It wasn’t all about charters at the 13 hours of meetings held Tuesday by the LA Unified School Board. They also made decisions on possibly bringing flavored milk back to schools, encouraging more water access, discouraging a high-speed rail rumbling past some schools, a name change to a school with a titled deemed racist, plus more. Other...

* UPDATED On a technicality, LA Unified turned down the Satanic Temple of Los Angeles from starting up an After School Satan Club on one of their elementary school campuses. But it doesn’t mean the idea is banned until hell freezes over. The district’s decision had nothing to do with the merits of the after school...

Imagine a school that has 97 percent of its students receiving free or reduced-price lunch. It is 98 percent Latino. Sixty-two percent are English-language learners. Despite these challenges, the school is thriving. On the Smarter Balanced Assessment, 54 percent and 50 percent of its students met or exceeded performance standards in English language arts and...

By Christina Kim More than twenty years ago I was classified as an English learner. I spent my first few elementary school years in a classroom not learning much or improving my ability to communicate in English. Then, Californians voted in favor of an array of anti-immigrant propositions, including Proposition 227, which eliminated most bilingual...

*UPDATED LA Unified is struggling to define its role in overseeing charter schools as the numbers of academically strong charters continue to grow across the nation’s second-largest school district. LA has the most independent public charter schools overseen by a single district and usually approves most petitions. But this week a record number of charters,...

* UPDATED Five independent public charter schools were denied Tuesday night by the LA Unified school board. The board granted one petition of the nine schools on the special agenda that had been recommended for denial. Another school will likely keep its charter under a last-minute deal, and two were petitions withdrawn. Here is the action Tuesday...

Magnolia Public Schools, facing a Tuesday afternoon vote that could shut down three of its schools, is prepared to take legal action and is calling on board President Steve Zimmer to recuse himself based on “a level of bias.” A letter sent Tuesday by a law firm on Magnolia’s behalf lays out its response to the...

A teacher who worked as an education policy advisor in President Barack Obama’s administration announced Tuesday she is running for the East San Fernando Valley District 6 seat on the LA Unified school board. Kelly Gonez, a 7th-grade science teacher at Crown Preparatory School in Los Angeles, joins five others who are seeking to replace...

The LA Unified school board today approved the renewal petitions of three independent public charter schools and approved a petition for one new charter school. The new charter school approved by the board is Gabriella Charter School 2, which plans to serve up to 468 students in grades TK-6 in Boyle Heights or Lincoln Heights....

*UPDATED The day before the LA Unified school board is scheduled to vote on the fate of 23 charter schools, the district was hit with a bombshell of a letter signed by 64 charter school leaders. The schools serve 90 percent of the charter students in the district — 196 schools serving 94,595 students, according to...