LA School Report

Pension payouts are growing so fast that California’s school districts are being forced to lay off staff and close schools, a Stanford professor and author of a new study says. LA Unified will have to cut spending by about 3 percent in 12 years in order to pay for the ballooning cost of its retirees’ pensions,...

In the historic “Is the American Dream at the Expense of the American Negro?” debate in 1965, author James Baldwin locks horns with conservative leader William F. Buckley Jr. about the significance of the American flag. “It comes as a great shock around the age of 5, 6, or 7 to discover that the flag...

Kirsten Farrell, who teaches life-saving techniques as a medical technology teacher at Venice Senior High School, has been named one five California Teachers of the Year for 2018. Three of the five winners are in the Greater Los Angeles area, and all five are in Southern California. A teacher for 21 years, Farrell created one...

When board members heard Tuesday that the number of students who have left LA Unified schools was even worse than they’d been told, they wanted to know what was being done. Here’s what they heard: • launching the unified enrollment system • offering a broader range of school options • reducing absences.   And here...

LA Unified urgently needs a sit-down with union representatives to make sure everyone is on the same page about the budget before the district falls off a fiscal “cliff,” longtime school board member Richard Vladovic said at Tuesday’s board meeting. “Our labor partners see the budget differently from the way we do, and I would...

It was college appreciation day Tuesday at the LA Unified school board, so all the board members wore their school shirts. But they may as well have worn their football jerseys because it erupted into a verbal brawl. In a few seemingly innocuous votes involving committee meetings, two board members not part of the new...

“If ever there was a time to talk about collaboration, now is the time.”   — Ryan J. Smith, executive director, The Education Trust-West Collaboration was the theme and aim of Pepperdine’s School of Public Policy’s first education conference, held Friday at the Malibu campus. The event brought together education policy leaders from Los Angeles...

LA Unified’s enrollment is dropping even faster than the district projected. There are 12,604 fewer students than last year, a 2.51 percent decline, last month’s official head count showed. The district had anticipated only a 2.1 percent drop. The difference means there will be $17 million less in the 2018-19 budget, and an additional $18...

An unprecedented coalition of community members, educators, parents, and students at LA Unified have convened a new task force to urgently address why African-American youth continue to have the lowest test scores and why black students and families continue to feel ignored by the education system. Black students persist in having LA Unified’s highest rates...

The main goal for most community college students in California is to transfer to a four-year university to earn a bachelor’s degree. But a new report shows it takes an average of 6.5 years to get a bachelor’s for students transferring to the University of California system and seven years for those transferring to the...