This is part of a series looking at the various types of schools in LA Unified. Read more on charters, magnet schools and affiliated charters.  Question: What is an independent charter school? Answer: Independent charter schools at LA Unified are publicly financed but independently run educational institutions. Charters are authorized and overseen by a local school district, county...

California’s voters have an improved view of public education in the state and want to increase the funds schools get, according to an annual PACE/USC Rossier School of Education poll. Researchers noted that voters’ optimism regarding their local public schools has reached a high point since the poll began five years ago. Twenty-three percent of Californians...

Charter families have lined up at dawn in biting cold winds holding babies. They’ve sweated it out for hours standing around ice chests or taking turns under canopies. They’ve waited hours—sometimes nearly a full a day—to get into an LA Unified school board meeting. Then, they wait hours more just to be heard. School Board...

Note: This post originally appeared on Education Post. By Caroline Bermudez Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, writes about “a never-ending stream of charter scandals coming from California” in Valerie Strauss’ Answer Sheet, a blog more slanted than the Leaning Tower of Pisa. But as is typically true with Burris, her writing is long...

By Sonya Heisters There is a growing, and arguably overwhelming, array of ways to measure school performance. Many researchers and policymakers say that we’ve been measuring the wrong things and, in some cases, I think that those naysayers are on to something. Then, in Thursday’s California State Board of Education meeting, the board unanimously adopted a new accountability system that, in...

Their logo features a wild-eyed horned character holding out a candy cane. Their promotional video features eerie music, children running backward and lots of spiders. They want to take children on field trips to local cemeteries. Members of the Satanic Temple of Los Angeles are hoping to host After School Satan Clubs that will be targeted toward...

LA Unified officials and a team of volunteers hit the streets Friday, knocking on the doors of high school dropouts in an effort to get them re-enrolled in school as part of the district’s Student Recovery Day. Among the door knockers was Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who along with LA Unified Board President Steve...

Despite calls for creating an overall rating, the California State Board of Education on Thursday approved a new evaluation system for schools that will display outcomes on a number of measures moving away from a system that relies on standardized test scores. More than 100 speakers signed up to address the 11-member board during the...

LA Unified throws away an average of one ton of food per school every week. That’s the equivalent of 600 tons of organic waste for the entire district each week, or “equivalent to 200 elephants of waste a week,” said Robert Laughton, director of the school district’s Office of Environmental Health and Safety. Laughton gave...

After LA Unified skyrocketed from a projected 49 percent graduation rate last fall to a record-setting 75 percent for the 2015-16 school year, academic experts, California public universities, editorial boards and even the school board president are all asking hard questions about one major aspect of the turnaround — online credit recovery. How rigorous are those...