Two more people this week entered the March 7 race for LA Unified school board. Gregory Martayan will join Nick Melvoin in challenging board President Steve Zimmer for his District 4 seat. And Joanne Baltierrez-Fernandez joins one other challenger in seeking an open seat in District 6. Martayan and Baltierrez-Fernandez filed with the city Ethics Commission on...

How LA Unified plans to help schools track English Learners to proficiency A new tool handled by LA Unified’s MiSiS computer system will help give principals monthly reports on the more than 140,000 English Learner students. Research shows that students who are not reclassified as English proficient by middle school are at a higher risk...

The Partnership for Los Angeles Schools and LA Unified announced today that Grape Street Elementary in Watts will be added into the organization’s network of schools. It will be the 19th school the nonprofit organization will now operate. “The district approached us about supporting Grape Street, and the promise there is as great as the...

On the first day of orientation for her all-girls school on Wednesday, Principal Liz Hicks seemed relatively calm. She personally answered her phone at her office as she was in the middle of preparing for the high-profile school celebration coming up Friday morning. “I’m feeling a little pressure, but I’m mostly excited because this dream...

*UPDATED This is the first in a five-part series about teacher sustainability in Los Angeles and California public schools and the available solutions to reversing teacher turnover. When I was growing up in Birmingham, Ala., nearly 30 years ago, the same teachers taught kindergarten year after year. It was almost a given that my sister...

LAUSD students go back to school Aug. 16, but parents and teachers say that’s too soon On Aug. 16, most students in the Los Angeles Unified School District will return to the classroom. But according to a survey of LAUSD parents and employees, summer fun doesn’t last long enough. The district conducted a phone survey in September...

Alex Caputo-Pearl is the president of United Teachers Los Angeles, a union that has a long and storied history of discarding presidents elected as firebrands but who reign as defenders of the status quo. Caputo-Pearl seems determined to end that cycle and bring teacher union militancy to the entire state of California. In a July...

The president of the LA teachers union, UTLA, outlined an aggressive plan for the coming year during a speech on July 29 at the 2016 UTLA Leadership Conference at the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles. Predicting that LA Unified will look to cut UTLA’s health benefits in 2017, along with other coming battles, Alex Caputo-Pearl said...

Dual language programs could get boost with initiative on November ballot With a growing number of parents embracing the value of their children learning a second language, nine more dual immersion programs are coming to L.A. Unified when schools open next week. Among the additions are one in Armenian and another in Arabic, giving the district 65 such...

Michelle King announced a record 75 percent graduation rate at her first State of the District address as superintendent of LA Unified, “a district on the move,” she proclaimed Tuesday. King noted that the 75 percent rate is based on “preliminary data” as she addressed 1,500 principals, assistant principals and district administrators at the annual kick-off to the school...