LA School Report

Outgoing school board member Mónica Ratliff announced Wednesday she is endorsing Kelly Gonez to take over her Board District 6 seat in the northeast San Fernando Valley. “I greatly appreciate that Ms. Gonez seeks to be an ‘independent voice on the school board,’” Ratliff said in an email to LA School Report. She made her choice after reviewing...

The state released its graduation rates Tuesday, pushing LA Unified’s Class of 2016 rate up to 77 percent, a 2 percentage point increase from the district’s preliminary projection in August and its biggest jump in seven years. The difference comes from how students are counted, as the state has better tracking information. The California Department...

New research shows that years after having even one black teacher in elementary school, black students experience major benefits, from being less likely to drop out of high school to being more likely to aspire to college and take college entrance exams. The recent study comes as there has been increasing attention to diversifying the teaching force,...

For decades, stereotypical homeschoolers have been white Christian families seeking to mix their children’s education with moral values. But in recent years, the demographics of homeschool families and the reasons they are choosing to teach their kids at home have grown more diverse. These days, homeschool parents are more likely to cite a negative school...

Steve Zimmer, the LA Unified school board president who is in a heated re-election battle, has barely raised any money ahead of next month’s runoff and says he is too busy to campaign for the seat he’s held for eight years. Zimmer’s opponent, Nick Melvoin, has raised nearly 10 times as much as Zimmer since...

One of the toughest jobs for LA Unified school board President Steve Zimmer is keeping the seven disparate voices of the board on track and headed toward their stated goal of 100 percent graduation. But to maintain that unity, he hopes fellow board members won’t weigh in against him in his campaign to win reelection in...

While LA Unified continues to drive toward higher and higher graduation rates, district data provided to LA School Report show that more than half of last year’s graduates were not eligible for admission into California’s public universities. Of the Class of 2016’s 26,806 graduates, 47 percent received a C or better in all of their...

AltSchool, a four-year-old network of independent schools, has a dream of growing so that millions of students nationwide can use its personalized learning technology — and it’s starting by adding five executives from charter schools, public school districts, and the tech sector to its team, it announced Thursday morning. “This is a big moment for...

A charter school that was repeatedly denied classroom space in its neighborhood by LA Unified is giving up the fight and will close in June. Westchester Secondary Charter School has operated in three sites during its four years and has never been granted district space in the west side community where its founding families and...

It’s a common refrain in education that research isn’t used wisely, or at all, to inform policy. As states have to redesign their accountability systems under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the new federal K-12 law, policymakers have the opportunity anew to use evidence to help guide their decisions. That was the topic of...