Tomorrow morning at 10 am, the Board of Education’s Budget, Facilities and Audit Committee will meet (see agenda here). According to LAUSD spokesman Tom Waldman, one of the issues to be discussed tomorrow is propositions 30 and 38, and what effect they will have on the district should they pass or fail. Both propositions are...

Reviews of the new release “Won’t Back Down” vary widely and tend to conform with pre-existing views on education reform issues. Critics like The Nation’s Dana Goldstein describe it as a mean-spirited caricature of classroom teachers funded by a conservative millionaire who wants to destroy public schools — a 2012 version of  “Waiting For Superman.”...

A new Los Angeles Times / USC poll shows support for Governor Jerry Brown’s Prop 30 ballot initiative – which would temporarily raise income tax on high earners – has slipped to 54%, down 10 points from March. Despite the erosion, Democratic voters still overwhelmingly favor it, 69-20%.  Meanwhile, Molly Munger’s competing tax measure, Prop...

A neighborhood blog you may not have heard of called The Eastsider has a good (if partial) list of public, charter, and private school websites, as well as other useful parent groups and addresses for a variety of Eastside neighborhoods (School Yard Links).  There’s also an interesting entry from a parent who’s concerned about LAUSD...

This week’s piece by Emily Bazelon in Slate about school district-charter school cooperation in New Haven sounds pretty cool as these things go — a teacher exchange between the district and a charter network that seems to be a win-win for both parties. I’m told that something similar is going on in Denver, with three charter networks helping...

The U.S. Department of Education announced today that LAUSD is a big winner of its Teacher Incentive Fund competition, which will award $250 million in grants over a two-year period to school districts across the country. The grants are meant to encourage districts to create “evaluation systems that reward success and drive decision-making on recruiting,...

Yesterday on MSNBC, Mayor Villaraigosa and former Education Secretary Spellings talked unions, charter schools, and education spending with NBC’s Chuck Todd: The Mayor was also on a panel about local control, which you can see here.

District 2 covers most of East Los Angeles and is currently represented by Monica Garcia, president of the school board and perhaps the staunchest foe of United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA). There are already a number of declared candidates in District 2, so the question isn’t so much who will run as who else...

Thanks to a kind reader for sending along this PBS NewsHour segment in which former LAUSD superintendent Roy Romer debates American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten:  It’s a couple of weeks old but still might be worth the watch, given the ongoing debate over including student achievement in teacher evaluations and whether unions can...

The recent LA Magazine profile of Superintendent John Deasy included a surprising statistic: “When Deasy arrived, about 98 percent of eligible teachers were granted tenure. Now the approval rate is less than 50 percent.” That sounded unbelievable to me– it either had to be a mistake, or the result of some little-publicized but groundbreaking policy....