Texas school officials surprised everyone yesterday when they announced that they were going to apply for an NCLB waiver (see EdWeek: Texas to Apply for NCLB Waiver). Under the Obama administrations, states can apply for waivers from things like the annual rating system that are part of the 2002 law, in exchange for a series of other...

Thirty percent of metro LA residents live in the central city (as defined by the census), and 30 percent of core city residents have college degrees, according to this chart dug up by Chicago Magazine: But only 23 percent of adults have college degrees and school-aged kids — not as steep a dropoff as, say, San Francisco,...

I finally got around to reading the newish, longish LA Magazine profile on Superintendent John Deasy, The Takeover Artist, by Ed Leibowitz, and it’s a good read I’d recommend everyone check out. Leibowitz is a fantastic writer, comparing LAUSD’s structure to “the work of a madman,” getting Deasy critics to make juicy remarks, and dishing up...

Still no word if and when a trigger petition gets filed in LAUSD, but in the meantime a screening of trigger movie “Won’t Back Down” was approved by the Democratic National Committee for a preconference event in Charlotte earlier this week, and took place complete with an appearance from Mayor Villaraigosa. Whatever Los Angelenos think of...

The first thing I notice when stepping into the office of Steve Zimmer, the 42 year-old LAUSD school board member, is the Cesar Chavez poster on the wall — a copy of which Deasy has, too. The second thing is the expansive view from the 24th floor of LAUSD’s massive hilltop headquarters looking out over...

Cross-posted from This Week In Education.  Via Scholastic Administrator Magazine.

Failure of teacher evaluation bill clouds CA’s NCLB waiver SI&A Cabinet Report: Withdrawal of the teacher evaluation bill in the final days of the legislative session last week likely removes an easy path for California schools to relief from federal sanctions under the No Child Left Behind Act, state officials said last week. [Also: The California Teachers...

The Daily News reports (see: LAUSD makes its best showing ever on STAR tests) that LAUSD students made significant improvement over last year in their performance on the state-required standardized test results, also known as the STAR tests: “48 percent of LAUSD students scored proficient or advanced in English, up from 44 percent last year. Math proficiency...

After much-last minute scrambling, Assemblyman Felipe Fuentes decided to withdraw AB 5, the controversial bill to overhaul how public school teachers are evaluated in California. Fuentes (pictured) issued a statement Thursday evening, reading in part: “I could not in good conscious [sic] allow the proposed amendments to be voted on without a full public hearing… I believe...

It’s not often that a single piece of legislation can be called catastrophic for the future of education in California, but Sacramento has managed to create it. It’s called AB 5 – a bill that will legislate how teachers are evaluated, and it has re-appeared Frankenstein-like, with the backing the powerful teachers’ unions. Stuffed with...