The elected leaders of Los Angeles’s public schools sent a strong signal Tuesday that LA needs bold leadership, choosing Los Angeles businessman Austin Beutner as superintendent of schools. Beutner is both an insider and an outsider. He has deep ties in Los Angeles and a demonstrated commitment to civic service. The former investment banker served...

The principals of 227 struggling Los Angeles schools may be about to get a coveted freedom: the ability to hire the teachers they believe will best educate their students. As common-sense as that sounds, it’s not currently the case at the LA Unified School District, nor at most school districts nationwide. Today, all LA Unified...

Las Vegas teachers, fed up with how their dues are being spent, voted overwhelmingly late Wednesday to cut all ties with their state and national parent unions. The vote by the members of the Clark County Education Association, which represents almost 20,000 teachers in the Las Vegas area, is a significant loss to the National...

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.) Erika López and her two younger children have been homeless for two years. She’s endured domestic violence. An older son didn’t graduate high school, another is...

Military-connected students — about 1.3 million of them in the United States — face a host of problems their civilian peers don’t. They move six to nine times in the course of their K-12 careers, forcing them to deal with everything from different GPA calculations and course offerings to missed opportunities to try out for...

Although America’s children spend most of their days in classrooms, many of their parents find our school systems surprisingly intimidating. Between issues of curriculum and assessments, of equity and choice, of discipline and technology, and of career training and soft skills, the conversations about designing, monitoring, and perfecting classroom learning can quickly become so complex...