What happens to traditional school districts when charter schools come to town? Do they offer families new, high-quality educational options and help spread better teaching techniques? Or do they represent unwanted competition, swiping students and funding from districts until academic performance begins to suffer? It’s a debate that divides much of the education community and...

In 2013, attorneys at the California Innocence Project, weighed down by a backlog of casework, turned for help to an unusual group: humanities students at High Tech High Chula Vista, a nearby charter school. The students, all juniors, trained on a past case handled by the San Diego nonprofit, which reviews pleas from prisoners who...

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. Diego López has been part of the Los Angeles Unified School District since he began his education in a Head Start...

A majority of Americans hold a positive view of K-12 public school principals, who are typically seen as caring and trustworthy. How about tech executives, journalists and members of Congress? Not so much. A Pew Research Center survey released Thursday found that Americans hold mixed views about the job performance of people in positions of power,...

For many families, searching for a high-quality early education program can be a challenge. Aside from very real issues of cost and convenience, parents must consider a wide range of factors that will impact their children’s learning and development. And there is a catch — many of the key factors are not ones that families...

In early 2011, when Maryland and other states were adopting the Common Core State Standards, teachers in the Baltimore City Public Schools were starting to grumble. “The materials in a lot of districts fell woefully short of the new standards,” said Sonja Santelises, now Baltimore’s superintendent. “[I was] hearing classroom teachers rightly point out that...

An obvious educational rule of thumb is that in order for students to learn at school, they first have to show up. But with millions of children counted “chronically absent” each year, a new report argues that educators can improve attendance by first making their schools more welcoming places to attend. The report, released Tuesday...

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears weekly at LA School Report There isn’t much to occupy California’s teachers unions politically for the rest of 2019, but that only allows them to accumulate more funds for what promises to be a very busy 2020 on the campaign trail. Choosing a candidate for the Democratic nomination for President,...

Updated and corrected, Sept. 20 As California this month expanded a statewide ban on suspending younger students for defiant behavior, lessons on how this increasingly sweeping school discipline reform may play out can be found in Los Angeles, which barred such suspensions on an even broader scale six years ago. Previously in California, “willful defiance”...

Competency-based education has seen its fair share of champions over the past decade, offering the promise of a new architecture of learning. As the competency bandwagon continues to get more crowded, however, there is a critical — and too often ignored — through line between competencies and connections. My recent book, Who You Know, focused...