LA Unified’s seven school board members — or six for now — make vital decisions impacting more than 570,000 students. Parents, community members, and the general public want their concerns to be heard, but what’s the best way to connect with the board members? Besides email and phone, there are board meetings most Tuesdays with...

Two of the oldest questions in Western education, going back to the ancient Greek philosophers, are: What is true? And how do you know? Thousands of years later, as superstition and pseudoscience have been replaced by conspiracy theory and ideological dogma, finding answers to those questions is as thorny as ever. The modern heirs to...

If you don’t count high school student body president, Aimy Steele has never held political office. But as a teacher and school administrator, she’s run classrooms and schools, and now she’s running to represent her district in North Carolina’s state house of representatives. Steele and thousands of teachers around the country got a taste of...

Los Angeles Unified has a multimillion-dollar problem: kids aren’t coming to school. And it’s particularly bad among their youngest students. New district data show that 1 in 4 kindergartners misses 15 or more days of school each year. “I couldn’t believe that when I heard that,” Diane Pappas, the superintendent’s senior adviser, told board members...

Following strikes this spring in which teachers in six states demanded higher salaries, a new poll finds a sharp uptick in Americans’ support for increasing educators’ pay. The national poll, last week by the journal Education Next, which has been surveying Americans on high-profile education issues for more than a decade, also found growing support for...

If you want to book a stay in Bainbridge Scott’s Airbnb in Los Angeles’s Montecito Heights neighborhood, you’d better plan well in advance. Listed as a “Rustic Studio with Private Garden Patio,” the hillside property boasts a terrace with views of the city, a classic clawfoot tub, and an extensive garden from which guests can...

*Updated Aug. 27 As night drew near last Tuesday, after a drawn-out and divisive four-hour debate on how to replace a disgraced board member, a bombshell was dropped at school board members’ feet. District finances are of such great concern that the Los Angeles County Office of Education’s chief financial officer showed up unannounced to...

*Updated Aug. 23 Families whose children attend schools in LA Unified’s Board District 5, in southeast and northeast Los Angeles, will get to elect a new representative in a special election on March 5. That’s what the school board on Tuesday decided to do with the seat that has been vacant since Ref Rodríguez stepped...

Every time Ana Ponce drives down the highway between Los Angeles and San Diego, she’s haunted by a childhood memory: her night in lockup — the sterile white room, the sounds of crying, and the fear she might be lost. Born in Mexico, Ponce moved to the U.S. when she was 4, and, even as...

LA Unified has one of the most generous health care benefits packages in the state. But that means a big chunk has to come out of the money the district gets to educate each child — $2,300, to be exact. That’s 14 percent of the $16,000 the district gets annually per student. Five years ago,...