By The Los Angeles Daily News Editorial Board Before school board members decide who they want to be Los Angeles Unified’s next superintendent, they must agree on what they want. That won’t be easy. But it’s vital. If they don’t come to a consensus soon about the qualities they’re looking for in an L.A. schools...

On Dec. 1 it will be a year since FBI agents showed up at LA Unified’s headquarters with a federal grand jury subpoena and carted off 20 boxes of documents related to the district’s controversial iPad program. Since that day little if any new information has been publicly revealed about the investigation’s status, and that...

The LA Unified School Board convened at 10 a.m. and didn’t adjourn until more than 12 hours later yesterday, in a series of meetings that ran the gamut from moving forward on finding a new superintendent, to confronting ugly budget realities to diving into the minutiae of charter school applications. For background information, each member...

An independent Financial Review Panel yesterday detailed drastic measures that LA Unified must take to remain afloat in what school board President Steve Zimmer calls a “perfect storm” of financial trouble for the district. “There’s a fiscal cliff that is immediate if different decisions are not made,” warned Bill Lockyer, the former California attorney general and...

By The Los Angeles Times Editorial Board In school superintendent searches across the nation, parents, teachers and the public tend to rank educational “vision” as the No. 1 attribute required for a new leader. But in online surveys and focus groups in Los Angeles Unified, vision came in at a weak ninth, according to the executive...

In presenting a detailed accounting of community input for LA Unified’s superintendent search, the president of the search firm urged the seven board members to reach consensus on what they are looking for in their ideal candidate. “You do not want to make this decision on four votes,” said Hank Gmitro of Hazard, Young, Attea...

The LA Unified school board is scheduled to meet today at 1 p.m. Among the items up for discussion is an analysis of a district finances conducted by non-district analysts and a number of proposals involving charter schools. Before a closed session scheduled to start at 10 a.m., the board will receive a detailed report on community input for the superintendent search. Click...

LA Unified school board member Scott Schmerelson is bringing a resolution before the board today, asking it to go on record opposing a plan by the Broad Foundation to add 260 new charter schools to the district over the next eight years. The plan has drawn rebuke from other board members and the LA teachers union,...

By Sandy Banks Restorative justice is a wonderful concept; a way to make student discipline less punitive and more productive. But in Los Angeles Unified, it’s little more than a slogan, generally misunderstood and rarely applied. The district did a lot of chest thumping two years ago, when it became the first in the nation to...

It doesn’t matter if the next superintendent is a he or she, but it does matter if the he or she is bilingual. The person should be good at communicating and love Los Angeles. And, the candidate should have been a teacher at one point in his or her career. Those are some of the...