By Raul Meza | Via: Thinking L.A., a partnership of UCLA and Zócalo Public Square The Worst Thing About My Job as a School Custodian Has Always Been the Pay. Now I’m Imagining What a Difference $15 Per Hour Will Make. Monday through Friday, my full-time job is cleaning restrooms at Van Nuys High School....

LA Unified must come up with $16 million this year to pay an unexpected bill as a result of legislation signed by Governor Jerry Brown aimed at rescuing the state’s teachers retirement pension system known as CalSTRS, but the district’s total increase is much higher, estimated to reach an extra $1.1 billion over the next seven...

Two high performing LA Unified charter schools, Magnolia Science Academy 6 and Magnolia Science Academy 7, have been ordered to shut down after failing a new round of scrutiny, leaving the possibility that 450 students will be looking for a new school in the fall. The two schools had initially been approved for renewal by...

Stating that “teachers and principals are not the problem,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan took to the podium at the White House today to unveil a national initiative aimed at addressing “systematic inequities” that shortchange some schools and disproportionately affect students in high-poverty, high-minority areas. While Duncan called teachers and principals “absolutely essential elements of...

For the second time in recent weeks, Tamar Galatzan has turned a critical eye toward LA Unified’s Bond Oversight Committee and the role it plays in monitoring district spending on bond-funded projects. At the board meeting on Tuesday, she objected to the BOC’s wholesale approval of a library project that earmarked $116,000 to move library...

Members of the school service workers union, SEIU Local 99, have ratified their three-year contract agreement with LA Unified, raising the wage of nearly 20,000 workers to $15 an hour by July 1, 2016. The union said in a statement early this morning that 82 percent of the members approved the contract after three days...

As LAUSD kicked off its newly expanded summer school program last month, accommodating more students than ever before, one thing became clear: Sometimes, more money means more problems. And one problem district officials didn’t anticipate was finding enough teachers who wanted to work in the summer. Without a sufficient number, the district scrambled to fill...

Nearly two months after its launching, the LA Unified Sustainable Environment Enhancement Developments for Schools (SEEDS) initiative is off to a slow start. In May, nearly 70 school representatives, community partners and LAUSD employees attended the SEEDS program kick-off event, but only eight applications have come in so far. But no worries, said LAUSD’s chief...

The stage was set with the two public education luminaries, ready to square off on such lightning rod issues as tenure and teacher dismissal laws in the wake of last month’s Vergara trial: Randi Weingarten, leader of the nation’s second largest teachers organization, AFT, and Superintendent John Deasy, leader of the second largest school district in the...