LA School Report

LA Unified Superintendent Ramon Cortines is praising the high performance of the district’s magnet schools on on the recent Smarter Balanced standardized tests, which based on a district analysis shows 65 percent of them scoring higher than the state average in English language arts and 56 percent of them scoring higher than average in math. “The performance...

By Issie Lapowsky On a cloudy Tuesday afternoon in San Marcos, California, Guadalupe Lopez is guiding me through Alvin Dunn Elementary’s concrete grid of a campus. Dressed in a black sweatshirt with Minnie Mouse ears on the hood, she’s striding along with the eager confidence of a soon-to-be 7th grader just weeks away from the first day of...

Report: Economy improves, but not for California’s poor kids In 24 states, the lot of poor children did improve slightly between 2013 and 2014, but in California, progress has been stagnant. KPCC Orange County says special ed students must comply with vaccination law Many parents who opposed the new vaccination law believed that special education...

An advisory committee studying options for LA Unified’s academic calendar are considering six different plans, and one them is a radically different approach that would shorten the summer break to five weeks and increase the winter break to seven weeks. In addition, the plan would potentially add a 20-day “winter intersession” for some students to...

LA Unified listed the names of the first 117 schools to get Transitional Kindergarten (or TK) classes in order to replace the closed School Readiness Language Development Program (SRLDP) classrooms. The rest of the 173 schools with the SRLDP pre-school programs will make the transition in the 2016-2017 school year. In the plan, none of...

This 12-minute video was posted on the LAUSD website today and will be shown to all 6th to 12th graders to warn them of the dangers of “sexting.” It is part of a campaign that will include lesson plans, posters, bilingual tip sheets and other resources for 900 elementary, middle and high schools. The video...

Hundreds of LA Unified employees and parents filed into the Edward R. Roybal Learning Center‘s downtown auditorium yesterday for a “Back to School at LAUSD” forum, hosted by Superintendent Ramon Cortines and other key district leaders. The event wasn’t called to unveil a specific agenda, but more for an open panel discussion on issues facing the...

By Eduardo Porter The wounds of segregation were still raw in the 1970s. With only rare exceptions, African-American children had nowhere near the same educational opportunities as whites. The civil rights movement, school desegregation and the War on Poverty helped bring a measure of equity to the playing field. Today, despite some setbacks along the...

Plan to boost charters splits L.A. Unified board Dividing lines quickly emerged over an ambitious plan to double the number of charter campuses across the city. Los Angeles Times Achievement gap points to ineffectiveness of decades of reforms Only 28 percent of African-Americans and 32 percent of Latinos who took the test in California met...