Although the brawl that took place on the Sylmar High School campus Monday is garnering national attention, it’s for the wrong reasons. “It was not race related, it was not about bullying,” said principal James Lee, who came to the school four years ago. Lee allowed students to take over the stage on Wednesday night at...

By Jill Tucker The taxpayer-supported Teach for America program, which supplies enthusiastic if inexperienced teachers to thousands of schools in lower-income areas across the country, has fallen out of favor in San Francisco. The city’s school board made clear this week that staffing some of the city’s neediest classrooms with recent college graduates who are...

The LA Unified school board broke into a surprise closed session for several hours Tuesday afternoon in the middle of their public meeting in order to head off a potential “parent trigger” lawsuit over 20th Street Elementary School. All morning, the school board was in closed session to discuss employee actions, contract renewals and pending litigation....

Almost without comment Tuesday, the LA Unified school board voted unanimously to seek help from outside the district to replicate high-achieving schools. The resolution was introduced by Monica Garcia and Ref Rodriguez and asks the district staff to “seek outside support for the funding” to replicate successful school programs in areas of high need in the...

LA Unified board members asked Tuesday for an in-depth analysis of a union-funded report stating that the district loses more than half a billion dollars because of independent charter schools. A response from the California Charter Schools Association, delivered after an hours-long recess while the school board met in closed session to address litigation against the district, called...

  Sylmar High School has quieted down and an assembly is planned after a lunchtime brawl disrupted the campus on Monday. The 20-minute incident involving at least 40 students was captured on cellphone video and posted on YouTube. Principal James Lee told LA School Report, “This was an incident that just snowballed, and it had to do...

The LA Unified school board is scheduled to hold an open session meeting today at 1 p.m. Items on the agenda include a teachers union-commissioned report on the financial impact that independent charter schools have on the district, and a resolution from board members Monica Garcia and Ref Rodriguez calling on the district to more aggressively court...

These days, Washington, D.C., policymakers are focused on working through the details of implementing the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which is replacing No Child Left Behind as the nation’s preeminent federal education legislation. The deliberations have included some conversations about how the law treats multilingual students. It’s early days to know how ESSA — and...

The 2016 presidential campaign has hardly lived up to the ideal of a civil exchange of ideas facilitating a peaceful democracy. But a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center suggests that the acrimony from the campaign trail may be having a broader, negative effect on society — particularly in American schools. An online survey of...

Many high school seniors think of spring as college admission season. Yet the nation’s most selective colleges seem determined to rebrand it as rejection season. Increasingly, the marketplace has rewarded colleges that turn away the most students, and the competition to be competitive has become white-hot. Winning that competition may be great for colleges, but...