LA School Report

This article first appeared in The Chronicle of Social Change A recent federal report found administrative and financial obstacles challenged the ability to keep foster youth in their school of origin. Los Angeles might emerge as a pioneer on fighting those barriers, now that one of the largest school districts in the nation has approved its share...

National data indicate that approximately three of every five students begin the school year below grade level, with those numbers even higher for low-income students and students of color. Educators know this is a problem, with one survey showing 39 percent of teachers agreeing that most of their students start the school year academically prepared...

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears weekly at LA School Report The School and Communities First ballot initiative might be the biggest and most expensive school funding campaign battle in California history. Or, it might peter out as so many other similar attempts have in the past. There is evidence to support either view. The proposed...

Marc Brackett still remembers sitting in his New Jersey middle school classroom, clutching his down vest protectively as classmates wrote cruel words on the fabric. The first thing on his mind was why the teacher was doing nothing to help him. The last thing on his mind was the day’s math lesson. In a sense,...

Even as information about schools proliferates across the internet, a new set of polls shows that parents and teachers want more meaningful student data, capturing children’s relationships with education that go beyond just their grades or even time in school. Half of parents strongly agree and 43 percent somewhat agree that they support teachers’ using student...

Quick — without looking it up on Google, can you define “edge-aversion”? Here’s a hint: It’s a decision-theory term describing what’s also known as middle bias. That is, a test-taker’s tendency to pick anything but the top or bottom option on a multiple-choice question. To a psychometrician, it’s a tell that the answer was a...

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears weekly at LA School Report As difficult as it may be to believe nowadays, when teacher unions deem charter schools their mortal enemies, there was a brief period of time when they took a different approach. Affiliates of the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers once created their...

Walk into almost any classroom in America, and you’ll find at least some students who’ve fallen behind the academic standards for their grade — meaning they’re at risk of not learning everything they’ll need to be ready for college and the lives they want to lead. Helping these students get back on the path to...

What happens to traditional school districts when charter schools come to town? Do they offer families new, high-quality educational options and help spread better teaching techniques? Or do they represent unwanted competition, swiping students and funding from districts until academic performance begins to suffer? It’s a debate that divides much of the education community and...

In 2013, attorneys at the California Innocence Project, weighed down by a backlog of casework, turned for help to an unusual group: humanities students at High Tech High Chula Vista, a nearby charter school. The students, all juniors, trained on a past case handled by the San Diego nonprofit, which reviews pleas from prisoners who...