A recent New York Times article about states and districts finding that just two to six percent of teachers are rated ineffective (Curious Grade for Teachers: Nearly All Pass) — even using new student achievement data has set off a ton of chatter online about whether that percentage is too low, too high, just about...

Starting tomorrow, LAUSD teachers will vote on whether or not to adopt the “Initiative for the Schools LA Students Deserve,” which would have UTLA make a series of demands including higher pay, an end to school reconstitution, and stronger advocacy for these demands. But that’s not the only decision teachers will have to make.  On...

Can’t live without education news between Friday and Monday? Check in here for news you might have missed or interesting tidbits that come in over the weekend: [widgets_on_pages id=”Twitter Live Posts”] As always, retweets (RTs) aren’t endorsements — just interesting items that we’re passing along.

Like LAUSD, we’re taking a break from our usual hectic schedule during this week.  Posting will be light this week — back to our normal schedule Monday April 1.

In the original movie version of “Stand and Deliver,” a tough high school math teacher gets his low-income, Latino students to take and pass AP Calculus. In the new “Portlandia” version of the story, it’s the students who “save” the teacher.

State Senator Alex Padilla (D-Pacoima) announced Thursday that he was shelving SB 10, his controversial bill intended to speed up and streamline the teacher dismissal process in California public schools. Now, Padilla plans to join forces with Assemblymember Joan Buchanan (D-Alamo), head of the Assembly’s Education Committee, who introduced her own alternative teacher dismissal bill...

LAUSD watchers began speculating about who the next School Board President might be almost as soon as the results of the March 5th LAUSD primary election were known. The issue gained further immediacy when the School Board voted 4-3 this Tuesday to limit the term of President to two years. Unless the Board votes to waive the...

A new report out from a Washington DC think tank closely associated with the Democratic Party takes a look at the history of “mayoral control” of big-city school systems in which City Hall runs a district rather than an independently elected Board of Education. According to the report, written by a pair of academics from...

In a new KPCC radio interview that aired earlier today, Mayor Villaraigosa surprised nobody touting his record on education — claiming to have doubled the number of schools at 800 and above in the API (academic performance index), for example — and taking aim at the notion that LAUSD should have an independent elected School...

On Monday, Mayoral candidate Wendy Greuel gained the endorsement of the powerful LA County Federation of Labor — an umbrella group of county unions. Greuel is supported by nearly every large union in the city (with the exception of UTLA). But, intriguingly, it was a member of the UTLA leadership, Gregg Solkovits, who helped convince...