In a wide-ranging State of the Union address Saturday in Los Angeles, Josh Pechthalt, president of the California Federation of Teachers, reviewed the union’s latest successes and challenges, including the Vergara v. California lawsuit that’s heading toward conclusion later this week. Among his over-arching themes was the familiar call for union members to stand together...

The money chase is on. Through the first reporting period for LA Unified’s open District 1 board seat, Alex Johnson has opened a wide margin over the other six candidates in the race. Johnson, an education aide to LA County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas who has backing from his boss, as well as former congresswoman Diane Watson and...

Do you know how many students attended the LAUSD school board meetings last month? In my circle of friends, you’d be lucky if a single person could name a school board member or tell you what the school board does. As an active LAUSD student who cares about my community, I wonder how the second-largest...

“Evidence is closed,” Judge Rolf Treu pronounced from his seat in Superior Court today, thus drawing the curtain on two months of testimony in Vergara v. California. Since Jan. 27, lawyers representing nine students-as-plaintiffs and their adversaries — the state and its two powerful teachers unions — the California Federation of Teachers and the California...

As California gets ready to transition to a new assessment system, the state is set to rollout its Smarter Balanced Field Test starting tomorrow. As part of the field test, the state will be examining technological capacity and the quality of test questions, while helping students and teachers prepare for next year’s first operational test,...

SEIU Local 99, one of the most powerful and influential unions in the LA Unified School District, is holding an exclusive forum next week for union members to meet the candidates running for the open District 1 board seat. With more than 30,000 cafeteria workers, special education assistants, custodians, bus drivers and others, the union...

Via EdSource | By John Fensterwald One of the first school districts to finish a draft of the spending and accountability plan required by the state’s new school funding law is proposing to hire social workers to deal with the effects of troubled home lives, cyberbullying and other social and emotional issues hobbling students’ ability...

UTLA is headed in a new direction —  mostly veering to the left. Despite a low turnout, Union Power candidates claimed victory today, with wins in nearly every leadership position within UTLA, the nation’s second-largest teachers union. The progressive group — which plans to call for a strike if a new teacher contract can’t be...

The defense rested its case today in Vergara v. California after an examination of an LA Unified administrator that was designed to show that the state laws under challenge did not impede the district’s effort to get rid of ineffective teachers. On Monday, court resumes with the plaintiffs’ opening a short rebuttal phase of the trial,...

All that criticism of Warren Fletcher as a weak UTLA president and of Alex Caputo-Pearl as a campaign rules scofflaw apparently didn’t make much difference. They emerged as the top two vote-getters for the president of United Teacher Los Angeles in the first round of voting in the union’s 2014 election campaign and are now headed...