LA School Report

The interview process starts today at the LA Unified school board meeting, with plans to hear from representatives of two headhunter firms in the search for the district’s next superintendent. Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates of Rosemont, Ill. and Leadership Associates of La Quinta, Calif. were picked from among five bidders by the board on Sunday. They were...

By The Editorial Board Kindergarten hasn’t been its old self for a long time. After decades of increasing focus on academics, it recently became more standardized as well; the curriculum for California’s 5-year-olds is now aligned with the Common Core academic standards. Kindergarten teachers are no longer preoccupied with keeping their squirmy charges from eating...

Prosecutors probe L.A. Unified’s food services for possible violations The Office of the Inspector General found mismanagement, inappropriate spending and ethical breaches in LA Unified’s meal operation. Los Angeles Times Fresno Unified’s legal tangles with no-bid contracts puts CA districts on alert LA Unified – which voiced support for Fresno Unified, saying it has spent...

Ever since the FBI seized documents in December related to LA Unified’s controversial iPad program, there have been no public updates on the case, but now it appears that the LA Unified school board and its legal department see trouble coming. It is just a single line in the agenda for tomorrow’s closed board meeting,...

A group of LA Unified students joined local and national educators last week to describe academic challenges they face and to suggest ideas for what could help them. The four-hour discussion last Thursday evening kicked off a weekend of activities sponsored by UTLA in conjunction with the “White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African...

The LA Unified school board made limited progress yesterday in the search for a new superintendent. The members invited two headhunter firms to pitch their ideas on how to handle the search but said three other firms may also still be in the running. The two leading firms — Hazard, Young and Associates of Rosemont,...

By Dan Walters California’s public schools saw an enormous enrollment surge during the 1950s from the post-World War II baby boom. It overwhelmed many school districts’ capacities to build new facilities, and one response, enacted in 1957, was called “lease-leaseback.” The law authorized a district to lease a school site to a contractor for a...

Uncertain impact of California’s high school exit exam Gov. Brown last week signed legislation that exempted students from the graduating class of 2015 from having to take the test. EdSource Lawmakers consider retroactive diplomas for students who failed exit exam Between 2006 and 2014, nearly 249,000 students, or about 6 percent of test-takers, did not...

An open and transparent search, background as an educator and under no circumstances someone from the Broad Academy. Those are the three major criteria that UTLA wants in the next LAUSD school superintendent. Alex Caputo-Pearl, the president of the United Teachers Los Angeles union, told the LA School Report that he has made it known to...

Whether charter schools in California have been a godsend or a destroyer of worlds depends upon whom you ask and where you are standing when you ask it. But now a group of activists hope to end the debate altogether by getting an initiative on the 2016 ballot to repeal the Charter School Act of...