This is graduation season, when an anticipated 3.3 million high school seniors will cross a stage and receive an elegant sheet of paper that announces their completion of an important phase of formal education. For the last few years, public school districts have proudly announced their increasing graduation rates: In the 2013-14 academic year, the...

About 200 parents, students and teachers rallied Wednesday morning outside Castelar Street Elementary School in Chinatown as part of a “walk-in” calling for lower class sizes at LA Unified, increased staffing and more accountability for Prop. 39, the law that gives charter schools the right to use empty class space at district schools through a process called...

Principal Mara Bommarito of Ellen Ochoa Learning Center said at Tuesday’s LA Unified school board committee meeting that she responded to a Los Angeles Times article about Spanish spoken in fewer homes in a letter to the editor, but when she mentioned it hadn’t been published, a school board member responded. “It wasn’t published, there has been a lot of...

Teachers were praised at a committee meeting Tuesday by LA Unified’s Chief Academic Officer Frances Gipson, honoring this week of celebrating educators, national Teacher Appreciation Week. “We want to celebrate our teachers, as this is Teacher Appreciation Day, and I want to mark that some of us in this room do not have credentials, but we...

Since the introduction of Long-Term English Learner courses in LA Unified in 2013, the number of those students designated as needing help with English has decreased by 6.4 percent, according to officials. The district has 36,322 students, or about 5.5 percent of the school population, designated as English learners, said Hilda Maldonado, executive director of...

By Judy Lin More than 50 civil rights and education reform groups are using Jerry Brown to remind Jerry Brown of his pledge to help black and Latino students following an interview with CALmatters in which he suggested that disparities will persist despite government intervention. In a letter dated May 3, dozens of advocacy groups...

UTLA is helping parents organize protests on May 4 at schools throughout the district, and in a letter more than 500 charter school parents are asking to stop it. The Reclaim Our Schools protest is part of a nationally scheduled demonstration for Wednesday, and UTLA says 80 cities and counties have signed up to rally against...

A recent report issued by the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) found that charter schools in the state are excelling at getting historically disadvantaged students into college over traditional schools. According to the report, “African-American and Latino charter students almost twice as likely (19 percent) to apply to [the University of California system] as their...

Two teenage boys were found dead this weekend after drowning in the Los Angeles River near Cypress Park. For the second time in five weeks, Superintendent Michelle King issued a statement of condolences over the drowning of an LA Unified student. “On behalf of the district, I express my deepest condolences to the boys’ families...

As I’ve recently written, most of the hottest K–12 topics are already settled for the 2016 election cycle. But that doesn’t mean that education is going to be entirely relegated to the sidelines. Keep an eye on early education policy, where various candidates have strong interest in and credentials for making their mark with new, interesting (or, erm, “interesting”)...