On Friday, 19 students from seven LA Unified schools will participate in a cook-off that will send a team to compete nationally in Washington, D.C. Their task: to create a nutritionally balanced school meal for $1.14, the district’s lunch budget. Their challenge is not unlike one the massive LA Unified Food Services division is facing: how to feed more than...

Bridging gaps in mental health services to students State legislators are moving forward with a plan to incentivize cooperation between schools and government agencies to provide mental health services for students. By Alisha Kirby, Cabinet Report Some after-school program providers say flat funding may cause them to close, EdSource Op-Ed: Forget cops. Should doctors and...

Each year, students cram into lecture halls to take classes that won’t get them any closer to a college degree — shelling out $1.5 billion to learn concepts they should’ve mastered in high school. One in four college freshmen who enroll in college directly after high school enroll in remedial classes. Remedial students who begin at four-year...

This is college acceptance season, the weeks when millions of high school seniors pore over their offers and agonize about which campus offers the best fit and the best financing. The real pressure is off, the essays and test scores a distant memory. Until you consider the results of a new study that revealed this: More than...

By Anya Kamenetz When Andrea Diaz was applying to colleges, she got good news and bad news. The good news was that American University, a private four-year university in Washington, D.C., wanted her. The bad news was that it required her to come to campus early to take two summer developmental-level courses in math and...

Besieged teachers unions reach out to their members The court’s tie vote provided breathing room for the CTA and public employee unions in 23 states, including California, whose laws allow unions to charge all employees mandatory “agency fees” for the costs to represent them. John Fensterwald, EdSource Bus safety law proposed after student with special needs...

Summer school is expanding, plus it’s going to be fun again. That’s the message Janet Kiddoo, LA Unified’s intervention administrator for Beyond the Bell, brought Tuesday in a report to the Curriculum, Instruction and Educational Equity Committee. “Whoever thought people would get excited about summer school?” Kiddoo said. “People are very excited, and there are such passionate and...

By Caroline Bermudez When Steve Barr founded Green Dot Public Schools, a network of charter schools in the Los Angeles area, the district had gone more than 30 years without creating a new high school even as enrollment skyrocketed. And he did so in a no-holds-barred fashion. For example, in 2008, after the school district...

Number of new math and science teachers declining in California In the 2014-15 school year, a total of 1,119 math credentials were issued, down 8.4 percent from 1,221 the previous year. For that same year, there were 1,347 science credentials issued, down 6 percent from the 1,434 issued the year before. By Pat Maio, EdSource...

The passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act and the waning of the Obama administration bring to a close federal efforts to improve teacher evaluation — a practice once widely derided for its infrequent and pro forma observations, inflated ratings and lack of consequences. Today most states combine different measures, including classroom observations and student test data,...