LA School Report

By Joshua Brown At the beginning of every school year, my students ask me what I did over summer vacation. This year, I have an answer that will surely mesmerize them: I cleaned caterpillar poop.  Let me elaborate.   I was fortunate enough to participate in a weeklong professional development fellowship to the Yanayacu Biological...

Look around at billboards, bus benches and online and you’re likely to spot a message from UTLA about students, teachers and parents telling their stories about their experience with the LA Unified school system. These positive stories about traditional district schools are part of an unprecedented media campaign launched this week by United Teachers Los Angeles, the second-largest teachers union...

Finally, a disturbing trend in education shows signs of reversal Despite increasing income inequality and the recession, the school readiness gap has narrorwed, a Stanford professor of poverty and inequality in education has found. From 1998 to 2010, the gap had narrowed — with both poor and wealthy children better prepared for kindergarten and poor students improving their readiness at a faster rate. “It’s not a...

LA Unified is wasting no time in getting students with poor or failing marks into its online credit recovery program at the start of the new school year. A district communications representative confirmed that credit recovery began right away for any student who earned a D or F in a course now being offered through the...

If El Camino Real Charter High School is stripped of its independent charter status, its teachers would lose their higher salaries and seniority and would have to start all over as new LA Unified employees, teachers have been told by union representatives. About 30 of the more than 150 teachers from the west San Fernando Valley high school attended...

  LA Unified Superintendent Michelle King signed off on new health benefits for teachers assistants and playground aides even though the agreement stated that it will help push district reserves into the red by half a billion dollars within two years. And the question in the document asking how the district would replenish those reserves was left blank....

Why was it the ACLU, not charter school overseers, who called out ‘illegal’ behaviors?  Dozens of charter schools have made changes to their websites, enrollment forms or recruiting materials in the month since the ACLU of Southern California alleged that one out of every five charters in California had a discriminatory admissions policy. The report initially identified...

The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation announced Tuesday that it has donated $1 million to the city’s public libraries to fund technology purchases for the libraries’ after-school homework centers used by thousands of the city’s children and teens. The free after-school homework centers are located at 34 library branches throughout the city. The centers give students...

For the second year in a row, LA Unified’s independent charter schools outperformed the district’s traditional schools on California’s standardized math and English language arts (ELA) tests, according to data released Monday by the California Charter Schools Association. The district’s magnets topped both.  The district’s independent charters saw 46 percent of its students meet or...

By Barbara Jones Los Angeles Unified’s popular magnet centers and schools outscored independent charters by double-digit margins on California’s new state assessments, and also beat statewide averages on the rigorous math and English tests, according to data released today. In the analysis of the Smarter Balanced Assessments, 61 percent of magnet students met or exceeded...