By Sandy Banks Restorative justice is a wonderful concept; a way to make student discipline less punitive and more productive. But in Los Angeles Unified, it’s little more than a slogan, generally misunderstood and rarely applied. The district did a lot of chest thumping two years ago, when it became the first in the nation to...

It doesn’t matter if the next superintendent is a he or she, but it does matter if the he or she is bilingual. The person should be good at communicating and love Los Angeles. And, the candidate should have been a teacher at one point in his or her career. Those are some of the...

In what looks to be a marathon LAUSD school board meeting tomorrow, members are scheduled to hear a detailed report on community input for the superintendent search, an analysis of a district finances conducted by non-district analysts and a number of proposals involving charter schools. At the open session at 10 a.m., the board will hear...

It’s one thing when LA Unified’s Chief Financial Officer appears before the school board and warns of budgetary troubles ahead, based on current projections and obligations. That’s her job. It’s quite another when a panel of outsiders, brought in to take a fresh look, reaches the same conclusions and expresses them in a hair-raising way...

By Teresa Watanabe and Howard Blume In a South Los Angeles classroom, a boy hassles a girl. The teacher moves him to the back of the room, where he scowls, makes a paper airplane and repeatedly throws it against the wall. Two other boys wander around the class and then nearly come to blows. “Don’t you talk...

Among the 43 people identified by the Los Angeles Times this week as potential candidates for LA Unified superintendent were nearly a dozen with a background in charter schools or the reform movement. One of them was Caprice Young, a former president of the district school board, as well as a founder of charter schools, the former president of the California...

In a new video on the LA Unified website, Board President Steve Zimmer  provides the latest count of how many people offered opinions on the superintendent search and what the next steps are in the process. Zimmer said 13,500 people went to the website to read about the superintendent search, more than 8,000 filled out the...

LA Unified is on the brink of a severe financial crisis and if officials don’t act now, the whole district could go bankrupt. That’s the overall conclusion of a report by an outside panel asked to look at the financial situation of LAUSD. Its findings are scheduled to be presented at the regular school board meeting...

By Elizabeth Lee White and Asian students in the United States continue to outperform their black and Latino counterparts nationwide, according to the  U.S. Department of Education’s 2015 Nation’s Report Card that assesses nationwide student achievement. Latino and black students are most effected by socio-economic challenges that keep them from excelling when compared to their...

A report out this week from the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) found that California is just one of five states that has no formal policy requiring that teacher evaluations be tied in some way to student achievement measures. The report — State of the States 2015: Evaluating Teaching, Leading and Learning  — took a look...