LA School Report

All 60 Grab and Go Food Centers operated by Los Angeles Unified will be open on Friday, March 20. While the Governor and Mayor have both issued “Stay at Home” orders, they stated that they expect essential services like food centers to remain open. This is an advisory LAUSD sent out Thursday.   On a...

What’s a school for in the 21st century? Start with the bedrock: they’re for helping children develop academic skills and access core content, right? Those famous R’s: reading, writing, ‘rithmetic, you know the deal. We also count on them to grow democratic citizens — informed, aware, civic-minded community members. But that’s just the beginning. Public...

The snowballing spread of COVID-19 across the United States has left education leaders — from superintendents and principals to teachers and nonprofit executives — with lingering uncertainty about overall organizational preparedness, gaps in proximate public health infrastructure, and continuity planning. In a moment that demands action, many are wondering what to do next and how to...

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive. The National Education Association finally threw its weight into the Democratic presidential primaries, announcing Saturday night that it recommended Joe Biden for the nomination. A Biden endorsement is hardly a surprise; he is an establishment candidate, and NEA is a major player in the...

Updated, March 17 L.A. Unified Superintendent Austin Beutner in a letter to families late Monday announced that the district at this time is unable to open 40 family resource centers as initially planned, as “state and local health and public safety officials cannot assure us it will be safe for the children and adults.” There...

Deans for Impact, the organization I helped found, believes all teachers should understand basic principles of learning science. But what does that mean? We see learning science as the study of how humans think and learn — what others call cognitive science. The last several decades have deepened our scientific understanding of how our minds...

*Updated March 6 At least two competitive L.A. Unified school board races are likely headed to a November runoff following the most heated and costly primary season on record and a campaign that once again became a proxy fight over the future of charter schools. As of early Friday, no one candidate in Districts 3 or...

In one incident, a teacher grew frustrated with a student because he wouldn’t respond to her, not realizing that in the student’s Native American tribe, exhibiting silence is a sign of respect to an authority figure. As punishment, the student was denied recess. In another instance, a Native American student was accused of consuming drugs,...

The 2010s were the decade for technology to fundamentally change education. Two years before the decade’s dawn, Clayton Christensen, Michael B. Horn and Curtis Johnson predicted in their book Disrupting Class that online learning would revolutionize teacher-led instruction and catalyze a student-centered transformation in U.S. K-12 schools. As the decade began, enthusiasm for ed tech...

Policymakers are focusing on the craft of teaching reading. They must also focus on the politics. Last year’s NAEP scores continued a lackluster streak and set off a predictable bout of handwringing. This time, it was reading instruction — or, more precisely, our national pandemic of ineffective reading instruction — catching the flak. In response,...