By Beth Hawkins Few education policy battles have burned as hot as debate over the practice of requiring traditional public schools to share under-used space with charter schools. Co-location, as the practice is called, is often cited as damaging to students in mainline district schools. But groundbreaking new research from Temple University Assistant Professor Sarah Cordes finds that at...

For the first time in 36 years, all LA Unified district students are starting school at the same time, now that the last school — Bell Senior High School — has ended its multi-track schedule. In 1981, Bell and nearly 80 percent of the district’s schools went on a year-round schedule to alleviate overcrowding. Even though...

A proposed state-run STEM school in Los Angeles is being opposed by teachers unions and others, including STEM teachers. Teachers unions and other groups spoke out against the school’s unique governance structure and process for approval through the Legislature as well as the uncertainty of whether teachers and staff would be able to collectively bargain....

Feeding the kids of Los Angeles has its own set of unique challenges. Not only is it one of the largest school populations in the country with 665,000 mouths to feed every day, the district is now open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner at most of its 1,100 locations, dishing up 132 million meals a...

Since it is still the lazy days of summer, we thought we’d dive into some refreshingly cool facts about swimming pools located at schools throughout Los Angeles. At LA Unified, more than one-third of all the high schools in the district have swimming pools, and it costs about $3.9 million annually to maintain them all....

About a decade ago, 15 years into the public charter school movement, a few of the nation’s top charter networks quietly upped the ante on their own strategic goals. No longer was it sufficient to keep students “on track” to college. Nor was it enough to enroll 100 percent of your graduates in colleges. What...

Expect more diligent searches at schools this fall as LA Unified officials push principals to meet their daily requirement of metal detector scans of students and random searches of lockers for knives, guns, or drugs. An internal report revealed that some schools are still not doing the mandatory searches of students that the district requires,...

Immigrant rights activists in Los Angeles are preparing to assist undocumented youth who may be the target of this week’s federal raids that could include teens. Reuters news service reported that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was planning raids beginning over the weekend and continuing through Wednesday, to arrest suspected gang members who...

An annual ranking of America’s most and least educated places reveals a true split in California when it comes to educational equity, with six cities scoring in the top 10 and six cities scoring at the very bottom. San Jose, Sunnyvale, and Santa Clara, taken together, scored third while the area encompassing San Francisco, Oakland,...

Across California last year, only 45 percent of high school graduates were eligible to attend the state’s public universities. Data from the California Department of Education show that since 2010-11, the percentage of students eligible for admittance into University of California and Cal State University schools has climbed by only 1 or 2 percentage points each...