By Peter Cunningham The Democratic Party has always stood for one thing: we fight for the little guy. In the field of education, the little guy is the student. He can’t vote. He doesn’t have much say about his school. He mostly has to do what he’s told. And he is trusting us to do...

‘Get to green’: California wants to grade school performance with colors instead of a single number For the last 15 years, a number between 200 and 1,000 told parents in California how good their child’s school was. Up next: They might have to decipher performance through a series of colored boxes. The latest proposal, presented Wednesday at a...

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge Wednesday denied LA Unified’s request to dismiss a lawsuit filed by well-known former fifth-grade teacher Rafe Esquith, who was fired in October. Esquith filed the defamation lawsuit against the district in August after he was placed on paid leave and assigned to “teacher jail” pending an internal investigation after a...

A handful of San Francisco elementary school principals facing an urgent need to fill positions for the fall have hired Teach for America recruits despite the school board’s vocal opposition to the organization. In May, the board severed the district’s partnership with Teach for America, which supplies enthusiastic if inexperienced teachers to thousands of schools...

New resources designed to make Common Core-aligned tests more useful California is providing a range of new resources to teachers, parents and the public to make Smarter Balanced tests and student scores easier to understand — and more useful in actually guiding instruction. The State Board of Education on Wednesday will discuss new parent and teacher resources that are available...

*UPDATED There were three days left in the school year, and final grades had already been turned in. Benjamin Feinberg’s 8th grade algebra students at Luther Burbank Middle School in Highland Park were looking forward to graduation and officially becoming high schoolers. But despite these kids having no tangible reason to stay engaged in the lesson...

LA Unified has so many different kinds of schools it’s hard to keep them all straight. With such varied terms as affiliated charter, independent charter, magnet school, pilot school, continuation school, option school and others, it can be a challenge to understand what they are, what they offer and how they differ.  This is the third...

Last month, NPR’s Education blog published what is being called a “takedown piece” on Rocketship Education. As co-founder and CEO of Rocketship, a leading network of nonprofit public charter schools, I have grown accustomed to anti-charter attacks like this. But my staff and parents are not. They flooded my inbox with outrage over the voices missing...

The district’s best teachers should be teaching at struggling schools, some LA Unified school board members suggested last week, with at least one board member calling for a future discussion on the issue. The comments were made during a Committee of the Whole meeting last week on how the district can improve and “reimagine” middle school,...

By Lindsay Sturman The epic battle over how to improve public education in California grew more stratified last week when a bill to mildly reform California’s onerous teacher employment laws was gutted beyond recognition and quickly died. With it went the hope that our elected officials would finally decide the question which is at the...