Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for the LA School Report newsletter.

By Paul Farhi

The Los Angeles Times announced what seemed like good news for its readers in August: a new reporting initiative that would expand the paper’s coverage of local education.

“Our goal is to provide an ongoing, wide-ranging report card on K-12 education in Los Angeles, California and the nation,” wrote then-Publisher Austin Beutner. He noted that the project, called “Education Matters,” would be funded by a series of charitable organizations.

Except the newspaper left out a key detail: Some of the foundations funding “Education Matters” are among the most prominent advocates of public-education reform in Los Angeles. One of them is the principal backer of a proposal to convert nearly half of Los Angeles’s public schools into charter schools.

In other words, the Times’ new education-reporting project is being funded by some of the very organizations the new education-reporting project is likely to be covering.

 

Click here for the full story.