via KPCC | By Adolfo Guzman-Lopez Latinos scored a hundred points less than their white counterparts on this year’s California’s Academic Performance Index – and more than 150 points below Asian students — a sign that, despite a decade of effort, educators have failed to close the achievement gap for the state’s largest minority group. As a group, Latinos...

For years, the SEIU Local 99 has been “the other union” in LAUSD. Representing custodians, cooks, bus drivers and other “classified” workers, the union is just as politically influential, if not more so, than the teachers union, UTLA. And yet its voice is rarely heard in policy debates. That might be about to change. In...

The first step of running for office is raising money, and the UTLA Presidential election is no exception. In an email to would-be supporters this week, candidate Alex Caputo-Pearl set a fundraising goal of $100,000 by the end of the year for his slate of seven candidates, dubbed “Union Power.” “The Union Power slate has the...

At two Los Angeles high schools, students will soon be able to meet all their banking needs right there on the school site — if they happen to use Union Bank, that is. The LA Unified board has announced a partnership to open student-run branches at Lincoln High School in Lincoln Heights and Crenshaw High School...

The Los Angeles teachers union said today that LA Unified’s application for a federal Race to the Top grant had “so many glaring problems” that the union could not support it. This was the second straight year the union refused to sign off on the district’s application, which was unanimously approved by the school board. Union participation is...

Eugene Selivanov and his wife, Tatyana Berkovich, will be back in an Los Angeles County Superior Court tomorrow, asking the judge to grant them a new trial in a case that the California Charter Schools Association says affects other charters within the LA Unified school district. The two were found guilty in April of misappropriating...

When the actor Matt Damon stood before a capacity crowd inside the Cal State Northridge student union last night, he smiled sheepishly and said he wasn’t surprised to see so many star-struck supporters in attendance. After all, he said, he was introducing the education historian and anti-corporate reform activist Diane Ravitch. Ravitch was appearing as...

The old California Standardized Tests are a thing of the past. Governor Jerry Brown just signed Assembly Bill 484, which immediately suspends the old tests and funds a trial run this year of the new Smarter Balanced Assessments, which will be taken on computers and are aligned with the new Common Core curriculum. “I’ve said...