LA School Report

This article originally appeared in the April 2022 School Business Affairs magazine and is reprinted with permission of the Association of School Business Officials International (ASBO). The text herein does not necessarily represent the views or policies of ASBO International, and use of this imprint does not imply any endorsement or recognition by ASBO International...

The nation’s students showed small signs of academic recovery during the 2021-22 school year, but high absenteeism, quarantines and short-term closures “thwarted hopes of a strong comeback,” new data shows. Overall, the findings — from 8.3 million students in 25,000 schools — “point to a long road to recovery still ahead,” wrote researchers from nonprofit...

CK-12, a nonprofit focused on pairing educational content with the latest technologies, has fully embraced artificial intelligence, giving students and teachers using its free learning system access to an AI-powered tutor dubbed Flexi.  Employing artificial intelligence, CK-12 engineers programmed Flexi to act as a tutor, responding to math and science questions, testing students’ knowledge, helping...

Parents and educators are asking: when is GreatSchools going to have new school data?  The answer is two-fold. First, it’s important to know we are not going to give parents information that doesn’t help them, or only helps some of them. Second, we have been consistently adding new data, but its type and source may...

This article first appeared in Idaho Capital Sun The more things change, the more they stay the same, or so the saying goes. In January 2021, I wrote a column called “Talking to your kids about recent mob violence.” The recent tragedies in Uvalde, Texas, and several other states bring on the sad occasion to...

Jennifer Kottke has worked with LAUSD homeless and foster care youth for more than 20 years — but she has never seen chronic absenteeism among these students become the crisis it did  during the pandemic.  While nearly half of all LAUSD students were chronically absent during most of the the 2021-22 school year, the numbers...

Reading is freedom. It opens up the world.  In my day job as an education researcher, I know that too many kids never learn to read well. Kids who don’t learn to read fluently by 3rd grade will struggle as the material gets more complex.  That fact hit home this spring when I noticed my 8-year-old son had...

Enrollment in colleges and universities continued its steep plunge this spring, down 4.7% from a year ago. The nation’s higher education drop is worsening — but not for the reasons you might think. A newly released National Student Clearinghouse report shows total post-high school enrollment fell by about 685,000 students in spring 2022. In the wake...

It has been a long time since so many education issues have been so politically divisive, with sharp debates between conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats about mask mandates, student sexual identity, and the role of race in the curriculum overtaking the routine work of educating students. But as school districts have decided how to...

A $50 million partnership between LAUSD and AT&T California to provide thousands of students with high speed internet access is drawing concern from advocates. When Los Angeles district schools went remote at the start of the pandemic, the school system’s digital divide was thrown into sharp relief — making clear many low income students lacked...