LA School Report

When I was a principal, if you had told me I would be working with artificial intelligence on a daily basis, I would have conjured visions of the Terminator and Skynet in my head. Fortunately, we’re not there (yet?) but the introduction of AI amplifies risks and opportunities attached to school leaders’ decisions. Education leaders...

Schoolyards are hot and getting hotter, but only a tiny fraction of California’s grade school students can play in the shade. Researchers and advocates are pushing the state to allocate money for green schoolyards, which can include trees, grass or gardens in place of the flat asphalt or rubber play surfaces at most schools.  With the...

In joyful preschool classrooms, three- and four-year-olds play and pretend together. They sing and dance, listen eagerly at story time, and ask endless questions. Nearly everything is new, which fuels an intense enthusiasm for learning. High-quality preschool supports social skills, fosters friendships, and builds a sturdy foundation for kindergarten and beyond. As researchers specializing in...

LA Unified senior Kamryn Williams is studying for finals this week — in the Chrysler sedan where she lives with her mother and their dog.  Kamryn, 18, who graduates next month from Hamilton High School in Culver City and will attend college in the fall, is one of about 15,000 homeless students enrolled in Los...

Question: How does a school district go broke with $1.1 billion in revenues?  Answer: When it spends $1.3 billion. This macabre joke is all-too real for San Francisco Unified, where this spring a state oversight panel took control of all budget decisions until the district balances its spending. After reviewing the district’s budget, the oversight...

A recent report has revealed only 16 percent of community college transfers earn a four-year degree with Black, Latino and low-income students taking the brunt of the completion outcomes. The data, released by the Community College Research Center and the Aspen Institute College Excellence Program, found about one-third of community college students transfer to a...

Seventy years ago this month, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Brown v. Board that racial segregation of children in America’s public schools was unconstitutional. Today, we’re commemorating the anniversary by relaunching our special Untold Stories of Brown v. Board microsite, dedicated to sharing the stories of the lesser-known students, parents and plaintiffs who joined...

Sometimes when I take a Lyft to LAX, the driver will ask what I do. If I tell the truth and say I’m a professor of education, I almost always regret it, because I’ll immediately get a variety of (usually) uninformed and inaccurate ideas about what’s wrong with schools and how to solve the nation’s...

When Tami Morrison, a teacher and mom from outside Youngstown, Ohio, discovered Superkids, she thought she’d found the perfect way to help young children learn to read. Kids like her daughter Clara, a second grader, glommed on to its rich characters; she’s especially fond of Lily, who wears her black hair in a short bob...

Seventy years after the Supreme Court outlawed separating public school children by race, a new report breathes life into an old question: how the most coveted public schools are able to legally exclude all but the most privileged families. In the first of its kind state-by-state breakdown by nonprofits Available to All and Bellwether Education,...