A groundbreaking summit that plans to share best practices between LA Unified traditional school and charter school educators is at capacity with more than 350 people signed up for the Saturday event planned by Superintendent Michelle King. From the moment she was appointed to the position in January, King said she planned to find ways to...

By Peter Cunningham  In the spring of 2009, newly-elected President Barack Obama took a meeting in the Oval Office with civil rights leader Al Sharpton. Reverend Sharpton told the White House he wanted to talk about education so Education Secretary Arne Duncan also attended. Sharpton also brought along an unlikely guest: former House Speaker and GOP...

(Cleveland, Ohio) — During a special forum organized around the Republican National Convention, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker offered some unexpected advice on the best way to sell school choice measures – talk about improving traditional schools too. “People who truly believe in education, they recognize greatness whether it’s coming from a charter school, a choice...

 Kids in crisis: One-third of California 11th-graders surveyed say they are chronically sad In a potential crisis crossing demographic lines, one-third of California’s 11th-graders and one-quarter of seventh-graders reported feeling chronically sad or hopeless over the past 12 months, a survey showed. The California Healthy Kids Survey also found that about 19 percent of both...

Where books are all but nonexistent Forty-five million. That’s how many words a typical child in a white-collar family will hear before age 4. The number is striking, not because it’s a lot of words for such a small human—the vast majority of a person’s neural connections, after all, are formed by age 3—but because...

By Max Marchitello The Veep-stakes are over! The pick is in. Mike Pence, the sitting governor of Indiana, will run as Donald Trump’s vice president. Although he has only been governor for a few years, Pence also served in the U.S. House of Representatives. Putting those records together, Bellwether Education Partners’ Max Marchitello takes stock of what...

Charter, union unite on wanting LA Unified to pay retiree benefits for charter teachers The local teachers union has made rare common cause with a charter school: They are pressing to have the Los Angeles school district — not the charter — pay for costly retiree benefits that are due to teachers who worked at...

Democrats added a misleading reference to standardized tests to the party platform over the weekend, requiring they meet a reliability standard that doesn’t actually exist. “[W]e believe that standardized tests must meet American Statistical Association standards for reliability and validity,” the amendment reads, saying this would “strike a better balance on testing, so that it...

It’s no secret that Donald Trump’s views on education (and, to be fair, many other policy areas) remain a mystery. But he won’t be the only one on display at next week’s convention proceedings in Cleveland. (Bookmark our coverage of the RNC over at our #EDlection2016 live blog) Along with vice-presidential pick Mike Pence, several of the announced speakers...

Nearly 1 in 4 students at this LA high school migrated from Central America — many without their parents At Belmont High, nearly 1 in 4 of its 1,000 students came from Central America, many as unaccompanied minors. They are part of several waves of more than 100,000 who arrived in the U.S. as children,...