LA School Report

Three high-profile education advocacy and research groups crossed political lines in Washington, D.C., Wednesday to announce an ambitious goal: cutting chronic absenteeism in half over the next five years. For the first time, the conservative American Enterprise Institute, the left-leaning Education Trust and the national nonprofit Attendance Works joined forces to confront an issue that...

Parents, educators, and advocates criticized Los Angeles Unified’s bumpy rollout and collapse of its splashy artificial intelligence chatbot “Ed” – even as the district moved ahead with more projects powered by the cutting-edge technology. LAUSD last month shut down the chatbot after the firm hired to build it lost its CEO and furloughed workers. District officials...

Community college student Jennifer Toledo says earning a four-year degree is exciting, but has had difficulty navigating the complicated higher education system after growing up in Mexico. Benjamin Gregory, a former community college student, managed to graduate with an associate degree and transfer to a four-year school despite the challenges of enrolling as an older...

For more than a decade, Benjamin Riley has been at the forefront of efforts to get educators to think more deeply about how we learn. As the founder of Deans for Impact in 2015, he enlisted university education school deans to incorporate findings from cognitive science into teacher preparation. Before that, he spent five years...

The botched rollout of a revamped process to apply for federal financial aid could have long-lasting effects, with students receiving less money for college this fall and others so fed up they’re delaying their educations. Now, with the traditional Oct. 1 start of the next financial aid season less than three months away, the U.S....

An ambitious Republican agenda to transform the federal bureaucracy under a second Trump presidency would have considerable fallout in the world of education, reimagining the U.S. government as a guardian of parents’ rights and reconstituting decades-old programs to serve as vehicles for school choice. The full program, entitled Mandate for Leadership, is a roadmap for...

Independent Los Angeles school district investigators have opened an inquiry into claims that its $6 million AI chatbot — an animated sun named “Ed” celebrated as an unprecedented learning acceleration tool until the company that built it collapsed and the district was forced to pull the plug — put students’ personal information in peril. Investigators with the...

While debates rage over who should win admission to selective high schools, public education leaves millions of talented young people, many of them students of color and from low-income backgrounds, without access to advanced learning. Vanderbilt University researchers have found that high-achieving students from the wealthiest 20% of U.S. families are six times more likely...

The ESSER cliff is coming. Most districts and states that initiated high-impact tutoring using federal ESSER dollars are scrambling. Many believe they must eliminate or reduce the scope of their programs; but this is not the case. Here are six durable funding streams that could replace the ESSER dollars to help provide highly effective tutoring...

For most students, having clean clothes to wear to school is not a problem.  But for many families at 112th St. S.T.E.A.M. Academy in Watts, a pair of clean pants and a shirt is such a struggle that it has become one of the main contributors to chronic absenteeism, which is when students miss 15...