LA School Report

Some See Adult-School Funding Shift as Disastrous The Los Angeles Unified School District cut its adult program by about 75% in the last two years, but Supt. John Deasy has recommended maintaining the current $100 million budget next year, said Michael Romero, executive director of district’s division. LA Times At Academic Decathlon, El Rancho High Keeps...

Can’t live without education news between Friday and Monday? Check in here for news you might have missed or interesting tidbits that come in over the weekend: [widgets_on_pages id=”Twitter Live Posts”] As always, retweets (RTs) aren’t endorsements.

Last month’s New York Times Sunday Magazine feature story about students, stress, and standardized testing included an anecdote about Bright Star Charter Academy student Armando Rodriguez.  Rodriguez loves competition and generally thrives under pressure, but didn’t feel so good when he took the SATs: Occasionally, he’d look up from his exam to see everyone else working on their...

At first glance, the upcoming District 6 (East San Fernando Valley) runoff election between Antonio Sanchez and Monica Ratliff looks like it might share many similarities to the District 5 election two years ago. The 2011 runoff (for an area running from Los Feliz to Maywood) pitted reform candidate Luis Sanchez (no relation to Antonio) against...

For all the time and effort spent trying to unseat District 4 School Board member Steve Zimmer in the primary, the Coalition-funded TV ad campaign relied almost entirely on the single “Talking Benches” ad.  Here’s an alternative that might have had more effect — or backfired: a YouTube video showing  Zimmer touting his independence at the...

In September, I was talking about pension reform on my now-defunct weekly podcast, LA Redux with the LA Times’ David Zahniser, who covers City Hall (and is in my opinion one of the best reporters in Los Angeles). Zahniser said that he hardly ever uses the word ‘reform,’ in his stories, although editors sometimes ad it in. “‘Reform’ is just...

Dramatic Dip in ‘Pink Slips’ Given to Teachers Reports are still trickling in, but the number could be as low as 2,600 notices statewide – down 87 percent from the 20,000 “pink slips” issued last year and just a 10th of the 26,000 notices issued in 2010, the peak during the recession, according to the California...

As you can see, life at Westeros Valley High is pretty brutal. You don’t really have to know much about Game of Thrones to enjoy. Via ONTD

As you may recall, Tuesday’s LA Times included an editorial calling for LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy to change the guideline he recently issued to principals that called for student achievement to be no more than 30 percent of a teacher’s evaluation. Thirty percent was perhaps too high a figure, according to the Times, and had been...

At the LAUSD Board meeting this Tuesday, March 19, Board Member Bennett Kayser is slated to introduce a resolution that would create new rules governing how new magnet schools are created — and who has the authority to approve them. Under the Kayser proposal, a majority of the full-time, unionized teaching staff at a school...