As the national high school graduation rate continues to rise — it hit a record 83.2 percent last year — the leaders of a campaign to raise that number to 90 percent by 2020 said they fear the country will not meet that goal. Hitting that ambitious target would require a far more intense focus...

Three charter school advocates — Greg Richmond of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, Caprice Young of Magnolia Public Schools, and Malcolm “Mike” Peabody of Friends of Choice in Urban Schools — have been chosen as this year’s inductees to the Charter School Hall of Fame, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools announced...

*UPDATED MAY 3 It’s not every day that a charter educator and a frequent charter critic converge to praise each other’s achievements in public education. But Marisol Pineda Conde, principal of Camino Nuevo Charter Academy’s Miramar High School, credits her mentor for much of her success — LA Unified school board President Steve Zimmer. “I’ve known...

*UPDATED More than $27 million is being funneled from the downtown LA Unified headquarters to local school districts, and the district is looking to move more employees out of their main office building. “We are decentralizing and putting more resources closer to the learners in the local districts,” Chief Academic Officer Frances Gipson told the...

*UPDATED The week and the month kicked off Monday with 100,000 people participating in May Day marches across Los Angeles, which for the first time in more than a decade all joined together at their final destination at City Hall. Teacher union organizers had called on Superintendent Michelle King to close the schools, but the...

Much attention has focused recently on a heightened fear of deportation among undocumented K-12 students, but the number of children actually affected is far greater, according to a new report from The Education Trust–West. About 250,000 undocumented children between the ages of 3 and 17 are enrolled in California public schools, says the report, released in...

It seems everyone is angry at LA Unified over its lack of transparency and leadership surrounding proposed co-locations of charter schools at district campuses. District staff, school board members, charter school leaders and parents throughout Los Angeles all say the number and intensity of the protests over these Prop. 39 co-locations are at an all-time...

U.S. News and World Report has released its 2017 rankings of America’s public high schools, and for the first time ever, the majority of the schools in the top 10 are charters. BASIS Scottsdale, BASIS Tucson North, and BASIS Oro Valley — all Arizona public charter schools in the BASIS network — placed one, two, and three atop...

LA Unified’s new Expanded Transitional Kindergarten program, which is serving nearly 30,000 children younger than age 5, is already facing challenges that threaten it, and the district will assess it at the end of the school year. Dean Tagawa, the executive director of the Early Childhood Education Division, said that a $5 million hold on state...

Fourth Street Elementary’s students are supposed to receive nearly $10.5 million under the state’s funding formula, but a new database published by the California Charter Schools Association shows that the East LA school has just $5.4 million to spend. The database’s release comes after a wave of criticisms levied against LA Unified and other California...