Hiring more teachers, moving the school year to start after Labor Day, training workers to fix air conditioners and offering health benefits for teachers assistants and playground aides are some of the items on the list for the Tuesday afternoon’s LA Unified School Board meeting kicking off the new year. The school board will also be...

*UPDATED The first day of middle school can be a pretty nerve-racking experience for almost any kid. You don’t know anyone, you have no friends, you don’t know where your classes are, you don’t know your teachers, you don’t know the rules and you don’t know what is expected of you. But PUC Schools, an...

By Benjamin Feinberg Teachers unions often argue that the “last in, first out” policy is the only fair way to lay off teachers. Reformers say that LIFO protects bad teachers while indiscriminately getting rid of young and creative new teachers. The way we lay off teachers will become more important as Los Angeles Unified School District...

Despite temperatures hovering in the 90s for the rest of the week for many LA Unified schools, calls for air-conditioning repairs haven’t gotten out of hand. Yet a proposal being introduced by three LA Unified School board members next week could change the start of the school year until after Labor Day, and one of the biggest reasons given...

Haddon Elementary Avenue School is so in demand that families want to drive their children across the San Fernando Valley from Granada Hills to attend the Pacoima school. Haddon is not a charter school, it’s not a new pilot program and it’s not a magnet school (yet). It’s a traditional Title 1 district school in a...

Middle school enrollment has consistently declined over the past 10 years in district schools. One school lost 858 students. But charters and magnet programs are growing.  LA Unified is attempting to quell the enrollment drop-off as 133,000 students have left the district since 2006-07 and middle schools have emerged as a key battleground. During the past 10 years, the...

The California Supreme Court’s decision on whether to take up Vergara v. California, a landmark ruling that challenged teacher tenure and declared some school employment laws unconstitutional, could come as early as this afternoon. Today is the court’s last scheduled conference before the Monday deadline to say whether it will review an appellate court’s ruling in the...

LA Unified is fresh, clean, safe and on the upswing. That was the message Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, LA Unified Superintendent Michelle King, school board President Steve Zimmer, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Education James Cole Jr. and board member George McKenna delivered at a news conference from the library of John C. Fremont High School in South...

For six years, 16-year-old Riley Gantt has gathered her family and friends to go to schools in the northeast San Fernando Valley to give backpacks to students who need them. It grew from a field trip she took as a 9-year-old from her comfortable neighborhood in Sherman Oaks to a less-privileged section of the Valley...