David Binkle, the embattled food services director for LA Unifed, has resigned from the job he held through last December before he was removed under a cloud of controversy. Binkle had become a celebrity in the food world the last few years after appearing on talk shows and receiving praise from First Lady Michele Obama for...

In what organizers call the state’s largest teacher training ever attempted, more than 20,000 educators gathered for the California Teachers Summit at 33 sites across the state on Friday. “It’s so exciting to bring teachers teaching teachers in this unprecedented collaboration,” said Ellen Moir, of the nonprofit New Teacher Center who helped organize the Better Together campaign. Among...

LA Unified’s chief lobbyist, Edgar Zazueta, told the school board last week that the House of Representatives version of the revised No Child Left Behind bill could cost the district $78.7 million in Title I money for low income schools, which translates to 22.9 percent of its funding. The board has voted to protest the House...

LAUSD School board president Steve Zimmer has given the board’s two newest members committee chairmanships. Ref Rodriguez will be taking over the Early Childhood Education and Parent Engagement Committee, which was previously run by Bennett Kayser, whom Rodriguez defeated in the June runoff. Zimmer named the other new board member, Scott Schmerelson, chairman of the Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment Committee....

Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, used his state of the union speech Friday night to call for a raise in union dues of $19 a month, an increase he said would enable the union to prepare for future challenges “greater and more dangerous” than those of recent years. Reminding members that UTLA has not...

By The Editorial Board Five years after California’s parent-trigger law was passed, it has not had the dramatic effect on public schools that its proponents hoped it would. Yet it is already at a crossroads in its young life. The law, passed in haste in 2010 in an effort to empower parents at lower-performing schools,...

Is the Friedrichs case an ‘existential threat’ to the teachers’ unions? The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the Friedrichs vs. California case next year, giving it a chance to strike down union “agency fees.” Education Next Neighbors push back against private schools’ plans to expand Elite private campuses throughout the Los Angeles area are...

For more than a year, students, parents, community groups and even LA Unified members, themselves, have demanded greater transparency in how the board conducts the business of the nation’s second-largest school district. Too often, critics say, the board moves with no apparent effort to broaden the conversation or even allow the public to watch the...

The LA Unified board endured a long and unusual protest last night as about 50 students demanded specific actions to get military-style weapons out of the hands of district school police. The students, some of them wearing bullet-proof vests, chanted for 20 minutes at the start of a meeting — “Back to school, no weapons”...

The LA Unified board voted last night to start the search for a new superintendent by issuing a request for bids to firms that would aide in the selection process. The move is the first step toward identifying candidates to replace the current superintendent, Ramon Cortines, who has expressed a desire to step down by...