For one more day, the nation gets to continue its escape from world events via the thrills of March Madness. While important issues of governance have been tying Congress and the Trump administration into knots, a wide cross section of the population has been preoccupied instead with the Sweet Sixteen and the Final Four, fixating...

John King didn’t have long. It was October 2015, and Arne Duncan announced he would step down as President Barack Obama’s education secretary. Obama tapped King, a K-12 adviser at the federal Education Department with years of classroom and government experience, to fill the vacancy. In only about a year in the job, King, among...

Kiersten Franz has a bachelor’s degree in math, a master’s in education, and several years’ teaching experience under her belt — excellent qualifications, presumably, for becoming a New York City high school statistics teacher. But her record wasn’t quite good enough to meet New York state’s stringent licensure requirements. Because her training was out-of-state and...

LA Unified is preparing its first-ever unified enrollment system, but signs that it’s already running off the tracks have spurred an influential group of advocates to band together to make sure the final product is equitable and accessible to all. The biggest obstacle to success they cite is leaving out charter schools, which already educate...

A coalition of Los Angeles charter schools announced Tuesday that they plan to join in the legal challenge against President Trump’s executive order to withhold federal money from “sanctuary jurisdictions” including LA Unified. They also reported that fewer seniors in their high schools are applying to college this year because of fears of their information being...

White parents who stand to lose teachers and counselors at their neighborhood public school in Los Angeles are changing their ethnic status with LA Unified to get around a district policy that strips extra staff from schools that are more than 30 percent white. And some Latino parents who fear deportation under the Trump Administration...

Yolie Flores is one of 24 candidates who will compete in the April 4 special primary election for the 34th Congressional District seat which includes downtown LA, Koreatown and the city’s northeast region. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the votes, a runoff election will be held on June 6.  When longtime representative Xavier Becerra...

Last October, in perhaps the final triumphant moment of his administration, President Obama announced that America’s soaring high school graduation rate had risen, again, to an all-time high of 83 percent. Before he took office, the percentage of students earning diplomas languished for decades in the low to mid-70s; now the news was made still...

Philip Skarin walked a mile and a half to his little school in the Cahuenga Pass in 1930 from Mulholland Drive when it was just a dirt road. There were 16 students in his class at the school that was called Hollywood Park Elementary and opened in 1917. “I came to school barefoot because we...

The girl had already burst into tears when the bold, yellow letters on the man’s jacket came into focus: “Police.” Rómulo Avelica-González had just dropped off his 12-year-old daughter, Yuleni, at a Los Angeles charter school — as he did every morning — and was heading next to the school of his 13-year-old daughter, Fatima....