LA School Report

This article was produced in partnership with our colleagues at The74Million.org. The East Coast protests started haphazardly enough Saturday afternoon. Washington, D.C., residents started gathering at Dulles International Airport around the same time New Yorkers were trekking to JFK’s international terminal — rallied by Facebook Live videos and social media posts that decried President Trump’s...

By Misti D. Kemmer Just last Thursday, I experienced one of those especially emotional days at work. I got a call that the mother of one of my fourth-grade students had passed away. Not five minutes later, another student went to the back of the room, sat down in a chair and began to cry. I...

*UPDATED Seven federal agencies united in a raid Wednesday in Los Angeles of a charter school network that oversees high-performing schools but had come under scrutiny for its financial and management practices. The raid of Celerity Educational Group, first reported by the Los Angeles Times, came after an investigation by LA Unified’s own Office of...

Thousands of undocumented students and educators received a respite from uncertainty Wednesday when the DACA program survived President Donald Trump’s first executive order on immigration. Earlier this week his spokesman stated that ending the program is not among the administration’s immediate priorities. Still, for some parents, promises made by LA Unified officials that schools in LA...

Half of Los Angeles public school students are part of school choice programs, but that doesn’t mean quality options are accessible for all students, according to a report released Wednesday. Parent Revolution, an LA group that works with parents through organizing, individual school choice and advocacy, spent a year helping families enroll in school choice programs...

Some LA Unified officials see teaching dual language at an early age as a way to save the district, which is faced with educating the largest English learner population in the nation. With speakers that included a program director from Sacramento, parents from dual language schools and school administrators from the superintendent’s office, the Early Childhood Education...

Despite record-breaking rainfall over the past week in Los Angeles, the number of leaks and flooding issues at LA Unified schools is minimal and administrators credit the preparations they did for last year’s rather wimpy El Niño.  As of Monday morning, there were 2,000 open service calls for issues throughout the district, but only 20...

Education leaders in Los Angeles along with families and members of the community of Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles on Thursday celebrated that one of their neighborhood’s schools — KIPP Los Angeles College Preparatory School (KIPP LA Prep) — has been named a 2016 National Blue Ribbon School by the U.S. Department of Education. The National Blue...

Forty-two percent of LA Unified’s 2016 graduates re-took a class they had previously failed or needed some other kind of credit recovery in order to graduate, district officials said Thursday. Superintendent Michelle King announced in August that the preliminary graduation rate was a record 75 percent, but the district had not calculated how many students...

Community leaders, parents and even educators across Los Angeles agree that navigating LA Unified can be confounding and frustrating, so on Thursday two groups — United Way of Greater Los Angeles and the Communities for Los Angeles Student Success (CLASS) Coalition — launched a Parent Engagement Toolkit to help parents understand academic terms, education policies,...