LA School Report

Despite more surveyed parents wanting school to start after Labor Day, the LA Unified school board voted Tuesday to keep the current school calendar for the next three years. Classes will begin in mid-August, with a week off for Thanksgiving, a three-week winter break, and a weeklong spring break. The first semester will end before...

California’s parents aren’t getting two key pieces of information they need to evaluate schools, says a new independent review of states’ accountability plans. California ranked at the bottom, along with Idaho and Texas, receiving the lowest scores in two categories out of nine in a review of 34 state plans on complying with the federal...

*UPDATED It’s a daunting task to try to figure out how LA Unified can save money, but an advisory group came up with a surprising statistic: If the district can get every student in the district to come to school at least one more day, then it will be ahead by $30 million because of...

*UPDATED — Schools to reopen Monday, plus lunch and support sites available on Friday and Saturday. More than one-third of LA Unified schools closed this week because of raging fires in the San Fernando Valley and the Sepulveda Pass.  No students in all those seats could mean a loss of tens of millions of dollars...

LA Unified’s charter division agreed this week to be more consistent when making additional requirements of independent charter schools during their renewal process. School board vice president Nick Melvoin requested the change at Tuesday’s board meeting because he said the added requirements, known as benchmarks, were being applied unfairly to some schools that were showing...

All states in the country are required to issue education report cards about students’ performance in public schools. The problem is, parents have a hard time finding and reading them — and in many cases, they’re not even available in a language they understand, a new report finds. “Getting people the data they need is essential...

My wife and I have two boys, ages 3 and 1. We are just a few years away from sending them to kindergarten, and like all parents, we want them to go to a “good school.” We want our children to learn and grow academically and socially so they can live rewarding and secure lives...

*UPDATED One lens into California’s size is its public education system. Six million children under the age of 18 attend public schools — including 600,000 in charter schools — while nearly 3 million students are enrolled in the state’s storied higher education system, which is still struggling to recover from decades of underfunding. The largest teachers...

Teachers are at their best when teaching material they are passionate about. The current curriculums in our education system are too restrictive and hinder teachers from reaching their full potential. To bring out their passions and reach their occupational apex, teachers need the opportunity to innovate, which requires a level of curricular freedom. If we...

Carolina Sagrero, 16, is neither vegan nor vegetarian, but she sure likes the new vegan chili that’s joined the Roosevelt High School lunch menu this year. “Everyone loves the vegan chili,” said Sagrero, a junior on the volleyball team. “It got me thinking about my diet, and so I’ve tried more of the vegan options....