With growing opposition around the country to the Common Core State Standards, one governor found an easy way to get rid of them: Change the name. Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona, feeling pressure from groups that believe the standards are a “federal intrusion,” has ordered state agencies to stop using the term “Common Core.’’ Instead, she has...

The election campaign for president of the teachers union, UTLA, has expanded with a third candidate entering the race, joining the incumbent, Warren Fletcher, and a previously-announced challenger, Alex Caputo-Pearl, a member of the Progressive Educators for Action caucus within the union. The new candidate, David Garcia, is a former Navy corpsman and veteran of the first Gulf War...

Richard Vladovic, president of the LA Unified School Board, has agreed to meet with a coalition of community groups that claimed Vladovic was ignoring their requests to meet over spending issues. The meeting has been scheduled for 11 a.m. Oct. 18, and it follows a sequence of events that began with a letter the coalition, known as CLASS,...

The state of California and its two biggest teachers unions are asking a state Superior Court to throw out a case about getting rid of “ineffective teachers,” saying passage of a bill now before Gov. Jerry Brown would make the lawsuit unnecessary. Lawyers for the plaintiffs responded by calling the request a “sham,” arguing that the...

A proposal to require the Los Angeles teachers union (UTLA) to adopt an online voting system for electing its leaders has qualified as a ballot measure (see petition wording here), LA School Report has learned. It must now be taken to the rank and file for a vote. Megan Markevich, a middle school English teacher who...

A broad coalition of more than 40 community and advocacy groups is jumping into LA Unified’s prolonged spending debate, urging the board to allow individual schools, rather than centralized administrators, to decide how to spend the billions of dollars coming into the district from Gov. Jerry Brown‘s Local Control Funding Formula program. Organized by the...

A neat interactive mapping widget called “States in Motion” has just been posted on EdSource. The map visualizes data like teacher salaries, student to teacher ratios, growth in enrollments and scores and compares it to other states. It’s the creation of Jeff Camp, who works with a nonprofit volunteer organization called Full Circle Fund.

Competing visions for future spending will be on grand display again Tuesday when the LA Unified Board of Education meets to put Superintendent John Deasy’s budget plan to a vote (or not) and consider a competing resolution (or not) that would tell him how to spend the money. (See the agenda here.) Confusing? Welcome to Budgeting 101,...