LA School Report

In West Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Kimberly Eckert felt as if she had been beating the same drum for years: Teaching is a challenging profession. Being a person of color in the United States is challenging, in a whole different way. Put them together and, for many, the obstacles are insurmountable. Eckert had been tasked with strengthening...

What’s the secret sauce for academic success? A great teacher? More school funding? At-home support? This is a subject that generates impassioned debate in the halls of government as well as around kitchen tables across the country. Parents often think the key to their child’s academic success lies in which teacher they are assigned to...

The Trump administration announced a proposal Monday to cut billions of dollars in education aid, in part by merging dozens of federal education initiatives, from charter school expansions to educating homeless children, into a single grant program. The move, which is practically assured not to win House approval, is part of the fiscal 2021 budget proposal...

School districts in high-income neighborhoods assume almost all their graduates will succeed in college. But often, their alumni fall short of expectations. Districts serving students in low-income neighborhoods cite their success in enrolling more students in college. But the number of their students who actually persist to earn degrees can be dismayingly low as well....

This interview is one in a series spotlighting Los Angeles teachers, their unique and innovative classroom approaches, and their thoughts on how the education system can better support teachers in guiding students to success. Daniel Lieu is just 22 years old but he’s already certain that he chose the right profession as a STEAM teacher,...

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears weekly at LA School Report. It’s election season — not just for America’s political parties, but for United Teachers Los Angeles. The union mailed ballots to members this week. They will vote by mail or online, with the results to be tabulated Feb. 28. Active members will choose the UTLA...

Alaina Gassler’s 2019 science project started small, designed for her middle school in Pennsylvania. Soon, though, her project to remove blind spots from cars was winning county and then regional science fairs — and now, Gassler has taken top honors at the largest middle school science fair in the country, the Broadcom MASTERS (Math, Applied...

Reading instruction in American schools is so rife with poor curriculum and pedagogical dogma that a prominent academic likened it to “the equivalent of chemistry departments teaching alchemy.” “We’ve had about 130 years of bad practice,” David Steiner, director of the Institute for Education Policy at Johns Hopkins University, told the audience at a national...

As Newark, New Jersey, Flint, Michigan, and other cities continue to grapple with lead in their water supplies, the Environmental Protection Agency is mulling changes to the decades-old regulation meant to protect Americans from the highly damaging contaminant. Among the proposed changes to the Lead and Copper Rule are a first-time national requirement to test...

As schools across the country remain starkly segregated by both race and income, parents expressed widespread support — in theory — for integrating America’s public schools, according to a new report. For many, however, that support appears to stop at their own doorstep. Across America’s increasingly partisan political divide, parents say they support racial and...