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How Generation Citizen uses action civics to empower students, grow lifelong citizens and combat inequality

Scott Warren wants civics to be the most exciting class in school. That’s why his organization Generation Citizen helps schools adopt action civics, a school-based approach to civics education that empowers students to find a problem in their community and work together to solve it. Warren started Generation Citizen in 2009 when he was a...
By Laura Fay | April 16, 2019
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Antonucci: Los Angeles unions open campaign spigots for special elections
Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears weekly at LA School Report. Campaign season came a little early in Los Angeles this year, with the open District 5 school board seat and Measure EE, the parcel tax proposal to fund city schools. United Teachers Los Angeles is devoting its sizable war chest to these elections, and its union allies...
By Mike Antonucci | April 16, 2019
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Commentary: Are Los Angeles high school students ready for tomorrow’s job market?
Southern California’s job market is hot right now. But unless something changes, many Los Angeles-area high school students won’t be ready for it when they graduate — especially if they don’t go on to earn a bachelor’s degree — which many of them won’t. For as long as anyone can remember, American high schools have mostly failed to provide...
By Cameron Sublett and David Griffith | April 15, 2019
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CTE classes are popular, but only 25% of students take courses that could lead to the nation’s biggest industries, new study finds

Business, marketing, tourism and manufacturing make up more than half of U.S. jobs — but students in high school probably don’t know that. Only one-quarter of the career and technical education classes students take are focused on these industries, according to a new report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C....
By Kate Stringer | April 15, 2019
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Whether through texts or apps, schools are using technology to get the message out to students’ families

Heejae Lim, founder of TalkingPoints, an app that translates text messages from educators into a parent’s home language, likes to tell a story of a San Francisco middle school principal. The administrator wanted to connect with the parents of a Spanish-speaking student at risk of failing. He tried visiting the family at home twice, to no...
By Tim Newcomb | April 15, 2019
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With LAUSD’s number of homeless students jumping by more than 1,000 since November, local and state response grows

In just the last five months, L.A. Unified’s number of homeless students has climbed by more than a thousand. The district has identified 17,494 homeless students as of Tuesday — up from about 16,200 students reported in November and about 17,280 reported one month ago, according to data provided by school board member Kelly Gonez. The...
By Taylor Swaak | April 10, 2019
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Expanding the community college to university pipeline: Why more elite schools like UCLA are embracing transfers and the 15,000 students graduating each year with 3.7 GPAs

This is an excerpt from the new Richard Whitmire book The B.A. Breakthrough: How Ending Diploma Disparities Can Change the Face of America. See more excerpts, profiles, commentaries, videos and additional data behind the book at The74Million.org/Breakthrough. Standing outside a lecture hall on a hot August Tuesday here at the University of California, Los Angeles,...
By Richard Whitmire | April 9, 2019
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Antonucci: Is the Sacramento teacher strike legal, and will it open the floodgates to new strikes, even re-upping them in L.A. and Oakland?
Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears weekly at LA School Report. Another California school district in financial crisis is facing a teacher strike, but Thursday’s one-day walkout in Sacramento is something different than what we’ve seen so far this year, and it might not be legal. But that’s not stopping the Sacramento City Teachers Association from hinting at...
By Mike Antonucci | April 9, 2019
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‘Frustrating and disappointing’ — how parents feel about LAUSD’s new school accountability tool

*Updated April 9 L.A. Unified’s newest way to share information about how students and their schools are performing is coming up short for parents who find the online site “very frustrating and disappointing.” Last fall, the district launched its Open Data Portal, a school accountability site with data about academic performance, graduation and college-going rates,...
By Esmeralda Fabián Romero | April 8, 2019
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Exclusive: Less than half of LAUSD’s Class of 2019 are on track to graduate eligible for California’s public universities

*Updated April 12 Less than half of L.A. Unified’s Class of 2019 are eligible for the state’s public universities, the latest district projections show. As of March, 49 percent of the district’s 34,734 prospective graduates are on track to pass all of their “A-G” college preparation courses with Cs or better. This means that less...
By Taylor Swaak | April 8, 2019