LA School Report

This story was co-published with Mother Jones.  Updated March 27, 2026: In response to this story, YouTube terminated six channels for violating the platform’s terms of service and one channel for violating its spam policy. In a video that has been played almost 50,000 times since it was posted five months ago, two cartoon children sing...

All 8th graders in the San Francisco Unified School District will soon be able to enroll in Algebra I now that board members voted earlier this week to fully restore the course at the middle school level. The 50,000-student system made headlines in 2014 when it eliminated the curriculum for eighth graders in an effort to...

The first time a mother in our study heard her daughter say “Mami,” it wasn’t through speech. It came through a communication tablet at school. Sofía, a 6 year old with autism, pressed a button, and a digital voice spoke the word her mother had waited years to hear. That moment carried more than joy....

California’s schools are facing a dual challenge: closing persistent academic gaps while rebuilding an educator workforce stretched thin. Unacceptably high numbers of students are testing below state standards, 50% in reading and more than 60% in math, according to state assessment data from the California Department of Education. Chronic absenteeism, while improving from pandemic peaks,...

This story was originally published by EdSource. Sign up for their daily newsletter. Following allegations of rape and sexual abuse by the late California labor leader Cesar Chavez, more than 30 school districts across the state face questions about renaming elementary, middle and high schools, while at least one California State University reckons with its memorialization of...

Imagine a restaurant that is losing customers. Instead of cutting back, the owner hires more servers. As revenues decline, the waiters demand higher pay and more busboys to help them serve fewer customers.  That might sound like the premise of an episode of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. But something very similar is happening right now...

This story was originally published by EdSource Thousands of California school employees have received preliminary pink slips in recent weeks as districts scrabble to close budget gaps caused by falling enrollment and rising costs. Most went to school administrators and classified school staff, such as clerks, administrative assistants and paraeducators. Districts were complying with a state...

Lauren McNally recalls when the checks began showing up at her house in 2021. As part of the expanded, refundable child tax credit, McNally and her husband were among 36 million families who received monthly checks from the federal government to offset the costs of raising their children. “It helped us pay off some credit...

This story was originally published on EdSource. The Los Angeles Unified School District has approved a resolution at its Tuesday board meeting to avoid contracting with vendors that support federal immigration actions.  The resolution, approved unanimously, would require the district to review its existing vendors and contracts to determine whether they enable immigration enforcement actions...

This story was reported by Mark Keierleber and written by Kathy Moore Months before the Los Angeles school board approved a $6.2 million contract with AllHere, an AI chatbot maker that is now being investigated by the FBI, top district leaders were invited to a meeting with its CEO and a consultant, who is a...