Partnerships to Uplift Communities, the charter school network co-founded by school board member Ref Rodriguez, released 109 pages of documents Wednesday relating to its conflict-of-interest complaint filed against Rodriguez. PUC alleges that Rodriguez illegally authorized $285,000 in payments to nonprofit organizations he oversaw during his tenure at PUC, as first reported Monday by the Los Angeles Times....

* UPDATE For the first time since LA Unified began authorizing independent charter schools, a charter school coalition is asking for major revisions in language and restrictions in their school petitions. And the school district seems more open than ever to making those compromises. Both sides say the changes are not aimed at increasing the...

California community college students now have a faster route to a four-year degree, thanks to two new state laws. On Friday, Gov. Jerry Brown signed AB 705, allowing more students access to college-level courses instead of remedial courses when they start community college, and AB 19, giving all first-time students in the state a free...

Eli Broad, the prominent education philanthropist and charter school booster, is retiring to spend more time with his family, according to release from The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. The Broads have given away more than $4 billion to education, health and science research, and contemporary-arts causes. They’ve pledged to give away 75 percent of their wealth....

Update:  Los Angeles County’s board of education on Tuesday denied Denon Carr’s charter application but urged him to make changes to the proposal and resubmit it as quickly as possible to either the Inglewood School Board or the state board. Carr says he will appeal, though he is not yet sure to which entity. For...

This article first appeared in The Chronicle of Social Change.  Teachers and school staff in Los Angeles County will now be able to make child abuse reports online, thanks to a motion approved this week. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday signed off on a plan that will allow the county’s Department...

Pension payouts are growing so fast that California’s school districts are being forced to lay off staff and close schools, a Stanford professor and author of a new study says. LA Unified will have to cut spending by about 3 percent in 12 years in order to pay for the ballooning cost of its retirees’ pensions,...

Kirsten Farrell, who teaches life-saving techniques as a medical technology teacher at Venice Senior High School, has been named one five California Teachers of the Year for 2018. Three of the five winners are in the Greater Los Angeles area, and all five are in Southern California. A teacher for 21 years, Farrell created one...

“If ever there was a time to talk about collaboration, now is the time.”   — Ryan J. Smith, executive director, The Education Trust-West Collaboration was the theme and aim of Pepperdine’s School of Public Policy’s first education conference, held Friday at the Malibu campus. The event brought together education policy leaders from Los Angeles...

LA Unified’s enrollment is dropping even faster than the district projected. There are 12,604 fewer students than last year, a 2.51 percent decline, last month’s official head count showed. The district had anticipated only a 2.1 percent drop. The difference means there will be $17 million less in the 2018-19 budget, and an additional $18...