LA School Report

Alaina Gassler’s 2019 science project started small, designed for her middle school in Pennsylvania. Soon, though, her project to remove blind spots from cars was winning county and then regional science fairs — and now, Gassler has taken top honors at the largest middle school science fair in the country, the Broadcom MASTERS (Math, Applied...

Reading instruction in American schools is so rife with poor curriculum and pedagogical dogma that a prominent academic likened it to “the equivalent of chemistry departments teaching alchemy.” “We’ve had about 130 years of bad practice,” David Steiner, director of the Institute for Education Policy at Johns Hopkins University, told the audience at a national...

As Newark, New Jersey, Flint, Michigan, and other cities continue to grapple with lead in their water supplies, the Environmental Protection Agency is mulling changes to the decades-old regulation meant to protect Americans from the highly damaging contaminant. Among the proposed changes to the Lead and Copper Rule are a first-time national requirement to test...

As schools across the country remain starkly segregated by both race and income, parents expressed widespread support — in theory — for integrating America’s public schools, according to a new report. For many, however, that support appears to stop at their own doorstep. Across America’s increasingly partisan political divide, parents say they support racial and...

When students meet me and learn that I was in the NFL, their eyes light up and they shower me with questions: What’s it like being on TV? How much money did you make? What kind of car do you drive? But being a former professional football player doesn’t define me. What I’m most proud...

California State University overwhelmingly decided Wednesday to move forward with a new admissions requirement, but will delay making formal alterations to state regulations until the consequences of the change are studied. Until last week, the CSU Board of Trustees were expected to cast votes on Wednesday either greenlighting or rejecting a controversial addition to admissions standards:...

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears weekly at LA School Report. The California Teachers Association is “310,000 members strong,” according to its website. But it’s difficult to track that number over time, or assess its impact on California school districts, because our only sources of information have been the union’s public pronouncements. Until now. Culled from figures...

For a moment, the issues seemed insurmountable. Some 150 parent activists, all strong-willed veterans of battles with their respective education establishments, were gathered in a New Orleans hotel ballroom trying to hammer out statements of joint belief. It was important to arrive at precise wording, the organizers running the meeting told them, because the statement...

Do the presidential candidates understand what it will take to ensure our public education system serves all students? It’s hard to know because they haven’t said enough in debates and other public sessions, so far, about how they plan to improve public education. We know they agree with us that increased funding is necessary and...

With the 2020 presidential primaries about to kick off in Iowa, a new poll shows that a majority of voters are less likely to support candidates who want to eliminate federal charter school funding. The results of the sixth annual poll, conducted for the American Federation for Children, an organization that advocates for school choice,...