LA School Report

Two of the oldest questions in Western education, going back to the ancient Greek philosophers, are: What is true? And how do you know? Thousands of years later, as superstition and pseudoscience have been replaced by conspiracy theory and ideological dogma, finding answers to those questions is as thorny as ever. The modern heirs to...

If you don’t count high school student body president, Aimy Steele has never held political office. But as a teacher and school administrator, she’s run classrooms and schools, and now she’s running to represent her district in North Carolina’s state house of representatives. Steele and thousands of teachers around the country got a taste of...

Los Angeles Unified has a multimillion-dollar problem: kids aren’t coming to school. And it’s particularly bad among their youngest students. New district data show that 1 in 4 kindergartners misses 15 or more days of school each year. “I couldn’t believe that when I heard that,” Diane Pappas, the superintendent’s senior adviser, told board members...

Every week, we sit down with Los Angeles parents to talk about their students, their schools, and what questions or suggestions they have for their school district. (See our previous interviews.) Sara Martínez, an LA Unified mom living in the southeast boundaries of Board District 5, had to put everything aside for one day so her voice...

Following strikes this spring in which teachers in six states demanded higher salaries, a new poll finds a sharp uptick in Americans’ support for increasing educators’ pay. The national poll, last week by the journal Education Next, which has been surveying Americans on high-profile education issues for more than a decade, also found growing support for...

If you want to book a stay in Bainbridge Scott’s Airbnb in Los Angeles’s Montecito Heights neighborhood, you’d better plan well in advance. Listed as a “Rustic Studio with Private Garden Patio,” the hillside property boasts a terrace with views of the city, a classic clawfoot tub, and an extensive garden from which guests can...

*Updated Aug. 27 As night drew near last Tuesday, after a drawn-out and divisive four-hour debate on how to replace a disgraced board member, a bombshell was dropped at school board members’ feet. District finances are of such great concern that the Los Angeles County Office of Education’s chief financial officer showed up unannounced to...