The LA Unified school board will consider major upgrades at school sites throughout the district at their regular meeting Tuesday. The Facilities Services Division is asking the board to approve district bonds for projects including replacing a half-century-old canopy over a stairwell, replacing 60-year-old bleachers, upgrading walk-in freezers at 305 schools and replacing ovens, ice machines and...

George McKenna doesn’t talk about it much, but Denzel Washington played him in a TV movie called “The George McKenna Story.” Fellow LA Unified school board members may occasionally rib him about it, and on a recent tour of an elementary school, Superintendent Michelle King pointed it out to impress the students. “This man had...

The tag line of the film “The George McKenna Story” (also known as “Hard Lessons”) is a punny George McKenna-ism characteristic of the man it profiled. “He risked it all to make the grade,” is how the movie was advertised. In it, the heroic principal sacrifices relationships, career and safety to do the right thing for...

By Nadra Nittle As evidence mounts that punitive discipline makes students more likely to go to prison than to college, school districts in greater Los Angeles, such as Long Beach Unified and Lynwood Unified, are shifting away from suspending students or citing them for truancy. Instead, they’re making greater use of restorative justice programs, as...

LA Unified Local District Northwest Superintendent Vivian Ekchian faced an angry and skeptical group of West Hills residents Thursday evening as she presented the district’s plan to redevelop a long-shuttered and dilapidated elementary school into a high school serving 500 students. The anger stemmed from the school board’s sudden cancellation last month of a plan that had...

By Caroline Bermudez With the Los Angeles Board of Education poised to consider the expansion of another successful charter school at its March 8 meeting, parents demanding more choice deserve to know what is driving the district’s questionable practices around charter review. There is an anti-charter narrative so strong that it defies reason, and few...

By Lida Jennings In many ways, Los Angeles is the birthplace of Teach For America. It was at University of Southern California 25 years ago that Wendy Kopp gathered 500 idealistic corps members for the very first summer training institute and launched them into teaching positions at high-poverty schools in Los Angeles and across the...

By Jeremy Loudenback In January, the Los Angeles Unified School District chose longtime local teacher and administrator Michelle King to head the nation’s second largest school district. The first African American woman to serve as district superintendent, King will oversee about 650,000 students at more than 900 schools across the city. LAUSD students include more...

School overcrowding is down and buildings are safer and updated. But according to a recent report, there’s still $60 billion worth of work needed on LA Unified schools. Since 1997 an unprecedented series of bonds approved specifically for school buildings to ease overcrowding has provided the district with $19.5 billion. While the district has completed 20,000 modernization...