LA School Report

The anticipated thousands of 7th graders being sent home for not having their vaccinations didn’t quite happen last week, the first week of school. LA Unified students were at 93 percent compliance, according to Ellen T. Morgan of the district communications office. That percentage “increases every day,” she said. There are about 36,000 7th graders...

LA Unified students are learning about water conservation methods needed locally because of the drought, and the effort got a big boost last week from a $50,000 federal grant. An award from the Environmental Protection Agency is intended to support a pilot program to teach students how to conserve water. It’s part of the “One...

For most kids, getting expelled in the seventh grade for bringing a weapon to school is the beginning of a sad story, the first step into the school-to-prison pipeline. But for Eduardo Pacheco, a recent graduate of LA Unified’s Woodrow Wilson High School, it ended up being a low point from which he slowly rose to...

Some think it is a threat to the public education system. Some welcome it. Members of the LA Unified school board have reacted quite differently to the announcement that the Broad, Keck and Walton Family Foundations are planning to expand the number of charter schools in the district to serve well beyond the 101,000 students...

By Anya Kamenetz Chester E. Finn, Jr. has three very bright granddaughters. He thinks they “have considerable academic potential and are not always being challenged by their schools.” But Finn is not just a proud grandpa; he’s a long-established expert on education policy with the Fordham Institute and Hoover Institution. So its not surprising that...

It’s true: Kindergarten is optional in California Educators and state lawmakers who want to close this achievement gap say it’s time to do away with optional kindergarten for California children. Los Angeles Times Raising graduation bar poses challenges for school districts More than 65,000 LAUSD students were funneled into summer school this year because they...

Now that the MiSiS crisis seems to be in the rear-view mirror, Superintendent Ramon Cortines is focusing on another difficult issue for LAUSD — class sizes. “We are now beginning to make necessary adjustments to class size,” he said in a statement released today. “For instance, we can open a new class and assign an additional...

A teacher at LA Unified filed a lawsuit against the district Wednesday after he was suspended in 2014 over a lewd Facebook page that was created with his name and image on it. A student was eventually arrested by the LAPD and charged with creating the page, but not before the teacher, Jason Duchan, was suspended from...

In a memo regarding the Smarter Balanced Assessments, LA Unified officials explained to Superintendent Ramon Cortines and members of the school board how the new test is so different from its predecessor and why scores may appear lower than in the past. Cynthia Lim, executive director of the district’s Office of Data and Accountability, said...

Not many people know much about LA Unified’s $133 million MiSiS computer system that has held the center of attention for the past year—and will determine the success or failure of the school year now underway. District officials this week gave LA School Report a behind-the-scenes look at the system to understand what it does and...