Where’s Don Draper when LA Unified needs him? After more than a decade of declining enrollment, the impact of which is costing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue losses, the district has a plan to stop, or at least slow down, the exodus: Marketing! Now, officials just need to decide on a plan. Each year...

By Maya Kosoff Elon Musk didn’t like his kids’ school, so he started his own, the inventor and entrepreneur said in an interview on Beijing Television. The school is called Ad Astra — which means “To the stars” — and is small and relatively secretive. It doesn’t have its own website or a social media presence. Christina...

*Updated After forging ahead with a massive overhaul of LA Unified’s Education Service Centers by Superintendent Ramon Cortines in March, the school board today approved contracts for three new local area superintendents and renewed contracts for another three. Among the new hires is Vivian Ekchian, who will head the newly created Northwest region. As the district’s chief...

* UPDATED The close of the school year next month also brings an end to Richard Vladovic’s second term as LA Unified board president. Rules bar him from serving a third consecutive year. While critical issues await the new president — transformation to new technology, managing the growth of charters, dealing with new budgets, among...

When the LA Unified school board passed a resolution that would begin the process of making ethic studies a graduation requirement, it did so without knowing how much it would cost. But now, after a draft report from the Ethic Studies Committee was released last week, it has some idea, and it is not chump...

By The Editorial Board When it was revealed that students at Jefferson High School in South Los Angeles and other schools were being assigned to “classes” in which nothing was actually taught, many people wondered how this could happen. Isn’t it against the law to stick kids in fake classes and deprive them of basic...

  It’s a long weekend, leading to Memorial Day on Monday. Let’s all remember why we celebrate it, and LA School Report will be back on Tuesday.    

Drinking too much at a work dinner or hitting on a co-worker’s spouse can make things truly uncomfortable at the office. But what about publicly damning a future colleague before his first day on the job? That’s the situation LA Unified school board Vice President Steve Zimmer faces, now that Ref Rodriguez has defeated his good...