LA School Report

Bill Restricting ‘Willful Defiance’ for Suspending Students Moves Ahead With new data showing that more than half of all suspensions and a quarter of expulsions in California schools are for “willful defiance” of school authorities, the Assembly Education Committee voted 6-0 on Wednesday to move forward a bill that would restrict the use of the...

The LA Times editorial page has established its independence on education issues several times in recent months — through its candidate endorsements and its views on charter school accountability, teacher evaluations, the parent trigger, and teacher dismissal proposals (among several examples). So it’s all the more striking that editorial page writer Karin Klein took to the newspaper’s pages yesterday to denounce the...

A bill sponsored by State Senator Bob Huff (R-Diamond Bar) that would expand the current “parent trigger” law to include more of California’s lowest performing schools was scheduled for a hearing by the Assembly Education Committee earlier today. The current 2010 version of the law has a cap limiting parent trigger takeovers to 75 schools...

Most of the news coverage surrounding last week’s union straw poll on LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy focused on the whopping 91 percent of teachers who expressed “no confidence” in his leadership and treated the result as if it had some sort of real-world impact. What got left out or minimized along the way was the...

Fresh off a controversial April 2012 renewal, the El Sereno charter school called Academia Semillas has refused to comply with an LAUSD audit, according to this December 2012 report by the Office of the Inspector General. “Repeated attempts to obtain this information from the school were unsuccessful and the school chose to communicate to the OIG exclusively through...

LAUSD Board Votes to Improve Abuse Investigations With 278 Los Angeles Unified educators sitting in “teacher jail,” the school board voted Tuesday to streamline and improve the investigations of those accused of serious physical abuse or sexual misconduct. LA Daily News See also: LA School Report, LA Times L.A. Unified Board Ratifies ‘Parent-Trigger’ Partnership The...

Tuesday’s Board meeting began with a moment of silence for the victims and survivors of the Boston Marathon bombing and the memory of teacher and activist Sal Castro. During the following hours came several key decisions including the unanimous passage of Board member Tamar Galatzan’s resolution to streamline teacher misconduct investigations and the unanimous renewal for...

While LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy says that a federal waiver from the law known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) could free up $80 million for student and teacher support services for the district — without reducing school accountability — and the Obama Administration has begun reviewing the LAUSD waiver request, state education officials and...

Follow LA School Report‘s Hillel Aron, who is livetweeting from the School Board Meeting: [widgets_on_pages id=”Twitter Live Posts”]

The agenda for today’s School Board meeting is packed with hot-topic resolutions, including a plan to streamline LAUSD’s teacher misconduct investigation process, a call to work with state legislators to pass a new teacher dismissal bill, and a plan to reduce student suspensions and discipline for “willful defiance” in LA schools. These topics have received...