LA School Report

Saturday provides dueling campaign events in LAUSD Board District 2, which includes Central and East Los Angeles. Candidate Robert Skeels is inviting supporters to walk the precincts in Boyle Heights to get out the word on his campaign (for details, click here). Perhaps not coincidentally, it’s the same day that his opponent, incumbent Monica Garcia...

Tuesday night at the charter board meeting for John Macdonogh High School in New Orleans, there were at least a few parents and community members upset about how things were going at the school handed over to Steve Barr’s Future Is Now charter network last year. One key aspect of the emotion-filled event was the first...

Last weekend, School Board candidate Kate Anderson kicked off her campaign. This weekend, LAUSD Board President Monica Garcia and supporters will kick off her reelection campaign on Saturday, January 19 at 9:00 a.m. in East Los Angeles. Garcia is running for a third term in District 2, an area that stretches from Central to East...

Nearly 100 parents of students attending 24th St. Elementary dropped off a “parent trigger” petition yesterday at LAUSD’s headquarters, demanding drastic reforms and new governance for the school. At LAUSD, the parents received a “strikingly” different reception than parents received in previous instances of the parent trigger, according to the LA Times‘ Teresa Watanabe. And...

United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) announced in the latest edition of its weekly newsletter that it plans to mail out surveys next week that give UTLA members the opportunity to grade LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy’s performance. It’s common knowledge that UTLA’s leadership, including union President Warren Fletcher, has often been critical of Deasy’s policies...

Parents Demand Charter in LAUSD’s First Parent Trigger Campaign A high-spirited group of nearly 100 parents descended on the Los Angeles Unified district office Thursday and turned in petitions demanding sweeping changes at their failing school in the first use of the controversial parent trigger law in the city.  LA Times See also: LA Daily...

Changed votes by two Board members over the approval of two Aspire charter schools at this week’s Board meeting gave the public a glimpse at a much larger debate over whether charter schools based in Los Angeles should be allowed to operate their special education programs through a partnership with a far-off district that costs...

Green Dot Public Schools, a network of unionized charter schools, is announcing a handful of changes to the Locke High School cluster of schools that will be of interest to admirers and critics. Located near Watts, Locke was converted to charter school status through a 2007 teacher petition and given over to Green Dot in...

The independent TFA spinoff known as Leadership for Educational Equity (LEE) has been quietly staffing up the past few months, including not only Joy SIlvern, former staffer to US Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO) and Obama for America policy person but also communications guru Michael Amodeo (another veteran of the Obama campaign) and former TFA LA executive...

Today is the last day for LA teachers union members to submit their votes to support or reject the teacher evaluation agreement that has been hashed out between UTLA leadership and LAUSD. In the January 15 edition of its weekly newsletter, UTLA urges its members, in so many words, to support the tentative agreement, warning teachers...