Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive. The National Education Association finally threw its weight into the Democratic presidential primaries, announcing Saturday night that it recommended Joe Biden for the nomination. A Biden endorsement is hardly a surprise; he is an establishment candidate, and NEA is a major player in the...

Updated, March 17 L.A. Unified Superintendent Austin Beutner in a letter to families late Monday announced that the district at this time is unable to open 40 family resource centers as initially planned, as “state and local health and public safety officials cannot assure us it will be safe for the children and adults.” There...

Deans for Impact, the organization I helped found, believes all teachers should understand basic principles of learning science. But what does that mean? We see learning science as the study of how humans think and learn — what others call cognitive science. The last several decades have deepened our scientific understanding of how our minds...

*Updated March 6 At least two competitive L.A. Unified school board races are likely headed to a November runoff following the most heated and costly primary season on record and a campaign that once again became a proxy fight over the future of charter schools. As of early Friday, no one candidate in Districts 3 or...

In one incident, a teacher grew frustrated with a student because he wouldn’t respond to her, not realizing that in the student’s Native American tribe, exhibiting silence is a sign of respect to an authority figure. As punishment, the student was denied recess. In another instance, a Native American student was accused of consuming drugs,...

The 2010s were the decade for technology to fundamentally change education. Two years before the decade’s dawn, Clayton Christensen, Michael B. Horn and Curtis Johnson predicted in their book Disrupting Class that online learning would revolutionize teacher-led instruction and catalyze a student-centered transformation in U.S. K-12 schools. As the decade began, enthusiasm for ed tech...

Policymakers are focusing on the craft of teaching reading. They must also focus on the politics. Last year’s NAEP scores continued a lackluster streak and set off a predictable bout of handwringing. This time, it was reading instruction — or, more precisely, our national pandemic of ineffective reading instruction — catching the flak. In response,...

This interview is one in a series spotlighting Los Angeles teachers, their unique and innovative classroom approaches, and their thoughts on how the education system can better support teachers in guiding students to success. More frequently, schools are giving the co-teaching model a chance but at CHIME Institute’s Schwarzenegger Community School, a charter elementary in...

Just one month after the worst K-12 school shooting in American history, then-Vice President Joe Biden held back tears as he addressed a nation mourning the 26 people killed, most of them young children. “We have a moral obligation — a moral obligation — to do everything in our power to diminish the prospect that...

“What do we need to do to make things as right as possible?” That’s the pivotal question we ask our students when practicing restorative justice in school, and I think it’s one we should be asking in the current Los Angeles Unified School Board elections. In schools, restorative justice is an alternative to exclusionary discipline...