LA School Report

Washington, D.C. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority appeared during oral arguments Tuesday to side with the Trump administration’s efforts to terminate a program that protects some 700,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as young children. The case could deal a hard blow to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and put its...

The release of the Nation’s Report Card last week was the exclamation point following a long line of 2018-19 state exam results that came out across the country in the last few months. There are three things I expect to hear every year around this time: ●  We don’t even need to see the results. You...

The teaching shortage in one stretch of rural California is so bad that 600 educators are licensed through emergency credentials. The nearest public universities with teaching programs are 50 and 80 miles away. But a new nearly $7 million federal grant is tapping both online learning and year-long classroom experience to train teachers to bolster...

Anyone paying half-attention to schools knows about the acronym STEM: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, the four pillars supporting a career-ready future for students. There’s hardly another term in the education world that’s as commonly referenced. But when strung together, just what do those four letters — or five if you’re observing National STEM/STEAM Day tomorrow...

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears weekly at LA School Report The California Teachers Association recently named Joe Boyd as its new executive director, replacing Joe Nuñez, who was mysteriously ousted in July after six years on the job. Boyd was most recently the executive director of CTA’s counterpart, the California Federation of Teachers. The executive...

This interview is one in a series spotlighting Los Angeles teachers, their unique and innovative classroom approaches, and their thoughts on how the education system can better support teachers in guiding students to success. Steven Rude has spent nearly 30 years working as a school psychologist for Los Angeles Unified School District, supporting students experiencing...

As educators scope out their work during the early ramp-up of the school year, one important item on their to-do list should be building connections with students’ families and learning about their lives outside of school. This isn’t just a sensible idea: Modularity Theory, a framework that explains how to optimize system performance, illustrates why...

Scores released last week from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) held bad news for American schools, with trends that are essentially flat in mathematics and down in reading. Most states saw little or no improvement in either subject, with their lowest-performing students showing the most significant declines in scores. Whether the cause lies...

Tuesday, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has the opportunity to give families and teachers a powerful tool to transform our kids’ education by publicly releasing growth data. They’ve already crunched the numbers. Fresno, Oakland and Long Beach school districts have released it publicly and California is one of only two states that doesn’t...

Los Angeles Unified leaders were right to abandon plans for a single rating system for schools, which would have been a giant step backwards for school performance transparency. Those same decision makers should double down by making Los Angeles school academic growth data available to schools and parents. The state of California has made significant...