National data indicate that approximately three of every five students begin the school year below grade level, with those numbers even higher for low-income students and students of color. Educators know this is a problem, with one survey showing 39 percent of teachers agreeing that most of their students start the school year academically prepared...

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears weekly at LA School Report The School and Communities First ballot initiative might be the biggest and most expensive school funding campaign battle in California history. Or, it might peter out as so many other similar attempts have in the past. There is evidence to support either view. The proposed...

This interview is one in a series spotlighting Los Angeles teachers, their unique and innovative classroom approaches, and their thoughts on how the education system can better support teachers in guiding students to success. Veronica Amis was born in St Louis, Missouri but she moved to Los Angeles with her family in 1963 when she...

Marc Brackett still remembers sitting in his New Jersey middle school classroom, clutching his down vest protectively as classmates wrote cruel words on the fabric. The first thing on his mind was why the teacher was doing nothing to help him. The last thing on his mind was the day’s math lesson. In a sense,...

The California Department of Education is being asked once again to intervene in a legal complaint that charges L.A. Unified and its county overseers with failing to ensure that high-needs students receive the more than $1 billion annually they are due in state funding. Public Advocates and the Covington & Burling LLP law firm —...

Even as information about schools proliferates across the internet, a new set of polls shows that parents and teachers want more meaningful student data, capturing children’s relationships with education that go beyond just their grades or even time in school. Half of parents strongly agree and 43 percent somewhat agree that they support teachers’ using student...

Quick — without looking it up on Google, can you define “edge-aversion”? Here’s a hint: It’s a decision-theory term describing what’s also known as middle bias. That is, a test-taker’s tendency to pick anything but the top or bottom option on a multiple-choice question. To a psychometrician, it’s a tell that the answer was a...

This interview is one in a series spotlighting Los Angeles teachers, their unique and innovative classroom approaches, and their thoughts on how the education system can better support teachers in guiding students to success. Rosalie Reyes has always been proud of her Latin origin. Her parents are from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, but...

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears weekly at LA School Report As difficult as it may be to believe nowadays, when teacher unions deem charter schools their mortal enemies, there was a brief period of time when they took a different approach. Affiliates of the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers once created their...

Walk into almost any classroom in America, and you’ll find at least some students who’ve fallen behind the academic standards for their grade — meaning they’re at risk of not learning everything they’ll need to be ready for college and the lives they want to lead. Helping these students get back on the path to...