By Chris Hofmann President Obama last week signed the most important education legislation in over a decade, the long-awaited reauthorization of ESEA and No Child Left Behind. The provisions of the law will have a profound effect on what school is like for my class of 26 fourth graders and will reverberate throughout the everyday...

By The Los Angeles Times Editorial Board When famed teacher Rafe Esquith was yanked from his fifth-grade classroom and an investigation was opened into possible sexual and financial misconduct, parents in the Los Angeles Unified School District— and the larger education world — gasped. Esquith was as iconic as he was iconoclastic. A winner of the National Medal...

With President Obama‘s signing the rewrite of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law yesterday, a new era of federal and state education policy has been ushered in. While the new law, Every Child Achieves Act (ESSA), doesn’t mean much for LA Unified in an immediate sense because it had already received a waiver from...

By the end of next week just before winter break begins, 95 LA Unified schools will have been issued computer devices for the year — one for every student, according to Bill Wherritt, the district’s Distribution Project Manager for the Instructional Technology Initiative Task Force. The remainder of the 103 schools in a pilot program for...

By Nicholas Melvoin If members of the LAUSD Board of Education are curious as to why the district’s enrollment is declining, they should review how the district treated parents over the last few days in the Playa Vista and Westchester neighborhoods for some clues. In a tale that is unfortunately all too familiar to many LAUSD...

 By Donna Littlejohn Got room for a 37-year-old Shetland pony named Peaches? How about two goats, 17 chickens, three tortoises or three turtles? After years of struggling to keep the doors open, Los Angeles school officials said this week that the San Pedro science center likely won’t open in the 2016-17 school year. “It doesn’t look...

More salacious charges against celebrated teacher Rafe Esquith were released this week, and for the first time LAUSD superintendent Ramon Cortines commented publicly about the case. At a forum last night, Cortines said he was surprised about the charges but stood behind the district for taking action, once its investigation was complete. “For me, six...

*UPDATED LA Unified is exploring building two new schools in the western San Fernando Valley on the sites of two campuses that have been vacant for decades at a potential cost of tens of millions. The move comes as the district has no current plans for any new schools and would need to spend an...