It was a mad scramble in Sacramento yesterday, and well into the night, with state legislators trying to get every bill they possibly could out the door before recess, Friday at midnight. And perhaps nowhere was the scramble madder than in the Senate education committee, where lawmakers desperately tried to amend AB 5, a bill...

As you may already have seen, the good folks at HuffPost Los Angeles were kind enough to run our Deasy interview yesterday.  In case you missed it, Deasy notes in the interview that the California Teachers Association supports AB 5, which would revamp teacher evaluation, even though it raids QEIA (class size reduction funding): “This bill allows...

It’s crunchtime for the state legislature, which has yet to figure out what to do with a slew of issues including AB 5, the proposal that would essentially remove pupil progress from teacher evaluations (see KPCC: California lawmakers voting on hundreds of bills to meet a Friday midnight deadline). As you may recall, AB 5’s author offered...

The next LAUSD board meeting isn’t until September 11, and it’s one of only four scheduled board meetings for the rest of 2012. The board will also meet on October 9, November 13 and December 11, according to Jefferson Crain, the Board Secretariat. However “if an issue comes up that has a time component or which...

We’ve been officially launched just a few days and the early responses have been really gratifying.  Thanks for all the emails, tweets, and Facebook “likes.” LA Observed’s Kevin Roderick was kind enough to mention us. WitnessLA’s Celeste Fremon gave us an especially warm (and much appreciated) welcome: LA Gets a New Education Blog! GothamSchools, a four year-old education...

Nothing really important will probably happen at the conventions this week or next but there are more education-related events scheduled than in previous years (when there was next to nothing) and some of the education events that will be taking place might be interesting or at least amusing.  Check below for a list, and let...

You might enjoy (or be appalled by) this Thursday night segment from the CNN Show Anderson Cooper 360 including footage of reporter Kyung Lah chasing the four SB1530 abstainers around the statehouse. It’s a little heavy-handed, but three of the four legislators play right into CNN’s hands by ducking interviews and issuing terse “no comments”...

Last Friday afternoon in his office high up on the 24th floor of  the district’s downtown headquarters, LAUSD superintendent John Deasy seemed both excited about the school year that had just started and also clear about the realities of the complex task ahead of him. Deasy taught math and science before becoming an administrator and then a...

Rumors are flying fast and furious about Assembly Bill 5, a proposed amendment to the Stull Act offered by San Fernando Valley Assemblyman Felipe Fuentes. The latest word from EdSource is that AB 5 is being revised slightly to try and mollify opponents and also to help make the state eligible for a No Child Left...

Last week I tweeted out the arrival of Atul Gawande’s recent New Yorker article about what the medical industry could learn from the restaurant chain called the Cheesecake Factory, suggesting that maybe there were things that the education industry could learn from the article as well: “Our costs are soaring, the service is typically mediocre, and...