Concerned about longstanding disparities between Los Angeles schools and a possible loss of state and federal funds, the Los Angeles Unified School District is tapping private philanthropy to fill the gaps. The district recently reignited its dormant nonprofit, the LAUSD Education Foundation, hiring a new executive director to court dollars from corporations and foundations. The...

Budget cuts, staffing reductions and school consolidations are coming to Los Angeles Unified as the cash-strapped district works to balance its shrinking budget, a top school official said.  LAUSD’s chief financial officer in an interview last week said declining enrollments and the end of pandemic relief funds have forced the district to take cost-cutting measures.  ...

Education policy and Hollywood rarely intersect.  But when filmmaker Rob Reiner latched onto the science about how young children develop, he not only used his moviemaking platform to convince the public of the importance of kids’ early years, he became a real-life policymaker to champion the cause.  After successfully steering the passage of a 1998...

By the time the morning bell rings at Rosewood STEM Magnet, Urban Planning and Urban Design, Monika Heidi Duque has already been in her classroom for hours — reviewing lesson plans, setting out materials, and greeting students by name.   Duque, who has taught at the award-winning, urban planning-themed LAUSD elementary school in West Hollywood for...

Update, Dec. 8: The Teamsters Union, representing some 1,500 paraprofessionals, office staff and cafeteria workers in the West Contra Costa Unified School District in Richmond, California, reached a tentative agreement Dec. 8 and returned to work. The teachers, represented by United Teachers of Richmond, remained on strike. Some 3,000 teachers, paraprofessionals, office staff and cafeteria workers...

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters. Until this year, UCLA senior Syed Tamim Ahmad considered staying in the U.S. after graduation to pursue his dream of becoming a doctor. But when the Trump administration revoked thousands of student visas last spring, he spent many sleepless nights supporting his peers...

This article is published in partnership with WIRED. It was in physical education class when Laila Gutierrez swapped out self-harm for a new vice.  The freshman from Phoenix had long struggled with depression and would cut her arms to feel something. Anything. The first drag from a friend’s vape several years ago offered the shy teenager a new...

Daily student absences rose 22% among more than 100,000 children living in California’s rural Central Valley in the weeks following January 2025 immigration raids, according to a newly peer reviewed Stanford University study. The findings span the early weeks of the second Trump administration. Since that time, immigration enforcement has escalated dramatically, particularly in Democratic...

Los Angeles schools have lost thousands of immigrant students for years because of the city’s rising prices and falling birth rates — and now that trend has intensified after the “chilling effect” of this year’s federal immigration raids, district officials said. This school year, the Los Angeles school district has lost more than 13,000 immigrant...

When The 74 started looking for schools that were doing a good job teaching kids to read, we began with the data. We crunched the numbers for nearly 42,000 schools across all 50 states and Washington, D.C. and identified 2,158 that were beating the odds by significantly outperforming what would be expected given their student...