One parent wanted more counselors. Another wanted more security personnel. A student came forward with a friend and said, “You’re spending all that money on iPads. We’d prefer you spend it on nurses and librarians and can you please fix the bathrooms.” This was Tuesday night, in the auditorium of Burroughs Middle School in Hancock...

Can we tone down the rhetoric a little? It’s getting hard to hear in here. I’m an English teacher. Though I taught at a charter school for five years, I’ve been reading Diane Ravitch’s work for a long time and think she’s raising some very important concerns about the at-risk kids left behind by the...

Ellie Herman is a writer and English teacher, who taught Drama, Advanced Drama, Creative Writing, English 11 and 9th grade composition at Animo Pat Brown Charter High School in south Los Angeles. A career union member, she is now immersed in a year-long journey, spending time in teachers’ classrooms at schools across the socioeconomic spectrum...

LA Unified students are teaming up with a non-profit group to profile career choices, learning video production while they do it. Gigniks is helping students highlight professionals in a variety of fields through entertainment industry professionals who visit classrooms to teach the basics of documentary production and interview techniques. The students participating are from the L.A....

Via Los Angeles Daily News | By Barbara Jones A veteran Los Angeles Unified secretary who filed harassment allegations against school board President Richard Vladovic has identified herself publicly in an exclusive interview with the Daily News, saying she’s speaking out in an effort to end bullying by the district’s powerful officials. Lily Nuñez is...

Superintendent John Deasy is proposing a nearly half year-long extension in completing LA Unified’s much-ballyhooed iPad rollout, pushing back completion of the program to the end of 2015. As originally planned, all LA Unified students were to have iPads by the spring of 2015* over three phases of distribution. If his proposal is approved by the...

Via Los Angeles Times | Editorial Board Last week, Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a bill to streamline the process for firing teachers, saying that he agreed with its goal but calling it an “imperfect solution.” Now he should follow up, taking the lead on this important but contentious issue much as he did when he...