Reading rates in LAUSD schools with the onset of the coronavirus, and Los Angeles students have yet to fully recover.  Just 43.1% of LA Unified students met state proficiency targets in reading in the 2023-24 school year, compared with 44.1% in the 2018-19 school year, the last before the pandemic. Meanwhile, Families in Schools is...

The Los Angeles Unified School District was able to avoid the hard choices that many districts around the state had to make in the 2024–25 budget year. They experienced only a 2% budget reduction and did not have to lay off personnel. This may have been in part because LAUSD was able to rely on...

At John C. Fremont High School STEAM Magnet in hardscrabble South Central Los Angeles, students face an uphill battle against social and economic hardship, with violence from the neighborhood sometimes filtering onto campus.  This school year Fremont High has seen security-related lockdowns on a nearly a monthly basis, including an incident at the beginning of...

The Santa Ana Early Learning Initiative (SAELI), a collaborative supporting families with children ages 9 and under in Santa Ana, California, aims to boost reading and math outcomes for students in kindergarten through third grade, but instead of using approaches traditionally employed by schools and districts to boost test scores, such as tutoring or data analytics, its model focuses on...

After years of political popularity, public investments in early education have mostly struggled to get traction in recent years. Federal momentum toward universal pre-K has stalled, and some successful local experiments from the 2000s and 2010s have struggled to deliver on the optimism that accompanied their launches.  California is a notable, laudable exception to this trend. In 2021, under the leadership...

Federal prosecutors have indicted the founder and former CEO of the once-celebrated education technology company AllHere, accusing her of defrauding investors of nearly $10 million as the startup that made AI chatbots for schools fell into bankruptcy. Joanna Smith-Griffin, a Forbes “30 Under 30” recipient and Harvard graduate, was arrested at her home in Raleigh,...

The majority of states, 26, saw declines in high school graduation rates following the pandemic, new research shows. In 2020, for example, 10 states had graduation rates of 90% or higher, but only five did in 2022, according to Tuesday’s analysis from the Grad Partnership, a network of nonprofits working to improve student outcomes. But the...

It’s a crisp Saturday morning in August and the USC campus is abuzz with students.  Football season hasn’t yet started, and classes aren’t in session — and the students in question aren’t college students at all. The campus is overrun with middle schoolers who line two sides of a red carpet waiting to welcome the...

A teacher union-backed incumbent has prevailed in a high-stakes LAUSD school board race,  dealing another setback to the nation’s largest charter school sector.   Charter-backed upstart Dan Chang failed in the Nov. 5 elections to unseat Scott Schmerelson, the longtime LAUSD educator and policymaker who won the election and will begin his third and final term...

LA Unified’s plan to scrap standardized tests at ten schools has parents questioning accountability — and teachers welcoming less testing stress. Next year, students from ten community schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District will not take the district’s standardized tests. Following a 4-3 decision by the district school board on Sep.10, these schools...