Mayor Eric Garcetti today helped kick off a fund raising campaign for Proyecto Pastoral and Promesa Boyle Heights which will focus efforts on expanding opportunity for youth in our communities. Both groups are non-profits that work to transform the East LA neighborhood by improving targeted schools and expanding social services in the community around them. The...

With an umambiguous victory in the Vergara lawsuit last year, the advocacy group that supported it financially, Students Matter, has developed a blueprint for the new legislature in Sacramento to rewrite the laws struck down by the trial court. Never mind that the case is on appeal by the defendants — the state and its...

Via Los Angeles Times | By Howard Blume  As a three-term Colorado governor, Roy Romer, a Democrat, had to deal with a combative Republican majority in his state Legislature. He later headed his party’s fractious national committee. But nothing was as difficult, he said, as running the Los Angeles Unified School District. “Educating kids in...

The California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) asked students, parents, teachers, leaders and supporters last year to share videos about their charter schools as part of a contest for thousands of dollars in cash prizes. With the deadline now passed, the CCSA has received 47 submissions and is asking the public to view the videos and...

A new state senate bill would ban the installation of any new school athletic fields or playgrounds that contain “crumb rubber” synthetic material until a full study is done on the substance. After lead was discovered at some LA Unified preschool playgrounds, the district stopped building new crumb rubber fields in 2009 and removed the...

LA Unified’s recent order for new testing devices ensures that district students will have all the technical equipment they need to take the state mandated exam later this year. Whether the Smarter Balanced test results will be used for anything is a separate issue. While intense public scrutiny over the deal between the district and...

Gov. Jerry Brown had a few words to say about public education in his State of the State address today. In effect, he saluted his effort to return more control over spending to the state’s school districts. Here’s what he had to say: “Last year, I spoke of the principle of subsidiarity, a rather clunky...

With the passing of the LA Unified school board’s “Good Food” resolution in December, a number of giant vendors the district does business with will be forced to change their practices or lose out on hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts. Tyson Foods in particular, which supplies much of the district’s chicken in a five-year $754...

As negotiations between LA Unified and its teachers union, UTLA, stumble along with still a wide gap on salaries, two Bay Area school districts, have made significant progress in their own deals with teachers. San Francisco teachers have agreed to a double-digit raise over three years while Oakland teachers are in line to get at...