LA School Report

The 2016 presidential campaign has hardly lived up to the ideal of a civil exchange of ideas facilitating a peaceful democracy. But a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center suggests that the acrimony from the campaign trail may be having a broader, negative effect on society — particularly in American schools. An online survey of...

Many high school seniors think of spring as college admission season. Yet the nation’s most selective colleges seem determined to rebrand it as rejection season. Increasingly, the marketplace has rewarded colleges that turn away the most students, and the competition to be competitive has become white-hot. Winning that competition may be great for colleges, but...

United front: Teachers unions quietly spend millions on ‘grassroots’ groups Public documents show teachers unions are spending millions of dollars creating front groups that appear to have wide grassroots support when in fact they are staffed, organized and funded by a single special interest. Tracing how these relationships are funded is not always straightforward. By David...

In honor of Teacher Appreciation Week, LA School Report spent some time recently talking with Brendan Wallace, a math teacher at Alliance Marc and Eva Stern Math and Science High School. On Thursday, Wallace was named the Teacher of the Year for Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, an organization that runs 27 charter schools in Los Angeles. (Check...

Arizona State University history professor Matt Delmont’s recent book, “Why Busing Failed,” challenges the conventional narrative around why school integration fell so short  — that segregated neighborhood schools were naturally occurring, that busing could never effectively change that — and examines the calculated backlash, including from a complicit media, that doomed desegregation before it began. Delmont and...

The 74 marks National Charter Schools Week (May 1-7) with a series of articles about America’s charter leaders, students and policies. See the full series. At the beginning of 2016, Rainshadow Charter High School in Reno, Nevada, was on its last legs. The Washoe County school board had granted Rainshadow just a one-year charter extension to...

Trump tussled with Los Angeles school board over historical hotel Donald Trump had a bitter public feud with the LAUSD school board over the Ambassador Hotel, where he wanted to build a 125-story office tower. The site of the Robert F. Kennedy assassination in 1968 was preserved and is now the site of six autonomous...

Anti-immigrant rhetoric going on in presidential politics and a potential state law have added a renewed emphasis on developing required ethnic studies classes in the LA Unified curriculum. An expert from the University of Arizona spoke to an LA Unified school board committee this week to explain the importance of ethnic studies in education. He brought...

This is graduation season, when an anticipated 3.3 million high school seniors will cross a stage and receive an elegant sheet of paper that announces their completion of an important phase of formal education. For the last few years, public school districts have proudly announced their increasing graduation rates: In the 2013-14 academic year, the...

All eyes on today’s Louisiana vote: A new era for New Orleans’ schools? Barring a last-minute twist, Louisiana lawmakers Thursday are expected to vote to dissolve a state-controlled school district that for the last 10 years has overseen the nation’s most radical foray into education reform. As for what would come next – a unique hybrid...