LA School Report

When Melissa Brennan begins school this fall at Mattie Lou Maxwell Elementary School in Anaheim, Calif., she’ll sit one-on-one with each of her special-needs kindergartners and first-graders and take the time to assess their basic skills. Brennan expects that the process will take place not in person, but over a video conferencing platform. “I’ll Zoom...

Updated August 6 Los Angeles Unified will reopen for the fall semester in less than two weeks, with campuses closed and students learning from home. The district and United Teachers Los Angeles struck a tentative agreement Sunday night over what distance learning will look like, but parents were excluded from the negotiations and largely kept...

Despite a boost from federal stimulus funds, drops in state funding for education during the Great Recession effectively ended a 50-year upward trend in national reading and math scores, according to a paper appearing Tuesday in the journal Education Next. A $1,000 cut in per-pupil spending also led to a decline in the college enrollment...

Timari Ray, who recently finished her first year at Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville, Tennessee, says she probably wouldn’t be able to afford higher education without the Tennessee Promise, which in 2014 made community college free for most students in the state. Thanks to the Promise, she’s planning to transfer to the University of...

Preschool participation has fallen by half during the pandemic, according to new data from the National Institute for Early Education Research. And even with early educators’ efforts to connect with students remotely, few families have remained consistently involved. This “massive reduction in preschool attendance,” the report shows, affected all families regardless of race or ethnicity, parents’ educational...

Georgianna Kelman’s phone doesn’t stop ringing nowadays. A special education attorney in Los Angeles, Kelman currently represents 60 families in southern California with complaints that their children didn’t receive services they were entitled to when schools closed in the spring. “I can only imagine the bottleneck of litigation that is coming,” Kelman said. “I have...

In May 2018, first-graders at George Peabody Elementary School in San Francisco sat cross-legged around the perimeter of a rectangular rug, each slightly swaying and bouncing like an electron held in place by a nucleus’s positive force. It’s hard to say what the main attraction was: Kristine Keane, the school social worker whose eyes narrow...

Schools are still determining what changes they’ll need to make before reopening in the fall. Some, like LAUSD and San Diego Unified, have already determined they’ll remain online only for now, while others are still grappling with the complexities involved: How will they ensure social distancing in the classroom? Will face masks be required? What about...

While we are all wading through the uncharted waters of a global pandemic interlaced with a racial justice uprising, one thing is clear — the clock is ticking towards back to school. Last week, Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest, announced what many had predicted: that because of the surge in coronavirus...

A version of this essay originally appeared on the KIPP.NJ blog. Remote learning is not what I signed on for when I became a teacher. The physical distance makes it very difficult for me to be there for my kids. But while this is an unpredictable and stressful time for everyone, helping students create new routines...