LA School Report

*UPDATED Taking on President Donald Trump and his proposal to cut funding for after-school programs, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson denounced the cuts Thursday in Los Angeles and encouraged students to write letters to their representatives in Congress describing how these programs have benefited them. Torlakson spoke to students and district leaders, including...

Dual-language immersion education, battered by decades of struggle in California, has bounced back in a big way in Los Angeles. This year, LA Unified is not only expanding these programs, but for the first time it will offer 10 early education dual-immersion pilot programs: eight in Spanish and two in Korean. And the popularity of...

By James L. Woodworth The ultimate goal for an education system is to enable individuals to become happy, engaged, productive members of society. Unfortunately, at this time, measuring happiness, productivity, and civil contribution of individuals is difficult. Tracing those measurements back to the schools attended by an individual is practically impossible. Thus, researchers and other...

Toward the end of the first day of wrangling 100 boys in LA Unified’s first all-boys school, Principal Don Moorer sighed, “They certainly have a lot of energy.” He took the entire school of sixth- and seventh-graders to USC on Tuesday morning to tour the campus and show them a university they might someday attend....

You snooze, you lose. A California bill that would turn that aphorism on its head — by requiring the state’s middle and high schools to start no earlier than 8:30 a.m. — faces a final vote when lawmakers return to Sacramento later this month. The bill has support from a number of health organizations, including...

*UPDATED Charis Holloman walked onto the campus of his new school Tuesday and didn’t even look back to say goodbye to his parents. “He’s excited,” Suzette Holloman said of her son’s independence as he started ninth-grade. Teachers and school staff greeted students with applause, cheers, handshakes, and fist bumps as they arrived for the first...

Tuesday signaled a return to class for LA Unified students — and that means lots of back-to-school photos on social media. There was some news Tuesday afternoon when reports came out that a swarm of bees attacked students at Palmdale High School. Dozens of students were stung and taken to hospitals, according to reports. UPDATED:...

Even as enrollment has steadily declined over the last decade in the nation’s second-largest school district, LA Unified is opening four new schools this week, while independent charter schools will continue to grow with 11 new schools opening in Los Angeles. The district will launch a new all-boys school called Boys Academic Leadership Academy, the...

“Wooooow. They built this just for us?” By Glenn Gritzner This week, a significant milestone is being achieved for the students of LAUSD that deserves to be celebrated. The final school — Bell High School — is coming off the year-round calendar, meaning that every school in LAUSD will now be on the traditional nine-month...

When the Maywood Center for Enriched Studies welcomes students next week, it will be the last school — the 131st — to open under the district’s more than $20 billion school building project. But as the district’s enrollment has plummeted since the building program began, the state of the district is far different now than...