LA School Report

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters. It’s not quite the “Mississippi Miracle,” but California’s reading scores have been inching upwards since the state poured billions into changing the way students learn to read. A shortage of literacy coaches, however, may be preventing students from improving even more. In 2013,...

Chemical fires, leaks and explosions happen at U.S. industrial facilities every other day — incidents such as four disasters in greater Los Angeles over Memorial Day weekend, including one involving a chemical tank that threatened to explode and forced 50,000 residents and more than 20 schools to evacuate, and a chemical tank explosion the next...

Updated, July 15 The University of California Board of Regents chair said Tuesday morning she expects a recommendation from the faculty-led Academic Senate by the end of this academic year on whether the system should reinstate the SAT and ACT for incoming freshmen. The announcement came shortly after the Senate’s admissions board said it was...

This story was originally published on EdSource. The first openly transgender person elected to a California school board is sitting in a booth at Bartel’s Giant Burger — a 1970s-era roadside joint a few miles from downtown Redding in Shasta County.  Mountains rise to the west and north. Big rigs rumbling up Interstate 5 can...

This story was originally published on EdSource. California’s audacious goal of having half of all K-12 students enrolled in bilingual education programs by 2030 has encountered one big stumbling block — there aren’t enough qualified bilingual teachers. To help remedy that, a $10 million grant tucked in the state budget aims to help school districts...

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters. California librarians were stunned when a last-minute budget change stripped K-12 schools of a trove of research materials, potentially leaving thousands of students without resources to do reports, projects or homework assignments. Without notice to schools or librarians, the Legislature last week canceled...

This story was originally published by EdSource. Sign up for their daily newsletter Before Michaella Huck graduated from high school in 2018, she struggled with depression and anxiety and didn’t know where to get help. She’d hear stories of students who died on “suicide hill” in her Los Angeles neighborhood of San Pedro.  It took a trusted...

As educators, we spend a lot of time talking about the things we think are important. Attendance. Graduation rates. Test scores. Yes, those things matter. But before any of them improve, students have to believe that school is a place where they belong.  This year, a student told me: “I gave up on myself because...

Thousands of foreign-born teachers leading classrooms throughout the United States now find their jobs and status in jeopardy because of the Trump administration’s campaign to constrict all forms of immigration. Educators hired in recent years on H-1B visas for hard-to-fill K-12 vacancies are waiting more than 10 months for renewals, forcing many from their schools...

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters. At Pinedale Elementary in Fresno, there’s almost no classroom aides, after-school tutors or behavioral counselors. Literacy activities and parent workshops are scarce. Field trips? Almost non-existent. The school survives on one of the lowest per-pupil expenditures in the state: $16,700 a year, nearly...