LA School Report

One of the nation’s largest community college systems is navigating through a chaotic two weeks before it unexpectedly but with paramount necessity transitions to a fully online set of institutions. Just a few scenes from its preparations: A video creation team films science instructors conducting lab experiments. The resulting video will then be posted online...

With a recession on the way, states and localities could be making severe cuts to public education over the next year — and many leaders don’t seem to realize it yet. That was the message delivered this week by Marguerite Roza, one of America’s foremost experts in school finance, in a public webinar. Her presentation...

Parents of the nearly 700,000 students attending traditional and charter schools in Los Angeles are facing an unprecedented disruption of their children’s routine and their daily lives with last week’s shutdown of L.A. Unified School District’s more than 1,000 campuses. One of the main concerns for district officials and educators trying to control the spread...

With schools shuttered and kids at home — some even asked to stay indoors — parents must now balance their work responsibilities with the educational needs of their children. But finding a place to start can prove downright daunting. Sifting through the online options may prove more overwhelming than useful, so we turned to experts to...

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive. The National Education Association finally threw its weight into the Democratic presidential primaries, announcing Saturday night that it recommended Joe Biden for the nomination. A Biden endorsement is hardly a surprise; he is an establishment candidate, and NEA is a major player in the...

Updated, March 17 L.A. Unified Superintendent Austin Beutner in a letter to families late Monday announced that the district at this time is unable to open 40 family resource centers as initially planned, as “state and local health and public safety officials cannot assure us it will be safe for the children and adults.” There...

Deans for Impact, the organization I helped found, believes all teachers should understand basic principles of learning science. But what does that mean? We see learning science as the study of how humans think and learn — what others call cognitive science. The last several decades have deepened our scientific understanding of how our minds...

*Updated March 6 At least two competitive L.A. Unified school board races are likely headed to a November runoff following the most heated and costly primary season on record and a campaign that once again became a proxy fight over the future of charter schools. As of early Friday, no one candidate in Districts 3 or...

In one incident, a teacher grew frustrated with a student because he wouldn’t respond to her, not realizing that in the student’s Native American tribe, exhibiting silence is a sign of respect to an authority figure. As punishment, the student was denied recess. In another instance, a Native American student was accused of consuming drugs,...

The 2010s were the decade for technology to fundamentally change education. Two years before the decade’s dawn, Clayton Christensen, Michael B. Horn and Curtis Johnson predicted in their book Disrupting Class that online learning would revolutionize teacher-led instruction and catalyze a student-centered transformation in U.S. K-12 schools. As the decade began, enthusiasm for ed tech...