LA School Report

Like many parents who homeschool their children, Jolene Fender helps organize book clubs, inviting students in her Cary, North Carolina, co-op to meet for monthly discussions. But over the years, parents have struggled to find good opening questions.  “You’d search [the Internet], you’d go on Pinterest,” she said. “A lot of the work had to...

Editor’s note: Americans may think they know a lot about the Declaration of Independence, but many of those ideas are elitist and wrong, as historian Woody Holton explains. His 2021 book “Liberty is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution” shows how independence and the Revolutionary War were influenced by women, Indigenous and enslaved...

In the realm of high school counseling, the traditional narrative has often centered around the four-year college experience as the sole path to success. However, as demands of the workforce change, it’s time to recognize that there’s not a one-size-fits-all approach to post-secondary education. To ensure equitable support for all students, schools must adopt a...

Just weeks before the implosion of AllHere, an education technology company that had been showered with cash from venture capitalists and featured in glowing profiles by the business press, America’s second-largest school district was warned about problems with AllHere’s product. As the eight-year-old startup rolled out Los Angeles Unified School District’s flashy new AI-driven chatbot...

Nearly $200 billion in emergency school funding spent during and after the pandemic succeeded in lifting students’ achievement in math and reading, according to two papers released Wednesday. Test score increases in both studies, which were conducted independently of one another, indicate that states and school districts used the money to effectively support children, even...

The future of LA Unified’s heavily-hyped $6 million Artificial Intelligence chatbot was uncertain after the tech firm the district hired to build the tool shed most of its employees and its founder left her job.  Boston-based AllHere Education, founded in 2016 by Harvard grad and former teacher Joanna Smith-Griffin, figured heavily in LAUSD’s March 20...

As a student, JUMP math curriculum creator John Mighton remembers struggling with the subject and then quickly beginning to panic as he fell behind. The fast pace of the curriculum he was taught prevented him from catching up and then his anxieties about being too slow got the best of him. “I would always compare...

School’s almost out for summer. But there’s no time for relaxing: Kids, especially girls, are becoming victims of fabricated, nonconsensual, sexually explicit images, often created by peers. These imaginary girls are upending the lives of the real ones. The coming summer break provides the opportunity for coordinated action at the state level to disrupt this...

Whenever April Heinz’s grown children come back to Los Angeles for a visit, there is one item they crave — LA Unified’s legendary coffee cake. “They’re now graduated and in college…they came back [for] summer break. I had a couple of slices of coffee cake for them, and they were like, ‘Oh my gosh!’… because,...

On the same day that millions of sensitive records purportedly stolen from the Los Angeles school district were posted for sale on the dark web, the Federal Communications Commission approved a $200 million pilot program to help K-12 schools and libraries nationwide fight an onslaught of cyberattacks.  A Los Angeles Unified School District spokesperson confirmed...