Weigand Avenue Elementary School: As a teacher , if I’d been in the same shoes as the Weigand teachers, I would have left because of loyalty and respect for...

This is a guest commentary written by LAUSD teachers Jeff Austin and Edward Kusell-Zigelman to Mayor-elect Garcetti about what he can do to be a leader on education issues in City Hall:   Dear Mayor-Elect Garcetti, A few weeks ago, residents of Los Angeles made their voices heard by voting you into office. We’d like to...

The latest LA Times piece on the parent trigger process at Weigand Elementary focuses its attention on the principal being pushed out (and the teachers who may go with her) rather than on the dismal results under her leadership and the frustrated low-income parents who petitioned for her removal. The debate over the merits of the Weigand...

This is a guest commentary from Ama Nyamekye,  Executive Director, Educators for Excellence (E4E) Los Angeles: School Board races can sometimes seem like inside-baseball, but they actually define the leadership and agenda of Los Angeles Unified School District, which serves over 660,000 children. With that in mind, Educators 4 Excellence and EdVoice recently interviewed both...

Two of my favorite education writers right now write a lot about education but you may not know their names because they don’t usually have bylines. Karin Klein of the LA Times (right) and Kate Grossman(@kategrossman1) of the Chicago Sun-Times  (left) are editorial page writers whose work often comes out in the form of unsigned editorial page positions....