LA School Report

Is the Los Angeles Unified School Board finally coming to terms with harsh fiscal realities of a post-recession world? That’s what it seemed like yesterday, when the members met for one of the shortest meetings in recent memory, only four hours. A combination of declining enrollment, federal cuts in special education and this year’s Federal sequestration...

L.A. Unified can’t afford $1-billion budget wish list, official says L.A. Unified will need more than $1 billion to pay for additional teachers, a longer school year and other items favored by Board of Education members — but the chance of acquiring such funds is zero, the district’s financial chief said Tuesday. Board members had...

LA School Report is live tweeting from today’s LA Unified Board Meeting.  The twitter feed is live on the right hand column or click @laschoolreport.

With growing opposition around the country to the Common Core State Standards, one governor found an easy way to get rid of them: Change the name. Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona, feeling pressure from groups that believe the standards are a “federal intrusion,” has ordered state agencies to stop using the term “Common Core.’’ Instead, she has...

The election campaign for president of the teachers union, UTLA, has expanded with a third candidate entering the race, joining the incumbent, Warren Fletcher, and a previously-announced challenger, Alex Caputo-Pearl, a member of the Progressive Educators for Action caucus within the union. The new candidate, David Garcia, is a former Navy corpsman and veteran of the first Gulf War...

Richard Vladovic, president of the LA Unified School Board, has agreed to meet with a coalition of community groups that claimed Vladovic was ignoring their requests to meet over spending issues. The meeting has been scheduled for 11 a.m. Oct. 18, and it follows a sequence of events that began with a letter the coalition, known as CLASS,...

What would federal shutdown mean for California education? Federal money for education will continue to flow into California, with some caveats, even with a government shutdown. The big-ticket federal education programs in California – $1.8 billion a year for low-performing schools and $1.4 billion a year for special education – will be unscathed, according to...

The state of California and its two biggest teachers unions are asking a state Superior Court to throw out a case about getting rid of “ineffective teachers,” saying passage of a bill now before Gov. Jerry Brown would make the lawsuit unnecessary. Lawyers for the plaintiffs responded by calling the request a “sham,” arguing that the...