At an hour of the morning that many of us might find unfamiliar, United Teacher of Los Angeles (UTLA) President Warren Fletcher walks to the corner and waits for a city bus to take him downtown. As the unlikely leader of the Los Angeles teachers union for the past two years, Fletcher has changed the...

When former UTLA head A.J. Duffy helped found Apple Academy, a charter school, in 2011, it seemed like the ultimate case of a zebra changing his stripes. Nearly a year later, Duffy still gets quoted in the Times, but he’s no longer head of Apple, which didn’t enroll enough kids to justify his salary, and...