LA School Report

*UPDATED With a crushing $13 billion in unfunded healthcare liabilities, LA Unified and its employee unions return to the negotiating table Monday still far apart — unions want increases in health benefits, the district wants to stop the bleeding — so the district is coming prepared. This month it secured the blessing of the school...

At their last meeting of 2017, the LA Unified school board beefed up sexual harassment policies, reversed support for a state bill that charter schools considered a threat, discussed how to handle upcoming retiree costs of nearly $14 billion, and got a little good news on the budget. BUDGET NEWS More cash is coming from the...

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...