It’s a big meeting day at LA Unified’s downtown headquarters, with three committees convening one after another starting this afternoon. At 1 o’clock, it’s the Curriculum and Instruction Committee, chaired by Marguerite LaMotte; followed at 3 p.m. by the Budget, Facilities and Audit Committee, led by Bennett Kayser; and at 5:30 by the Common Core...

Via The Los Angeles Times | By Howard Blume Providing Apple iPads to Los Angeles students will cost nearly $100 more apiece — or $770 per tablet, a new school district budget shows. This potential sticker shock can be avoided, but only after the L.A. Unified School District has spent at least $400 million for...

The number of LA Unified 12th-graders taking the SAT test rose last year, along with the District’s average test scores on critical reading, mathematics, and writing portions of the exam, according to new data from the College Board, which develops the test. Nearly half of the most recent graduating class took the SAT, 22,106 seniors for...

An expert in school board governance says that a censure vote is rare and has the potential to fracture a board even beyond its existing rifts. Christopher Maricle, a policy program officer and governance consultant for the California School Board Association, says the effort to publicly condemn a school district president could be an extremely divisive...

Via the Los Angeles Times | Editorial John Deasy, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, can be impatient and stubborn, qualities we often admire in him. It takes a sense of urgency to get things moving in L.A.’s schools, as well as a willingness to stand against the forces that resist change....

A coalition of community groups known by the acronym, CLASS, finally had a meeting today with LA Unified Board President Richard Vladovic. The groups’ mission was to press the case for individual schools, rather than district administrators, deciding how to spend money coming into LA Unified from Gov. Jerry Brown‘s new Local Control Funding Formula,...

Theodore B. Olson, the former U.S. Solicitor General, previewed arguments yesterday in Vergara v. California, a lawsuit that strives to protect equal educational opportunity in California by ensuring that all students have access to effective teaching. Speaking at the National Summit on Education Reform in Boston, Olson appeared with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and...

Eight weeks ago Mayor Eric Garcetti named his new education deputy, Thelma Melendez de Santa Ana. In that time, only a few people have any idea who she is what she does or how she’s going to do it. She has met with various board members and some community groups in her official capacity as...