The Coalition for School Reform has already spent nearly $200,000 since the March 5th primary to support Antonio Sanchez‘s bid to replace Nury Martinez as District 6 Board Member. With around $1 million left in the bank thanks to recent donations by former Mayor Richard Riordan ($50,000), New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg ($350,000), and philanthropist /...

Parents Rally to Save Classroom Breakfasts Union officials representing school cafeteria workers led a noisy rally of parents Tuesday to save a Los Angeles Unified classroom breakfast program that feeds nearly 200,000 children but was in danger of being axed after sharp criticism by teachers. Los Angeles Times See also: LA Daily News, CBS LAUSD...

There are lots of LA education folks up in Burlingame today at the NewSchools Venture Fund education summit, a one-day edtech/school reform confab. So far I’ve spotted Marco Petruzzi (Green Dot), Steve Barr (Future Is Now), and Stephanie Germeraad (Broad Center). Click here to check out the details, panels, speakers, and sponsors, or follow the...

This is a guest commentary from longtime journalist Richard Lee Colvin comparing the current debate over the leadership of LAUSD to a similar one that took place nearly a decade ago in San Diego: School board elections typically are low-cost, low-turnout, low-visibility exercises in democracy. But, in this one, philanthropists and other moneyed interests spent...

The May 14 School Board meeting two weeks from today is shaping up to be a blockbuster event featuring mass demonstrations by two unions and a host of conflict-laden issues for the Board to decide on. The teachers union has promised to hold a large rally demanding that LAUSD hire more teachers, nurses and librarians....

In a recent Which Way L.A. segment, host Warren Olney discusses the battle brewing in Sacramento over Gov. Jerry Brown’s approach to education budget reform. Brown’s plan to give struggling school districts like LAUSD, which have higher numbers of low-income and English language learner students, higher funding than more successful districts, has divided Democrats in...

Apparently not content with its recent poll on LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy’s performance, UTLA is now embarking on a “Superintendent Performance Review” that calls on teachers to review Deasy’s work. The union’s announcement of the new Deasy survey appears somewhat more neutral than it was for the last survey, which indicated what the union thought...

The teachers union is none too pleased about a recent LA Times story by Howard Blume about rumors that District 6 School Board candidate Antonio Sanchez had worked out a secret deal with UTLA Vice President Gregg Solkovits. “It is sad that the Times has chosen to print rumors and innuendo, instead of doing the necessary research...

The education publication Education Week is reporting that eight major civil rights groups have written a letter to US Education Secretary Arne Duncan asking him to reject a request made by LAUSD and several other local school districts to give them a waiver from some of the key provision of the federal No Child Left...

On Thursday, LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy unexpectedly announced that he was putting a controversial classroom breakfast program’s fate in the hands of the School Board. The possible elimination of a program Southern California Public Radio described as “a political hot potato” presumably pleased the teachers union, which has long called for its end. But Deasy’s plan to remove...