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Teacher Spotlight: Florence Griffith Joyner Elementary School’s Veronica Amis, 34 years of teaching in Watts with ‘unconditional love’

This interview is one in a series spotlighting Los Angeles teachers, their unique and innovative classroom approaches, and their thoughts on how the education system can better support teachers in guiding students to success. Veronica Amis was born in St Louis, Missouri but she moved to Los Angeles with her family in 1963 when she...
By Esmeralda Fabián Romero | October 9, 2019
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To build emotional intelligence in students, start with the adults. SEL pioneer Marc Brackett helps schools do both in ‘Permission to Feel’

Marc Brackett still remembers sitting in his New Jersey middle school classroom, clutching his down vest protectively as classmates wrote cruel words on the fabric. The first thing on his mind was why the teacher was doing nothing to help him. The last thing on his mind was the day’s math lesson. In a sense,...
By Kate Stringer | October 9, 2019
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Advocates file appeal with the state charging LAUSD, county still not accounting for how more than $1B for high-needs students is being spent

The California Department of Education is being asked once again to intervene in a legal complaint that charges L.A. Unified and its county overseers with failing to ensure that high-needs students receive the more than $1 billion annually they are due in state funding. Public Advocates and the Covington & Burling LLP law firm —...
By Taylor Swaak | October 7, 2019
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Even as new polls show both teachers and parents demanding better data about their students, only 17% of educators say they’ve received data training in prep programs

Even as information about schools proliferates across the internet, a new set of polls shows that parents and teachers want more meaningful student data, capturing children’s relationships with education that go beyond just their grades or even time in school. Half of parents strongly agree and 43 percent somewhat agree that they support teachers’ using student...
By Mikhail Zinshteyn, CalMatters | October 7, 2019
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Testing anxiety, boredom & guesses: What expert Steven Wise has learned about exams and ‘rapid-guessing behavior’ — and what that tells him about your child’s score

Quick — without looking it up on Google, can you define “edge-aversion”? Here’s a hint: It’s a decision-theory term describing what’s also known as middle bias. That is, a test-taker’s tendency to pick anything but the top or bottom option on a multiple-choice question. To a psychometrician, it’s a tell that the answer was a...
By Beth Hawkins | October 2, 2019
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Teacher Spotlight: Rosalie Reyes celebrates Hispanic Heritage Month by creating Central American curriculum to bring that rich culture, history to the classroom

This interview is one in a series spotlighting Los Angeles teachers, their unique and innovative classroom approaches, and their thoughts on how the education system can better support teachers in guiding students to success. Rosalie Reyes has always been proud of her Latin origin. Her parents are from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, but...
By Esmeralda Fabián Romero | October 2, 2019
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Challenging charter critics, new study finds that as sector enrollment grows, so do test scores for black and Hispanic students

What happens to traditional school districts when charter schools come to town? Do they offer families new, high-quality educational options and help spread better teaching techniques? Or do they represent unwanted competition, swiping students and funding from districts until academic performance begins to suffer? It’s a debate that divides much of the education community and...
By Kevin Mahnken | September 30, 2019
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After school, students are ‘playing the whole game’ in activities from drama to sports to debate. Backers of project-based learning ask: Why can’t all of education look like this?

In 2013, attorneys at the California Innocence Project, weighed down by a backlog of casework, turned for help to an unusual group: humanities students at High Tech High Chula Vista, a nearby charter school. The students, all juniors, trained on a past case handled by the San Diego nonprofit, which reviews pleas from prisoners who...
By Greg Toppo | September 30, 2019
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Teacher Spotlight: Sylvan Park’s early ed teacher Diego López on exposing preschoolers to technology without limits

This interview is one in a series spotlighting Los Angeles teachers, their unique and innovative classroom approaches, and their thoughts on how the education system can better support teachers in guiding students to success. Diego López has been part of the Los Angeles Unified School District since he began his education in a Head Start...
By Esmeralda Fabián Romero | September 25, 2019
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Americans view principals positively, according to Pew study comparing school leaders to lawmakers, journalists, tech execs

A majority of Americans hold a positive view of K-12 public school principals, who are typically seen as caring and trustworthy. How about tech executives, journalists and members of Congress? Not so much. A Pew Research Center survey released Thursday found that Americans hold mixed views about the job performance of people in positions of power,...
By Mark Keierleber | September 24, 2019