LA School Report

A proposal to require the Los Angeles teachers union (UTLA) to adopt an online voting system for electing its leaders has qualified as a ballot measure (see petition wording here), LA School Report has learned. It must now be taken to the rank and file for a vote. Megan Markevich, a middle school English teacher who...

A broad coalition of more than 40 community and advocacy groups is jumping into LA Unified’s prolonged spending debate, urging the board to allow individual schools, rather than centralized administrators, to decide how to spend the billions of dollars coming into the district from Gov. Jerry Brown‘s Local Control Funding Formula program. Organized by the...

California truancy is at ‘crisis’ level, says attorney general One out of every four California elementary school students — nearly 1 million total — are truant each year, an “attendance crisis” that is jeopardizing their academic futures and depriving schools of needed dollars, the state attorney general said in a report to be released Monday....

A neat interactive mapping widget called “States in Motion” has just been posted on EdSource. The map visualizes data like teacher salaries, student to teacher ratios, growth in enrollments and scores and compares it to other states. It’s the creation of Jeff Camp, who works with a nonprofit volunteer organization called Full Circle Fund.

Competing visions for future spending will be on grand display again Tuesday when the LA Unified Board of Education meets to put Superintendent John Deasy’s budget plan to a vote (or not) and consider a competing resolution (or not) that would tell him how to spend the money. (See the agenda here.) Confusing? Welcome to Budgeting 101,...

L.A. Unified reports 71 iPads are missing Los Angeles school district officials are trying to track down 71 missing iPads — including 69 from one campus — but said Thursday that new security measures are designed to frustrate future thefts. Officials also acknowledged that student hacking of an iPad security system last week was more widespread than originally...

Who pays if L.A. Unified students lose or break iPads? Another issue in the Los Angeles Unified School District’s $1-billion effort to equip every student with an iPad surfaced Wednesday: Are parents liable if their child breaks or loses the tablet? The question emerged after revelations that 300 or so students at Roosevelt High School...