College promise programs offering “free college” to local students are increasingly adding a new task to their core mission — connecting young people to internships and apprenticeships. The programs, in which students are promised free college tuition if they graduate high school, have long been considered a silver bullet against the soaring tuition and loan debt...

Los Angeles charter school operator Alfredo Rubalcava can’t sleep at night.  Like other educators in Los Angeles, the CEO of Magnolia Public Schools is awaiting the unveiling of a new policy limiting the use of nearly half the city’s school buildings by independently run charter schools. But with LAUSD superintendent Alberto Carvalho on the verge...

Artificial intelligence now has a daily presence in many teachers’ and students’ lives, with chatbots like ChatGPT, Khan Academy’s Khanmigo tutor and AI image generators like Ideogram.ai all freely available. But nearly a year after most of us came face-to-face with the first of these tools, a new survey suggests that few states are offering educators substantial guidance on how to...

From teacher to congressional candidate, Nick Melvoin has accomplished much in his years of public service. Now he is one of 18 candidates running in the March 4, 2024 primary for U.S. House of Representatives California District 30.  Melvoin started his career as an English teacher at Markham Middle School in Watts. Motivated to see...

Parents and caregivers have been struggling for pretty much as long as I’ve been in the game. Ten years ago, I had a playground chat with a mother of a toddler who felt like she was failing on all these complicated goals she had for her kid. This deeply unhappy stranger helped me realize something:...

Grand Rapids college placement advisor Sarah Zwyghuizen normally starts cajoling high school seniors in October to fill out the federal financial aid forms that are key to unlocking their chances of going to college. Not this year. A U.S. Department of Education delay in revising the forms known as the Free Application for Federal Student...

After California invested billions to help students rebound from the pandemic, K-12 math and English language arts scores remained mostly stagnant last year and still well below pre-COVID levels. The annual Smarter Balanced scores, released today, showed that English language arts scores dropped slightly and math scores inched upwards a bit from 2022, although both scores...

Post-pandemic staffing challenges have eased up slightly this fall, but many school leaders report that they still have crucial vacancies to fill. The latest federal data on the public education workforce, released Tuesday, shows 45% of leaders said they were understaffed as the new school year began. That’s down from just over half last year....

Los Angeles Unified school superintendent Alberto Carvalho and a team of officials visited the homes of chronically absent students last month for the district’s fifth iAttend Student Outreach Day, an initiative to promote daily attendance. The program was introduced after LAUSD’s chronic absenteeism rate skyrocketed to 40% for the 2021-22 school year after students returned...

When I was young, I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about what I wanted to be when I grew up. I came to the United States from El Salvador when I was five years old, and while my mom and I liked to dream, we were more focused on meeting our day-to-day needs...