When LA Unified and five other school districts unveiled a new school accountability system in February, it represented California’s first significant move toward incorporating more than just test scores while also valuing how well the neediest students are performing. The School Quality Improvement Index, which was developed by the California Office to Reform Education (CORE), is...

An Airbnb for school choice! The Tesla of curriculum! A Fitbit that tracks student learning! We’ll find out if these are real pitches at the 2016 ASU GSV Summit in San Diego this week — probably not — where an impressive gathering of entrepreneurs, policy leaders, superintendents and investors will convene to discuss ideas aimed...

It was bound to happen sooner or later. In implementing the Every Student Succeeds Act, the nation’s new education law, the odds were high that the U.S. Department of Education would issue a regulation meant to protect the rights of poor children (for instance), that congressional Republicans would interpret as the department’s effort to chew...

The day after the state Court of Appeal ruled that the job protections for teachers do not predominantly harm minority students, the key players in the case said they feel confident the California Supreme Court will take up the issue. The three-judge panel reversed a landmark 2014 ruling by Superior Judge Rolf Treu, who struck...

Yep, it’s just a toilet. That’s what the students are saying at Santee Education Complex where today they’ve become the first LA Unified school to have a gender-neutral restroom. The issue has become controversial throughout the country, with some states passing laws restricting transgendered people’s restroom use and boycotts being waged against certain cities and states. The...

The California Court of Appeal on Thursday overturned a lower court ruling that had challenged teacher tenure and declared school employment laws unconstitutional. The nine student plaintiffs intend to appeal the ruling to the California Supreme Court, according to a statement from StudentsMatter, a group representing the students. The three-judge panel unanimously reversed Vergara v....

Vergara v. California was reversed today. The landmark lawsuit sought to scuttle teacher tenure laws and “last in, first out” layoff policies, stating they disproportionately harm minority and low-income students. The plaintiffs – nine students in five California public school districts – argued that five laws governing teacher dismissal deprive them of their right to a quality...

Another $40.3 million was approved to repair and run the beleaguered MiSiS computer system for the next year, but the big question at Tuesday’s LA Unified School Board meeting was how much it will cost to maintain once all the repairs are done. The answer came late into the nearly six-hour meeting when board member Monica Ratliff asked Diane...

Although an ethnic studies mandate was approved by the school board in 2014, LA Unified is only now taking steps to fulfill their hope of getting ethnic studies into every high school. But it won’t be a graduation requirement any time soon, and it won’t be a requirement for the class of 2019, as the school...

LA School Report on Monday published a comprehensive top-to-bottom list of all 714 schools that were evaluated by a new accountability system LA Unified developed along with five other California districts, but missing from the data were independent charter schools. With over 210 of these kinds of schools and 101,000 students enrolled in them at...