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It gets worse for LAUSD: This week both the county and the state showed up to say, ‘Get your fiscal house in order or else we’re taking over’
LA Unified board members were jolted last month when a top county official showed up unannounced to say, You’re spending more money than you make and the savings you’ve been living off of are about to run out. It got worse this Tuesday, when she came back and brought a top state official with the...
By Laura Greanias | September 12, 2018
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Antonucci: The inevitable Los Angeles teachers strike — does Chicago hold the key to a solution?
Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears weekly at LA School Report. Leaders of United Teachers Los Angeles continued their preparations for a strike by approving the transfer of up to $3 million from the union’s strike fund to its general fund in order to be ready for immediate use. The first mediation session is scheduled for Sept. 27,...
By Mike Antonucci | September 11, 2018
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UTLA wanted immigrant parents’ support for a teachers strike. Instead, parents wanted to know, ‘How would this strike guarantee a high-quality education for our children?’
What will we do with our kids if the teachers go out on strike? To find answers to that question, about two dozen public school parents gathered Monday morning at a prominent Latino community organization in downtown Los Angeles. They had invited a teachers union representative to their monthly meeting so they could learn more...
By Esmeralda Fabián Romero | September 10, 2018
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How to reach your LAUSD school board member — without sleeping overnight on the sidewalk
LA Unified’s seven school board members — or six for now — make vital decisions impacting more than 570,000 students. Parents, community members, and the general public want their concerns to be heard, but what’s the best way to connect with the board members? Besides email and phone, there are board meetings most Tuesdays with...
By Esmeralda Fabián Romero | September 10, 2018
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How schools & philanthropists are joining forces to fight back against fake news: Inside the renewed push for social studies, media literacy, and civic engagement
Two of the oldest questions in Western education, going back to the ancient Greek philosophers, are: What is true? And how do you know? Thousands of years later, as superstition and pseudoscience have been replaced by conspiracy theory and ideological dogma, finding answers to those questions is as thorny as ever. The modern heirs to...
By Kevin Mahnken | September 5, 2018
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Commentary: Kids should not be collateral damage in teachers strike
With talks between United Teachers Los Angeles and LAUSD at a tense impasse and teachers voting overwhelmingly to authorize a strike, there’s one group caught in the middle that’s largely been left out of the discussion: L.A.’s kids. A strike would have a dramatic impact on the kids and families of Los Angeles, where 84...
By Katie Braude | September 4, 2018
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From the schoolhouse to the state house: These 5 teachers are running for office to say ‘No more’ to slashed education funding
If you don’t count high school student body president, Aimy Steele has never held political office. But as a teacher and school administrator, she’s run classrooms and schools, and now she’s running to represent her district in North Carolina’s state house of representatives. Steele and thousands of teachers around the country got a taste of...
By Laura Fay | September 4, 2018
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Antonucci: Staffers accuse California Teachers Association of ‘betrayal’ over post-Janus cuts
Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears weekly at LA School Report. Employees who work for the California Teachers Association claim union managers are trying to renege on an agreement in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Janus ruling, which ended the practice of unions charging agency fees to represent non-members. With teachers now free to withhold payments,...
By Mike Antonucci | September 4, 2018
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1 in 4 kindergartners is chronically absent — part of a multimillion-dollar problem for LAUSD
Los Angeles Unified has a multimillion-dollar problem: kids aren’t coming to school. And it’s particularly bad among their youngest students. New district data show that 1 in 4 kindergartners misses 15 or more days of school each year. “I couldn’t believe that when I heard that,” Diane Pappas, the superintendent’s senior adviser, told board members...
By Esmeralda Fabián Romero | September 4, 2018
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LA parent voice: ‘We want to have a voice,’ says a mom who showed up at LAUSD before dawn to make sure her community was represented
Every week, we sit down with Los Angeles parents to talk about their students, their schools, and what questions or suggestions they have for their school district. (See our previous interviews.) Sara Martínez, an LA Unified mom living in the southeast boundaries of Board District 5, had to put everything aside for one day so her voice...
By Esmeralda Fabián Romero | August 28, 2018