LA School Report

* Updated Feb. 9 Kids rarely stepped foot in the library at Washington Elementary in Compton. “It was dusty and damp in there, it was not very welcoming for kids at all,” Principal Diana Phillips said. “We had a lot of very old books that children were not interested in and none of the modern...

The Every Student Succeeds Act requires school districts to set aside at least 1 percent of their Title I funding for parent engagement. Yet the parent engagement policies we’ve seen rarely reach their potential to improve student success. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, district funds are often spent on programs that teach parents...

In the context of the search for its next superintendent, LA Unified’s school board is asking existential questions about how hard it should be pushing to disrupt the status quo in a system that serves more than 700,000 students. While none of the conversations came particularly full-circle in a special meeting of the board on...

A lobbyist for the California Teachers Association took to Twitter recently beating the drum for transparency and accountability in advocating for a bill related to charter schools. Having private and secret meetings to discuss how tax dollars will be spent is not acceptable. Too much is at risk when our students are counting on sound...

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. “Having more data available is good, but who is going to explain it to me?” Sandra Sánchez, mother of a first-grader at LA Unified’s Bryson Avenue Elementary in...

The new year started off with a bang for education watchers in Los Angeles: a new leader will be chosen this year for the nation’s second-largest school district. The first month of 2018 had plenty more news to keep up with, as the state thumbed its nose at new federal accountability rules, the governor sought...

*Updated Jan. 30 Two young DACA recipients from Los Angeles will be guests at Tuesday’s State of the Union address, sitting with House Democrats and hoping to hear President Trump announce a permanent solution for them and their families to remain together in this country. The two young women are part of a delegation of...

*Updated Feb. 7 Jesús González Saucedo’s parents knew that even though he was born with a cleft palate that made it hard for him to speak, he could develop his potential and rise above the life they could offer him as street vendors. They just had to find the right school. “They had to sell...