The California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) asked students, parents, teachers, leaders and supporters last year to share videos about their charter schools as part of a contest for thousands of dollars in cash prizes. With the deadline now passed, the CCSA has received 47 submissions and is asking the public to view the videos and...

A new state senate bill would ban the installation of any new school athletic fields or playgrounds that contain “crumb rubber” synthetic material until a full study is done on the substance. After lead was discovered at some LA Unified preschool playgrounds, the district stopped building new crumb rubber fields in 2009 and removed the...

LA Unified’s recent order for new testing devices ensures that district students will have all the technical equipment they need to take the state mandated exam later this year. Whether the Smarter Balanced test results will be used for anything is a separate issue. While intense public scrutiny over the deal between the district and...

Gov. Jerry Brown had a few words to say about public education in his State of the State address today. In effect, he saluted his effort to return more control over spending to the state’s school districts. Here’s what he had to say: “Last year, I spoke of the principle of subsidiarity, a rather clunky...

With the passing of the LA Unified school board’s “Good Food” resolution in December, a number of giant vendors the district does business with will be forced to change their practices or lose out on hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts. Tyson Foods in particular, which supplies much of the district’s chicken in a five-year $754...

As negotiations between LA Unified and its teachers union, UTLA, stumble along with still a wide gap on salaries, two Bay Area school districts, have made significant progress in their own deals with teachers. San Francisco teachers have agreed to a double-digit raise over three years while Oakland teachers are in line to get at...

SEIU Local 99, one of LA Unified’s largest and most powerful labor partners, announced today it is backing all of the incumbents running for a district school board seat in 2015. After a town hall meeting for their members, the union representing nearly 40,000 cafeteria workers, bus drivers and special education assistance, among others, made...

LA Unified sustained another legal blow this week in a “whistleblower” case that’ll cost the district millions. After nearly a month-long trial, a Los Angeles jury awarded retired Air Force Officer and Junior ROTC instructor, Archie Roundtree, $3.3 million, finding that the district had revoked his teaching certification in an act of retaliation. This latest...

A small but loud group from The Labor Community Strategy Center’s Fight for the Soul of the Cities and Community Rights Campaign protested outside of LA Unified headquarters yesterday, demanding that the LA School Police Department give up any military weapons it received through the Pentagon’s controversial 1033 Program. Check out the attached video for highlights...