LA School Report

LA Unified’s new Expanded Transitional Kindergarten program, which is serving nearly 30,000 children younger than age 5, is already facing challenges that threaten it, and the district will assess it at the end of the school year. Dean Tagawa, the executive director of the Early Childhood Education Division, said that a $5 million hold on state...

Fourth Street Elementary’s students are supposed to receive nearly $10.5 million under the state’s funding formula, but a new database published by the California Charter Schools Association shows that the East LA school has just $5.4 million to spend. The database’s release comes after a wave of criticisms levied against LA Unified and other California...

*UPDATED Steve Zimmer and Nick Melvoin met Sunday evening in their first one-on-one debate, heading into the final three weeks before the May 16 runoff for the LA Unified District 4 school board seat. Moderator Dr. Fernando J. Guerra of Loyola Marymount University had to dig deep at times to find daylight between Zimmer, the...

Darryl Adams put an iPad in the hands of every one of the 18,000 students in the Coachella Valley Unified School District, one of the poorest districts in the nation. Then he installed Wi-Fi on school buses and parked those buses throughout the district’s 1,250 square miles, so those kids’ iPads could get online. “The...

*UPDATED Negative campaigning has reached an all-time high as the nation’s most-watched school board race enters its final month. And all four LA Unified board candidates don’t like what’s being said in their name. The independent organizations including unions and charter groups that are campaigning for — and against — them have no involvement with the...

By Mike Antonucci The California Teachers Association is not only on the opposite coast from the New York State United Teachers, it is on the opposite side of the financial ledger. While NYSUT battles budget deficits and cumbersome staff pension debt, CTA has loads of cash, consistent budget surpluses, net assets of more than $300 million,...

*UPDATED After passionate debate and pleas from charter school administrators and parents, the LA Unified school board voted 4-3 to support three teacher union-backed bills being considered by the California legislature that all restrict some of the autonomies given to public charter schools. The most contested bill, SB 808, was pulled by its author on Monday...

The state Senate bill that was at the heart of Tuesday’s heated school board debate and which some charter advocates consider dangerous to the future of charter schools was pulled for discussion Monday by its author for two years. Pro-charter parents who met with State Sen. Tony Mendoza last Friday said they believed they helped...

By Andrew Rotherham and Kaitlin Pennington It’s an education policy only TurboTax could love. Trying to find and keep teachers in California, legislators there are sponsoring the Teacher Recruitment and Retention Act. The bill’s idea is straightforward: eliminate income tax for teachers. Really, who could be against that? Specifically, the bill would exempt teachers who remain...