The New York Times is reporting that Participant Media, the production company behind “Waiting For Superman” as well as several other features and documentaries, is creating a new cable channel of its own to create more do-gooder fare from the likes of Davis Guggenheim, Morgan Spurlock, and others. Maybe they’ll make something out of Stray...

The Coalition for School Reform has a Board. It has a website, albeit one left over from 2011.  It has a campaign consultant team.  Now all it needs are candidates. Although the Coalition won’t formally announce its slate of candidates until January, its picks are widely expected to include school board President Monica Garcia in...

All around the nation, school districts are trying innovative things to make schools work better for kids. LAUSD has some of these elements – charter schools, for example, and federally funded merit pay. There’s no shortage of talented individuals, dedicated educators, and generous benefactors willing to help speed the process of change. But because of...

In the aftermath of Friday’s deadly school shooting, the California teachers pension fund — the largest teachers’ retirement fund in the United States — is rethinking its $500 million investment in Cerberus, a private equity firm that owns a gun manufacturer called Freedom Group, according to this story in the LA Times. After the teachers pension fund announced Monday...

The March 5 elections are less than three months away, and campaigns and advocates are busy hiring campaign consultants. The San Francisco-based SCN Strategies political consulting firm has confirmed that they will manage the independent expenditure (IE) campaign for the Coalition for School Reform. Meantime, three individual candidates — both union-endorsed and otherwise — have hired SG&A Campaigns to...

Sunday’s LA Daily News picks up on the Board of Education’s new requirement to approve grant applications ahead of time, reporting that a majority of the Board feared that Superintendent John Deasy and his staff had “hijacked” the grant application process but that their votes had set off a string of events that “could stem the...

The Los Angeles City Clerk’s office released the final lineup of qualifying LAUSD Board candidates on Friday, December 14. Here it is: To see the Clerk’s office’s full press release, click here.

The media tends to pay a lot of attention to UTLA, the powerful local union that represents classroom teachers. LA School Report is no different. But there’s another union that arguably just as influential when it comes to LAUSD issues: SEIU Local 99, which represents non-certificated school employees (also called classified employees) such as teacher assistants, bus...

Both LAUSD and UTLA issued statements in response to the rampage at Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut this morning, in which the assailant is reported to have killed nearly 20 children and several adults, including his mother, a kindergarten teacher at the school, and the school principal.  Read below, via HuffPostLA

LAUSD — specifically “LA Unified School District” — was one of the most frequent searches on Google for the LA area in 2012, notes the blog LAist — along with pop culture and mainstream topics like Whitney Houston, Lakers, and Batman.  Is the district’s search popularity because of increased interest, or frustration?  Nobody really knows.