East LA native Monica Garcia only planned on working for LA Unified for three weeks.  That was way back in 2001, when former Board member Jose Huizar asked her to be his first chief of staff. But Garcia, now 44, ended up replacing her boss when he was elected to City Council. The job of...

“There is no reasonable explanation for why firing a teacher in California is such a time-consuming, tortuous and expensive procedure… Appeals often drag on for years — during which the school district must pay the teachers’ salaries and benefits — and almost invariably favor the teachers… The dysfunctional process benefits no one except bad teachers. The...

Former School Board candidate John Fernandez is among a handful of voices urging to teachers to vote against the tentative agreement struck between UTLA and LAUSD regarding teacher evaluations earlier this year. “The big problem is the district and the union have not figured out how much weight they will count for,” said Fernandez, who...

“In many states, perhaps all but I don’t know one way or the other, boards of education have to approve the receipt of all grants.  However, I am not aware of boards being required to approve grant applications,” says Donald McAdams, Center for Reform of School Systems (and 1990-2002 Houston school board member).  “If a superintendent was...

Jeneen Robinson, the would-be school board candidate for the Westside’s District 4, is meeting with the elections division tomorrow to contest her non-qualification for the March ballot, according to her campaign manager, Kevin Durst. “It’s kind of odd,” Durst told LA School Report. “We turned in 1000 names and only 360 were valid, according to the electoral office. We’re...

The New York Times is reporting that Participant Media, the production company behind “Waiting For Superman” as well as several other features and documentaries, is creating a new cable channel of its own to create more do-gooder fare from the likes of Davis Guggenheim, Morgan Spurlock, and others. Maybe they’ll make something out of Stray...

The Coalition for School Reform has a Board. It has a website, albeit one left over from 2011.  It has a campaign consultant team.  Now all it needs are candidates. Although the Coalition won’t formally announce its slate of candidates until January, its picks are widely expected to include school board President Monica Garcia in...

All around the nation, school districts are trying innovative things to make schools work better for kids. LAUSD has some of these elements – charter schools, for example, and federally funded merit pay. There’s no shortage of talented individuals, dedicated educators, and generous benefactors willing to help speed the process of change. But because of...

In the aftermath of Friday’s deadly school shooting, the California teachers pension fund — the largest teachers’ retirement fund in the United States — is rethinking its $500 million investment in Cerberus, a private equity firm that owns a gun manufacturer called Freedom Group, according to this story in the LA Times. After the teachers pension fund announced Monday...

The March 5 elections are less than three months away, and campaigns and advocates are busy hiring campaign consultants. The San Francisco-based SCN Strategies political consulting firm has confirmed that they will manage the independent expenditure (IE) campaign for the Coalition for School Reform. Meantime, three individual candidates — both union-endorsed and otherwise — have hired SG&A Campaigns to...