Parents and community advocates are divided on L.A. Unified’s Measure EE, a parcel tax on the June ballot that would raise about $500 million a year over a 12-year period for schools. However, a common thread connects them: They agree schools need more funding, but there’s also “distrust” over whether the district would use the money to advance...

Michael Danielson gives students in his ninth-grade media literacy class a simple piece of homework each night: Pay attention. The assignment is meant to prod them into thinking critically about the countless messages that bombard them every day. They report back to their teacher and classmates at the start of each class with “media literacy...

Scott Warren wants civics to be the most exciting class in school. That’s why his organization Generation Citizen helps schools adopt action civics, a school-based approach to civics education that empowers students to find a problem in their community and work together to solve it. Warren started Generation Citizen in 2009 when he was a...

Business, marketing, tourism and manufacturing make up more than half of U.S. jobs — but students in high school probably don’t know that. Only one-quarter of the career and technical education classes students take are focused on these industries, according to a new report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C....

Heejae Lim, founder of TalkingPoints, an app that translates text messages from educators into a parent’s home language, likes to tell a story of a San Francisco middle school principal. The administrator wanted to connect with the parents of a Spanish-speaking student at risk of failing. He tried visiting the family at home twice, to no...

In just the last five months, L.A. Unified’s number of homeless students has climbed by more than a thousand. The district has identified 17,494 homeless students as of Tuesday — up from about 16,200 students reported in November and about 17,280 reported one month ago, according to data provided by school board member Kelly Gonez. The...

This is an excerpt from the new Richard Whitmire book The B.A. Breakthrough: How Ending Diploma Disparities Can Change the Face of America. See more excerpts, profiles, commentaries, videos and additional data behind the book at The74Million.org/Breakthrough. Standing outside a lecture hall on a hot August Tuesday here at the University of California, Los Angeles,...

*Updated April 9 L.A. Unified’s newest way to share information about how students and their schools are performing is coming up short for parents who find the online site “very frustrating and disappointing.” Last fall, the district launched its Open Data Portal, a school accountability site with data about academic performance, graduation and college-going rates,...

*Updated April 12 Less than half of L.A. Unified’s Class of 2019 are eligible for the state’s public universities, the latest district projections show. As of March, 49 percent of the district’s 34,734 prospective graduates are on track to pass all of their “A-G” college preparation courses with Cs or better. This means that less...

Once again, March Madness builds to a crescendo this weekend, with the “Final Four” basketball bouts set to dominate the Saturday spotlight. For many sports fans, this is an excellent time to debate what it takes to be a winner on the court — but for those of us focused on the country’s schools and...