In honor of Teacher Appreciation Week, LA School Report spent some time recently talking with Brendan Wallace, a math teacher at Alliance Marc and Eva Stern Math and Science High School. On Thursday, Wallace was named the Teacher of the Year for Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, an organization that runs 27 charter schools in Los Angeles. (Check...

Arizona State University history professor Matt Delmont’s recent book, “Why Busing Failed,” challenges the conventional narrative around why school integration fell so short  — that segregated neighborhood schools were naturally occurring, that busing could never effectively change that — and examines the calculated backlash, including from a complicit media, that doomed desegregation before it began. Delmont and...

The 74 marks National Charter Schools Week (May 1-7) with a series of articles about America’s charter leaders, students and policies. See the full series. At the beginning of 2016, Rainshadow Charter High School in Reno, Nevada, was on its last legs. The Washoe County school board had granted Rainshadow just a one-year charter extension to...

Trump tussled with Los Angeles school board over historical hotel Donald Trump had a bitter public feud with the LAUSD school board over the Ambassador Hotel, where he wanted to build a 125-story office tower. The site of the Robert F. Kennedy assassination in 1968 was preserved and is now the site of six autonomous...

Anti-immigrant rhetoric going on in presidential politics and a potential state law have added a renewed emphasis on developing required ethnic studies classes in the LA Unified curriculum. An expert from the University of Arizona spoke to an LA Unified school board committee this week to explain the importance of ethnic studies in education. He brought...

This is graduation season, when an anticipated 3.3 million high school seniors will cross a stage and receive an elegant sheet of paper that announces their completion of an important phase of formal education. For the last few years, public school districts have proudly announced their increasing graduation rates: In the 2013-14 academic year, the...

All eyes on today’s Louisiana vote: A new era for New Orleans’ schools? Barring a last-minute twist, Louisiana lawmakers Thursday are expected to vote to dissolve a state-controlled school district that for the last 10 years has overseen the nation’s most radical foray into education reform. As for what would come next – a unique hybrid...

About 200 parents, students and teachers rallied Wednesday morning outside Castelar Street Elementary School in Chinatown as part of a “walk-in” calling for lower class sizes at LA Unified, increased staffing and more accountability for Prop. 39, the law that gives charter schools the right to use empty class space at district schools through a process called...

Principal Mara Bommarito of Ellen Ochoa Learning Center said at Tuesday’s LA Unified school board committee meeting that she responded to a Los Angeles Times article about Spanish spoken in fewer homes in a letter to the editor, but when she mentioned it hadn’t been published, a school board member responded. “It wasn’t published, there has been a lot of...

Teachers were praised at a committee meeting Tuesday by LA Unified’s Chief Academic Officer Frances Gipson, honoring this week of celebrating educators, national Teacher Appreciation Week. “We want to celebrate our teachers, as this is Teacher Appreciation Day, and I want to mark that some of us in this room do not have credentials, but we...