LA School Report

Oakland, California They come to the enrollment office at 18, 19, or 20, often without transcripts, identification or immunizations. Some have massive gaps in their education and many speak little English. Any one of these would be reason enough for districts across the country to deny admission, but not here. With ample enrollment staff speaking...

If asked to name the school districts that do the best job of teaching math, people might think of wealthy enclaves like Scarsdale, New York; tech hubs in California’s Silicon Valley; or college towns like Ann Arbor, Michigan. Few of them would think of Neshoba County in Mississippi. But Neshoba County schools are doing something...

George Lee, maestro de tercer grado en Camino Nuevo Charter Academy, habla con el entusiasmo y la certeza de alguien que está donde debe estar.  “Estoy enseñando en un barrio donde crecí”, dijo Lee. “De verdad soy una parte de esta comunidad, o sea, siento una obligación como educador para realmente servir a las personas...

Leer en español aquí George Lee, a third grade teacher at Camino Nuevo Charter Academy, speaks with the confident enthusiasm of someone who is where he belongs.  “I’m teaching in a neighborhood that I grew up in,” said Lee. “I’m really a part of this community, like, I have more of an obligation as an...

North Hollywood High School is a construction zone. On any day at the North Hollywood campus, workers at the center of the historic high school campus are busy erecting an auditorium, or gutting the school’s outdated pipes.   Kids and teachers pick their way past the ongoing work, oblivious to the chatter of construction workers who...

The Santa Ana Early Learning Initiative (SAELI), a collaborative supporting families with children ages 9 and under in Santa Ana, California, aims to boost reading and math outcomes for students in kindergarten through third grade, but instead of using approaches traditionally employed by schools and districts to boost test scores, such as tutoring or data analytics, its model focuses on...

Reading rates in LAUSD schools with the onset of the coronavirus, and Los Angeles students have yet to fully recover.  Just 43.1% of LA Unified students met state proficiency targets in reading in the 2023-24 school year, compared with 44.1% in the 2018-19 school year, the last before the pandemic. Meanwhile, Families in Schools is...

The Los Angeles Unified School District was able to avoid the hard choices that many districts around the state had to make in the 2024–25 budget year. They experienced only a 2% budget reduction and did not have to lay off personnel. This may have been in part because LAUSD was able to rely on...

At John C. Fremont High School STEAM Magnet in hardscrabble South Central Los Angeles, students face an uphill battle against social and economic hardship, with violence from the neighborhood sometimes filtering onto campus.  This school year Fremont High has seen security-related lockdowns on a nearly a monthly basis, including an incident at the beginning of...

After years of political popularity, public investments in early education have mostly struggled to get traction in recent years. Federal momentum toward universal pre-K has stalled, and some successful local experiments from the 2000s and 2010s have struggled to deliver on the optimism that accompanied their launches.  California is a notable, laudable exception to this trend. In 2021, under the leadership...