A group of LA Unified students joined local and national educators last week to describe academic challenges they face and to suggest ideas for what could help them. The four-hour discussion last Thursday evening kicked off a weekend of activities sponsored by UTLA in conjunction with the “White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African...

The LA Unified school board made limited progress yesterday in the search for a new superintendent. The members invited two headhunter firms to pitch their ideas on how to handle the search but said three other firms may also still be in the running. The two leading firms — Hazard, Young and Associates of Rosemont,...

By Dan Walters California’s public schools saw an enormous enrollment surge during the 1950s from the post-World War II baby boom. It overwhelmed many school districts’ capacities to build new facilities, and one response, enacted in 1957, was called “lease-leaseback.” The law authorized a district to lease a school site to a contractor for a...

Uncertain impact of California’s high school exit exam Gov. Brown last week signed legislation that exempted students from the graduating class of 2015 from having to take the test. EdSource Lawmakers consider retroactive diplomas for students who failed exit exam Between 2006 and 2014, nearly 249,000 students, or about 6 percent of test-takers, did not...

An open and transparent search, background as an educator and under no circumstances someone from the Broad Academy. Those are the three major criteria that UTLA wants in the next LAUSD school superintendent. Alex Caputo-Pearl, the president of the United Teachers Los Angeles union, told the LA School Report that he has made it known to...

Whether charter schools in California have been a godsend or a destroyer of worlds depends upon whom you ask and where you are standing when you ask it. But now a group of activists hope to end the debate altogether by getting an initiative on the 2016 ballot to repeal the Charter School Act of...

The LA Unified board is going to the end of the earth, or close to it, to accelerate the search for the district’s next superintendent. The seven board members are gathering at 10 a.m. Sunday at the Point Fermin Outdoor Education Center in San Pedro, about a quarter mile from the Pacific Ocean, for a...

The California Department of Education has set Sept. 9 as the probable date for releasing the results of the new statewide Common Core-aligned tests that were administered in the spring. The tests, called Smarter Balanced Assessments, were given to 3.2 million students in grades 3 to 8 and 11. The new tests will be used as part...

By Natalie Wexler Standardized tests are commonly blamed for narrowing the school curriculum to reading and math. That’s one reason Congress is considering changes in the law that could lead states to put less emphasis on test scores. But even if we abolished standardized tests tomorrow, a majority of elementary schools would continue to pay...