You might enjoy (or be appalled by) this Thursday night segment from the CNN Show Anderson Cooper 360 including footage of reporter Kyung Lah chasing the four SB1530 abstainers around the statehouse. It’s a little heavy-handed, but three of the four legislators play right into CNN’s hands by ducking interviews and issuing terse “no comments”...

Last Friday afternoon in his office high up on the 24th floor of  the district’s downtown headquarters, LAUSD superintendent John Deasy seemed both excited about the school year that had just started and also clear about the realities of the complex task ahead of him. Deasy taught math and science before becoming an administrator and then a...

Rumors are flying fast and furious about Assembly Bill 5, a proposed amendment to the Stull Act offered by San Fernando Valley Assemblyman Felipe Fuentes. The latest word from EdSource is that AB 5 is being revised slightly to try and mollify opponents and also to help make the state eligible for a No Child Left...

Last week I tweeted out the arrival of Atul Gawande’s recent New Yorker article about what the medical industry could learn from the restaurant chain called the Cheesecake Factory, suggesting that maybe there were things that the education industry could learn from the article as well: “Our costs are soaring, the service is typically mediocre, and...

Martin Sandoval was the principal of Miramonte Elementary last year during the horrific sexual abuse scandal that included teacher Mark Berndt. As Scott Johnson notes on the blog Mayor Sam, Sandoval was reassigned to Sierra Park Elementary in El Sereno. Johnson spotted this angry Facebook post from a Sierra Park parent: Friends i am horrified…Superintendent Deasy…SHAME ON U..Some1...

Tomorrow, the Sacramento-based school reform advocacy group Ed Voice will have a full-page ad (seen on the left, click to enlarge) in the LA Times calling on the state legislature and Governor Jerry Brown to oppose AB 5. The Felipe Fuentes-sponsored bill would make all teacher evaluations subject to collective-bargaining agreements. A number of other...

This morning, the school board unanimously and without discussion passed a symbolic resolution in support of both Propositions 30 and 38, two separate state ballot measures that would raise taxes to fund education. Then, for good measure, when the board came back at noon after a closed session, it voted to pass two additional symbolic...

As we mentioned earlier, the Adelanto school board voted, on friday night, to set up a “community advisory board” to reform the parent-trigger targeted Desert Trails Elementary, but to reject the petition for a charter. “They decided they could thumb their nose at the court decision,” Parent Revolution spokesman David Phelps told me today. Phelps...

When the LAUSD Board meets tomorrow morning at 9 am, the first item of business will be which of the competing tax measures on the November ballot to support. Governor Jerry Brown is pushing proposition 30 while Molly Munger is pushing prop 38. The state’s rank-and-file Democrats are lining up to support the governor’s measure,...

There are two big articles about teacher preparation programs in the news this week — and one about poverty — that don’t focus specifically on LAUSD but are well worth knowing about for anyone concerned with education reform.