LA School Report

When former UTLA head A.J. Duffy helped found Apple Academy, a charter school, in 2011, it seemed like the ultimate case of a zebra changing his stripes. Nearly a year later, Duffy still gets quoted in the Times, but he’s no longer head of Apple, which didn’t enroll enough kids to justify his salary, and...

• LAUSD is cutting adult education offerings in half– and that’s the good news, since some were afraid that the program would be completely eliminated. “An agreement by LAUSD’s unions to take up to 10 unpaid days restored about $105 million for Adult Ed, enough to accommodate about 105,000 students.” Daily News • LA School Police...

• A delightful piece by Barbara Jones profiles the latest scheme by LAUSD to make a little extra cash: selling advertising space on about 70 vans and delivery trucks. Actually seems like a pretty good idea, although it’s only earning $157,000– so far. Daily News • A typically equivocating LA Times editorial praises the judge’s recent...

LAUSD’s social media director, Stephanie Abrams (pictured) has already been the subject of a smattering of news coverage and is featured in next month’s Scholastic Administrator magazine.   In the meantime one of Abrams’ biggest projects, a social media survey of the district, is out, and The Journal has some coverage.  Here’s LAUSD’s Tumblr announcement....

Well, late-morning reading, anyway. • LAUSD is giving schools more options to have various levels of autonomy from the district, saying it will help teachers and administrators move away from a “one-size-fits-all” approach to education. It’s another example of how the charter school movement is placing competitive pressure on LAUSD to diversify, experiment and improve....

Prop 32 would have huge implications for LAUSD politics, drastically limiting the amount of money unions could spend on local races. In 2011, UTLA spent over $2 million on school board races. And at first it seems like a straightforward, partisan issue– Democrats and Unions vs. Republicans and rich guys. But one Democrat has stepped forward to support...

Per yesterday’s post about Congressional deliberations over alt cert teachers, LAUSD says that there are 24,466 fully credentialed classroom teachers [I’m assuming these are folks who came through an alternative route but are now done with their credits and fully certified], plus 199 NCLB-compliant interns [I’m guessing all or most of these are TFA corps members...

Speaking of court cases (see below), the House education committee held a hearing about alternative certification yesterday in Washington, trying to figure out what to do about the quickly-expiring NCLB exemption for alternative route candidates in LAUSD and nationally.  All indications are that Congress is going to extend the alt cert program, but if it...

• Judge James C. Chalfant has set a deadline for LAUSD to comply with the Stull Act, which, according to the judge’s decision last month, mandates that objective measurement of pupil progress be included in teacher evaluations. Or rather, the judge sent the attorneys into the hallway of the courthouse to hammer out an agreement. They came...

Michelle Rhee’s organization, Students First, a Sacramento-based ed reform group, has produced a very bizarre TV ad, that Rhee showed on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday: