LA School Report

Via The Los Angeles Times | By Howard Blume Providing Apple iPads to Los Angeles students will cost nearly $100 more apiece — or $770 per tablet, a new school district budget shows. This potential sticker shock can be avoided, but only after the L.A. Unified School District has spent at least $400 million for...

LA Unified embarks on revamp of devastated adult education program The Los Angeles Unified School system is embarking on a process to revamp its adult education programs – one of the biggest victims of years of budget cuts – and it’s teaming up with the city and business interests to come up with the plan....

The number of LA Unified 12th-graders taking the SAT test rose last year, along with the District’s average test scores on critical reading, mathematics, and writing portions of the exam, according to new data from the College Board, which develops the test. Nearly half of the most recent graduating class took the SAT, 22,106 seniors for...

An expert in school board governance says that a censure vote is rare and has the potential to fracture a board even beyond its existing rifts. Christopher Maricle, a policy program officer and governance consultant for the California School Board Association, says the effort to publicly condemn a school district president could be an extremely divisive...

Via the Los Angeles Times | Editorial John Deasy, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, can be impatient and stubborn, qualities we often admire in him. It takes a sense of urgency to get things moving in L.A.’s schools, as well as a willingness to stand against the forces that resist change....

L.A. Unified’s English learner action upsets parents, teachers Luis Gaytan, the 5-year-old son of Mexican immigrants who speak Spanish at home, was so terrified by kindergarten that he would barely talk — prompting classmates to tease that he didn’t have a tongue. LA Times CA’s $250M investment in linked learning complicated by rules, regs The...

A coalition of community groups known by the acronym, CLASS, finally had a meeting today with LA Unified Board President Richard Vladovic. The groups’ mission was to press the case for individual schools, rather than district administrators, deciding how to spend money coming into LA Unified from Gov. Jerry Brown‘s new Local Control Funding Formula,...

Theodore B. Olson, the former U.S. Solicitor General, previewed arguments yesterday in Vergara v. California, a lawsuit that strives to protect equal educational opportunity in California by ensuring that all students have access to effective teaching. Speaking at the National Summit on Education Reform in Boston, Olson appeared with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and...