LA School Report

* UPDATED A $50 million-a-year drain on the general budget by LA Unified’s food services, which was identified as a significant contributor to the district’s budget deficits, is on its way to being eradicated by the new director who has been on the job less than a year. Joseph Vaughn, who was hired last August from...

By Deborah Marcus When Dou’Jae Rice’s father was killed during her sophomore year of high school, the pressures of providing for her family could have forced the straight-A student to drop out. But that didn’t happen. Instead, Dou’Jae was able to tap into a network of support at LAUSD’s Hamilton High School that kept her...

Only 43 percent of California’s 2015 high school graduates were eligible for the state’s public universities, one of the factors that contributed to the “F” that the state’s higher education received in a newly released report. And many of those who do make it to college aren’t finishing, the report found. Only 47 percent of...

The legal team for the father who has been held since Feb. 28 by immigration officials after his arrest outside a Los Angeles charter school is trying a new strategy, relying on a new law to wipe out old convictions. The father, Romulo Avelica-Gonzalez, was born in Mexico and has lived in the United States...

Of the 1,600 LA Unified administrators who were notified in March that they may lose their jobs, only 115 have been told their contracts will not be renewed, but all of them are being offered other positions in the district. That could mean only a slight decrease in administration staffing levels next year despite a continuing...

A new data analysis of California test scores has revealed that three out of four black boys don’t meet state reading standards. The data analysis and article published Wednesday by the nonprofit news organization CALmatters provides a deep dive look at how gender interacts with race on the state tests. It found that: Girls have...

At just 28, Kelly Gonez has gone from being an education policy adviser for the Obama administration to middle school math teacher to the youngest member of the LA Unified school board. She won the May 16 runoff for the District 6 seat with less than 1,000 votes, obtaining 16,961 votes, or 51.5 percent, to Imelda Padilla’s...

By Richard Whitmire Without a doubt, pro-charter school forces took a beating over the past year. There was a big setback in Georgia, and the Massachusetts vote on allowing charters to expand was nothing short of a money-losing, brutish beatdown. Things only worsened with the election of Donald Trump and his appointment of the wildly...

  As many as 9 out of 10 black parents and 57 percent of Latino parents nationwide believe that schools in their communities are underfunded compared to those in white communities. They also believe that racism is the second biggest obstacle for their children to receive a high-quality education, according to the second annual New Education...