“Good for the committee that … put the brakes on this poorly planned effort Wednesday.” LA Times: A Tablet in Every Backpack?    

One of the most interesting things about Hillel Aron’s new LA Weekly profile about the race for District 4 (Can Kate Anderson Fix LAUSD?) is that Anderson was recruited to run against incumbent Board member Steve Zimmer. Defeating Zimmer may not be particularly difficult if he’s left hanging in the wind by UTLA, who isn’t particularly enamored with him, either....

Independent expenditure (IE) committees are poised to once again spend millions in the upcoming March 2013 LAUSD Board election, but despite city disclosure laws, the information available to the public is limited and uneven. One of the main reasons is that while the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission requires IE committees to disclose all contributions,...

A total of 356 teachers nominated themselves for seats on UTLA’s 350-member House of Representatives, triggering internal elections for UTLA policy-setting body that that have not been required in recent years due to low numbers. There will be elections held in 22 of the 32 electoral districts (see list of nominees in contested areas here). In...

Inspired by innovations in sports statistics, the New York Times‘ statistics guru Nate Silver, and all the Gates Foundation talk about the value of school climate surveys, a group of Yale seniors led by North Hollywood High School alumn Aaron Feuer (son of Mike) has developed a relatively cheap, cloud-based software platform called Panorama that can help schools conduct...

You might be surprised to learn that Los Angeles isn’t one of the top five districts when it comes to the percentage of kids who attend charter schools. The top five according to a new report from the National Association of Public Charter Schools are New Orleans, Detroit, Washington D.C., Kansas City (Missouri), Flint, Gary, and St. Louis. But...

Today, members from the Bond Oversight Committee blocked Phase I of Superintendent John Deasy’s plan to provide tablet computers for all students and faculty by the end of 2013. The first phase of Deasy’s plan called for spending $17.4 million on tablets for 14 secondary schools. The Bond Oversight Committee voted 7-3 to approve the...

Board Members Tamar Galatzan, Monica Garcia, Nury Martinez, and Richard Vladovic voted “no”; Bennett Kayser and Steve Zimmer voted “yes.” Marguerite LaMotte left the room, so her vote was counted as “absent.”

Nobody seems to know just how deeply involved in fundraising for Board candidates or other measures to preserve his education legacy Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is going to be during the upcoming months. So it’s interesting to see his byline on a recent oped touting the importance of education in general and in particular the controversial “parent trigger”...

NBC News: Budget cuts can’t stop music at LA school