Your donation will help us produce journalism like this. Please give today.

 L.A. schools chief wants to extend iPad rollout by a year
The rollout for a $1-billion school iPad program could be extended by a year, doubling the time originally allotted for getting tablets to every student in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The decision is a substantial concession to critics who questioned whether the district has been moving too fast in plans to distribute about 650,000 devices to teachers and students. LA Times

---

Students can see books but can’t check them out
Despite increasing school budgets, one victim of years of budget cuts remains: shuttered school libraries. When budgets tightened post recession, the LA Unified School District told principals they’d have to find money in their budgets for librarians or library aides – positions that used to be budged directly by the district. KPCC

---

With money available for Common Core, CA districts study their options
Making the new national Common Core standards a reality in classrooms is a complicated and expensive business. Unusually for California, the money is there. But the tricky part is how to spend it. “The thing about this work is that no one here has done it before, so we don’t know exactly what we’ll need” to spend for Common Core, said David Christiansen, Fresno’s associate superintendent for curriculum and instruction. Center For Investigative Reporting

---

Are school reformers wrecking the Common Core?
The latest news stories from the brave frontiers of a movement known as “education reform” are in, and the consensus view is that down continues to be the new up. Personnel programs such as teacher merit pay that were supposed to improve the financial efficiency of schools are now being discarded for financial reasons. The Washington Post

---

Bullying could violate disability law
Schools may have to rework the education plan of a student with disabilities if the child is being bullied, new guidance out Tuesday from the Education Department says. If the student’s education or support services are being affected by the bullying, that could violate his or her rights to an education under federal law, according to a letter from the department’s office of special education. Politico 

---

U.S. schools compete for smaller pots of state aid
Most U.S. states, faced with a sluggish economic recovery and population growth, are still spending less on each public school student than they did before the recession, according to a Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services. The rapid growth of charter schools is compounding the problem, pulling students away and putting some public school districts – urban ones in particular – open to credit risk. Reuters