LA School Report

Kiersten Franz has a bachelor’s degree in math, a master’s in education, and several years’ teaching experience under her belt — excellent qualifications, presumably, for becoming a New York City high school statistics teacher. But her record wasn’t quite good enough to meet New York state’s stringent licensure requirements. Because her training was out-of-state and...

LA Unified is preparing its first-ever unified enrollment system, but signs that it’s already running off the tracks have spurred an influential group of advocates to band together to make sure the final product is equitable and accessible to all. The biggest obstacle to success they cite is leaving out charter schools, which already educate...

By Seth Litt “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” — James Baldwin For more than a year, families from Parent Revolution’s Parent Power Network have voiced their concerns about the direction of California’s school accountability system. They’ve met with legislators, taken multiple overnight bus...

A coalition of Los Angeles charter schools announced Tuesday that they plan to join in the legal challenge against President Trump’s executive order to withhold federal money from “sanctuary jurisdictions” including LA Unified. They also reported that fewer seniors in their high schools are applying to college this year because of fears of their information being...

Early campaign spending in the LA Unified school board runoff election has shifted to the open seat in the San Fernando Valley from the west side race, which dominated the primary election. Three weeks into the May 16 runoff contest, outside groups have spent nearly five times as much on the District 6 race compared...

*UPDATED Barack Obama’s former Education Secretary Arne Duncan threw his support Wednesday to two pro-reform candidates in the LA Unified school board race. Duncan, who was appointed secretary of education by Obama in 2009, endorsed Nick Melvoin who is running against school board President Steve Zimmer, and is backing Kelly Gonez against Imelda Padilla in...

White parents who stand to lose teachers and counselors at their neighborhood public school in Los Angeles are changing their ethnic status with LA Unified to get around a district policy that strips extra staff from schools that are more than 30 percent white. And some Latino parents who fear deportation under the Trump Administration...

Yolie Flores is one of 24 candidates who will compete in the April 4 special primary election for the 34th Congressional District seat which includes downtown LA, Koreatown and the city’s northeast region. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the votes, a runoff election will be held on June 6.  When longtime representative Xavier Becerra...

Mónica García started this month’s school board meeting day with an 8 a.m. visit to one of her schools. At 9 she joined the board’s closed session meeting, eating her lunch while it extended right up to the public afternoon meeting. Between votes, she could be found talking to concerned parents in the hallway outside...

Last October, in perhaps the final triumphant moment of his administration, President Obama announced that America’s soaring high school graduation rate had risen, again, to an all-time high of 83 percent. Before he took office, the percentage of students earning diplomas languished for decades in the low to mid-70s; now the news was made still...