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...

While kids were running through sprinklers and eating popsicles this summer, a handful of education researchers crunched the numbers about their principals. Reports released this summer offer new insight into America’s school principals, from their racial diversity to how turnover affects student achievement. The new papers add to a growing body of research about principals...

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. Guillermo Lopez has one expectation for all his students, including the ones with the most challenges to learn, and that is...

It was a busy, if often frustrating, summer for the Trump administration’s many efforts to destabilize U.S. immigration policies. Federal judges ruled in August that, under a longstanding legal agreement, the administration was required to provide detained children at the border with “edible food, clean water, soap and toothpaste.” So the administration announced that it...

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears weekly at LA School Report You have to give California’s public employee unions credit for their dogged determination to undo Proposition 13, the state’s landmark property tax limitation initiative approved by voters in 1978. Forty years of failed attempts and tens of millions of dues dollars spent without even managing...

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. *Updated With the purpose of promoting an inclusive school culture, where all students feel safe, Maria Duarte is leading a study...

Twenty years ago, a groundbreaking study by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed the ubiquity of childhood trauma and its long-term impact on health and behavior. I was in my sixth year of college at the time, struggling to focus on my coursework as I recovered from years of watching my alcoholic...

High school senior Frances Suavillo has always believed education is a right and not a privilege. She’s seen firsthand when it’s not. Born and raised in the Philippines until she was 9 years old, Suavillo saw deep-seated educational inequity in the Southeast Asian island country — how “money dictated who went to school and who didn’t,”...

Applying to one of Chicago’s 11 selective enrollment high schools is a little like banking on the Bears to triumph at the Super Bowl: probably futile and, at times, downright depressing. The elite public schools, which admit students on the basis of high grades and exam scores, attract thousands of high-achieving applicants each year. In...

California has more charter schools than any other state and has long served as a reliable source of growth for that sector of public education. But a sweeping bill, hammered out in a compromise last week between the governor and leaders of both legislative bodies, is likely to slow down expansion in the years ahead....