LA School Report

This story was originally published on The Conversation. Uncommon Courses is an occasional series from The Conversation U.S. highlighting unconventional approaches to teaching. Title of course: “STEM & Social Impact: Climate Change” What prompted the idea for the course? Harvey Mudd College’s mission is to educate STEM students – short for science, technology, engineering and math –...

The Los Angeles Unified School District will spend $2.2 billion to rebuild three schools destroyed or badly damaged in January’s deadly wildfires – and protect the entire district from natural disaster, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said at a press conference Tuesday. “It’s the right investment at the right time for absolutely the right reasons,” Carvalho said. ...

After a natural disaster like the Los Angeles wildfires, teachers are often a first line of support for children processing trauma — but teachers can also experience what expert Stephen Hydon calls secondary traumatic stress. In this interview, Hydon, who serves as the director of the School and Educational Settings specialization program at USC’s Dworak-Peck...

This story was originally published on CalMatters. As President Donald Trump begins his second term with a declaration of a national emergency at the southern border and a steadfast pledge of mass deportations, California’s colleges and universities have been holding workshops and partnering with legal service nonprofits to help undocumented students on their campuses stay...

Firefighters have now contained deadly wildfires that just after the new year devastated whole swaths of Los Angeles. Schools are reopening and, for some families, life is returning to normal.  But the historic blazes, which in January prompted the emergency closure of the nation’s second-largest district and burned some schools completely, made a lasting impression...

This story was originally published on CalMatters. It’ll be a while before Los Angeles can fully assess the damage to its schools from this recent spate of fires, but a few things already seem certain: rebuilding will take a long time, it will be expensive, and it may sap the statewide fund for school repairs. At least a...

This story was originally published on CalMatters. Aleeza Siddique, 15, was in a Spanish class earlier this year in her Northern California high school when a lesson about newscasts got derailed by her school’s internet filter. Her teacher told the class to open up their school-issued Chromebooks and explore a list of links he had curated from the...

Hopes for a post-COVID academic recovery were dashed Wednesday morning with the publication of new federal testing data for elementary and middle schoolers. Newly released scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card, show that both fourth and eighth graders have lost ground in reading — not...

Over the past few years, millions of educators have embraced the science of reading, in many cases radically transforming how the youngest students learn how to read. But a new book argues that the current approach remains deeply flawed. Though phonics instruction has emerged as a key component of reading lessons, stagnant NAEP scores, among...

This story was originally published on CalMatters. Rural school districts — already beset with financial struggles — are furiously scrambling to save a century-old funding source that Republican lawmakers last month eliminated from the federal budget.  The Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act, which has been approved almost continuously since 1908, is intended to compensate rural counties...