*UPDATED — Schools to reopen Monday, plus lunch and support sites available on Friday and Saturday. More than one-third of LA Unified schools closed this week because of raging fires in the San Fernando Valley and the Sepulveda Pass.  No students in all those seats could mean a loss of tens of millions of dollars...

LA Unified’s charter division agreed this week to be more consistent when making additional requirements of independent charter schools during their renewal process. School board vice president Nick Melvoin requested the change at Tuesday’s board meeting because he said the added requirements, known as benchmarks, were being applied unfairly to some schools that were showing...

All states in the country are required to issue education report cards about students’ performance in public schools. The problem is, parents have a hard time finding and reading them — and in many cases, they’re not even available in a language they understand, a new report finds. “Getting people the data they need is essential...

*UPDATED One lens into California’s size is its public education system. Six million children under the age of 18 attend public schools — including 600,000 in charter schools — while nearly 3 million students are enrolled in the state’s storied higher education system, which is still struggling to recover from decades of underfunding. The largest teachers...

Carolina Sagrero, 16, is neither vegan nor vegetarian, but she sure likes the new vegan chili that’s joined the Roosevelt High School lunch menu this year. “Everyone loves the vegan chili,” said Sagrero, a junior on the volleyball team. “It got me thinking about my diet, and so I’ve tried more of the vegan options....

Undocumented students are missing school. Parents aren’t showing up to school events. College students aren’t re-enrolling. Discrimination complaints are exploding. As DACA protections come to an end, California education advocates are redoubling their efforts to make sure immigrant families know their rights and students continue their schooling. They are also stepping up pressure on Congress...

* UPDATED A man volunteering as a poll worker at a Van Nuys elementary school was a registered sex offender, according to a report this week. Although the election activity provided limited access to any students, LA Unified confirmed Wednesday that the district was notified of the potential violation and no incident occurred nor arrests made....

The San Francisco NAACP is urging the city school board to declare a state of emergency to spotlight the city’s stark racial gap in student achievement. Despite several interventions designed to increase achievement among African-American students, the gap has lingered for more than 25 years, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Although the city is one of the...

Despite making up the majority of California’s public school students, Latinos are still facing major challenges to achieving in school and graduating from college, a new report finds. But the report also highlights five bright spots in the LA County area — schools, districts, and programs that are helping Latinos succeed. In Los Angeles County,...

Before LA School Report published a new district database that breaks down state standardized test scores at LA Unified’s magnet programs and schools, parents weren’t able to compare which magnet programs were academically successful and which ones weren’t. Many magnets are a “school within a school,” but the state does not report student scores at...