LA School Report

A ruling on whether the state needs to step in and straighten out the scheduling problems at LA Unified’s Jefferson High School is now awaiting a decision by a Superior Court judge in Alameda County. As part of Cruz v. California, a bigger case seeking the state to assure the quality of education for students from...

Via The New York Times Magazine | By Nicholas Confessore The lunch ladies loved Marshall Matz. For more than 30 years, he worked the halls and back rooms of Washington for the 55,000 dues-paying members of the School Nutrition Association, the men and still mostly women who run America’s school-lunch programs. They weren’t his firm’s...

California leads the nation in homeless school children One out of every five K-12 students nationally who experienced homelessness in the 2012-2013 school year lived in California, according to a study by the California Homeless Youth Project. AllGov Education groups won’t back rainy day fund Gov. Jerry Brown won’t have key education groups helping him...

L.A. Unified officials announced today a plan to offer computer science curriculum to all students in kindergarten through 12th grade as part of a partnership with Seattle-based nonprofit Code.org. The program will offer the instruction to all students and will expand upon the district’s earlier collaboration with UCLA to give more students access to computer science education,...

Beyond the billions of dollars from construction bonds they spend after rigorous public debate, LA Unified school board members also have access to millions of additional dollars that they can spend without debate through a little-known program known as “board member priority projects.” By rules in place since 2002, members have the discretion to spend...

It’s an old story in LA Unified: Two schools are put together in one campus under the state co-location policy. The merger is always complicated and messier still when it’s a last-minute arranged marriage and neither side is consulted ahead of time about the partnership. It sometimes explodes into smithereens, as it did last year...

What’s wrong with the Vergara ruling Commentary: What’s wrong with the ruling is that it reinforces a completely false narrative in which incompetent teachers are portrayed as the central problem facing urban schools.EdSource Online resource offers help with discipline Educators who want to implement more positive disciplinary practices can now access an online national repository...

Art is returning to LA Unified — in one project, anyway. The J. Paul Getty Museum has selected Barbara Kruger for the 2014 Getty Artists Program, a collaboration this year with two schools to encourage students to develop a project of their choosing. Kruger, whose work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American...

Could there be a hint of progress in negotiations between LA Unified and the teachers’ union, UTLA? Negotiators for the district say they were encouraged by the union’s latest — and most comprehensive — contract proposal, which was submitted last week. Vivan Ekchian, the district’s chief labor negotiator, told LA School Report, “I considered it...

California, other states to set test cutoff scores During the next few weeks California educators will play a pivotal role in a crucial phase of work for the new Smarter Balanced assessments that millions of California students will take this spring for the first time. EdSource Why can’t the grown-ups get it right on education?...