LA School Report

By EdSource Staff Legislators who headed out of town on Friday for a month have already decided the fate of many key bills. Gov. Jerry Brown has signed, including a much debated child vaccination law that eliminates the personal belief exemption to school-required vaccinations. All of the bills to rewrite the teacher evaluation law have...

L.A. superintendent: ‘When it comes to student safety, we are going to choose students over adults every single time.’ Los Angeles schools superintendent Ramon C. Cortines e-mailed me Monday night with a reaction to my latest column. Washington Post Teacher training course aims to boost students’ college readiness Nearly 5,000 teachers across the state in...

As the result of a new law signed by Gov. Jerry Brown last month, California’s school districts must specifically outline in their Local Control Accountability Plans (LCAP) how they will help homeless students, through tracking their test scores and other accountability measures. The law is believed to be the first of its kind in the...

In a campaign that may be the most ambitious in the state, if not the country, LAUSD is gearing up to launch an anti-sexting campaign for students, teachers and parents. The launch is scheduled for early in the new school year in all middle and high schools, said Judy Chiasson, the district’s program coordinator for...

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear Friedrichs vs. California Teachers Association, a 2013 case with huge implications for unions’ nationwide in their ability to collect dues, the Los Angeles teachers union, UTLA, is gearing up for whatever the justices decide. A victory by the plaintiffs would reverse a decades-old precedent, Abood...

LA Unified’s new board president, Steve Zimmer, had a recent chat with Politico, and some of his comments reached its Education Morning Edition today. Nothing surprising until the final paragraph, when he expresses his hope that the selection of a new superintendent to replace the soon-to-be-leaving Ramon Cortines doesn’t “devolve into another ground war over schooling,...

By Corey Turner If this isn’t an honest-to-goodness crystal ball, it’s close. Neurobiologist Nina Kraus believes she and her team at Northwestern University have found a way — a half-hour test — to predict kids’ literacy skill long before they’re old enough to begin reading. When I first read the study in the journal PLOS Biology, two words...

Long Beach board under pressure to rename Robert E. Lee Elementary Dozens of schools throughout the nation bear the name of Lee, who commanded the Army of Northern Virginia during the Civil War. NY Daily News Why NYC is experimenting with new ways to desegregate public schools Advocates of school integration say the tide is...

LA Unified students and teachers this week are helping educate scientists and instructors from 34 countries, with a focus on how they are handling California’s water crisis. The GLOBE Program (Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment) is a federal effort aimed at expanding the understanding of global environment to a worldwide audience. As...

There’s a little good news/bad news in a new report analyzing the college-readiness of low-income students who took the ACT test. More low-income students than ever took the test in 2014, according to the report, and a high level of them expressed a plan to attend college. But the bad news: performance by low-income students...