Many high school seniors think of spring as college admission season. Yet the nation’s most selective colleges seem determined to rebrand it as rejection season. Increasingly, the marketplace has rewarded colleges that turn away the most students, and the competition to be competitive has become white-hot. Winning that competition may be great for colleges, but...

In the extensive U.S. News & World Report ranking of all the public high schools in the country, LA’s top 10 include four independent charters, three magnets and three traditional schools. The Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies was the top-ranked LA school and the only LA Unified school in California’s top 20. It was 18th...

By the time Alvaro Quintero and Jose Rodriguez reached the end of their senior year, they were no longer Alvaro and Jose. “Before we left, we got our names changed to Harvard and Yale, respectively,” Rodriguez recalled. “That is how we were referred to.” At once they had lost their familiar identity in the halls...

KIPP Raíces Academy School in East Los Angeles celebrated its National Blue Ribbon Schools award on Tuesday. After the ceremony, LA School Report caught up with the school’s founding principal, Amber Young Medina, who opened Raíces in 2008 and is now the managing director of KIPP LA Schools. This is an edited transcript of the conversation. LA School Report:...

UPDATED* LA Unified Superintendent Ramon Cortines has corrected a statement he made at Tuesday’s board meeting, telling the members in an email that he erred in saying charter schools receive more in state funding than traditional public schools. “One of the problems is the funding of charters versus regular schools. And the charters in the state get...

KIPP LA Schools today announced plans to open nine additional campuses, nearly doubling its presence in south and east LA by 2020. The high performing charter schools are part of the Knowledge Is Power Program,which runs 162 campuses, educating 58,000 students nationally. In LA, the organization currently operates 11 schools serving 4,000 elementary and middle school...