LA School Report

Education is full of priorities: getting kids ready for kindergarten, getting children reading on grade level, developing students’ STEM skills, building social-emotional skills, addressing nature deficit disorder (children spending too little time outdoors), developing thoughtful citizens, training future workers to compete in a global marketplace, and so on and so forth. They’re all interlocked to a certain...

The introduction of a new Dream Act that aims to permanently legalize undocumented youth who came to the country as children sparked optimism among DACA educators in Los Angeles. The new bill presented to Congress on Thursday is even more generous than DACA — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — because it offers a path...

At an event filled with 500 Los Angeles education leaders, Ryan Smith, executive director of The Education Trust -West, highlighted the urgent need to ensure that low-income students of color get the best education possible — and how to do it with what he calls “The California Way.” Smith is director of the research and advocacy organization...

(Click on photo to play video of the school board meeting.) It was one of the most uncomfortably dramatic moments at any LA Unified School Board meeting in recent memory — maybe the oddest of any in the country this year. Flanked by her friends, 15-year-old Lila Copeland stood in silence for a minute and a...

*UPDATED Philanthropist and former LA Times publisher Austin Beutner said he doesn’t see the new task force he is co-leading as a body that has any intention of usurping the new LA Unified School Board, or telling the superintendent what to do. “We are here to support Michelle King, and offer suggestions,” Beutner said in...

Summer is down time for education, but the California Teachers Association remains active on the policy front. Ever since its May 1 Day of Action — the message of which varied greatly depending on local issues — the union has tried to take advantage of huge legislative majorities and burgeoning school revenues to push its...

Business, philanthropic and community leaders have formed a new task force to work with LA Unified Superintendent Michelle King and its first undertaking will be to tackle chronic absenteeism, the Los Angeles Times reported. LA School Report reported last month that budget documents showed the number of students who were chronically absent — missing 16...

When Nick Melvoin unseated LA Unified school board President Steve Zimmer, teachers threatened to strike. Others worried about having to find a new job. A national reporter was surprised to learn in an interview that opponents were all wrong when they portrayed Melvoin as a Trump supporter. And there was palpable trepidation by a server who...

LA Unified is projecting that it has nearly doubled last year’s rate of reclassifying English learners as proficient and has hit Superintendent Michelle King’s goal laid out in her strategic plan. Preliminary data show the district’s English learner reclassification rate is 20 percent for the school year that ended last month, a vast improvement from...

High school athletes at big schools know that sports can be a sure route to college. But for students at smaller schools that’s not as well known, especially in immigrant families where sports isn’t seen as a way to get — and pay for — a higher education. Alex Guerrero, 18, had never heard of...