Note: This post originally appeared on Education Post. By Caroline Bermudez Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, writes about “a never-ending stream of charter scandals coming from California” in Valerie Strauss’ Answer Sheet, a blog more slanted than the Leaning Tower of Pisa. But as is typically true with Burris, her writing is long...

By Caroline Bermudez Nearly two years ago, Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez posed a question in an op-ed worth revisiting. “Is the L.A. teachers union tone deaf?” Based on a recent speech given by Alex Caputo-Pearl, the head of United Teachers Los Angeles, the answer is a definitive yes. The juvenile world of heroes...

By Peter Cunningham  In the spring of 2009, newly-elected President Barack Obama took a meeting in the Oval Office with civil rights leader Al Sharpton. Reverend Sharpton told the White House he wanted to talk about education so Education Secretary Arne Duncan also attended. Sharpton also brought along an unlikely guest: former House Speaker and GOP...

A new RNC dispatch from Peter Cunningham, executive director of Education Post: If Republican conservatives stand for one thing above all else when it comes to public education, it is local control. Just as some conservatives see tax cuts as the only answer to an ailing economy, some also see local control as the antidote to...

By Caroline Bermudez The great Joan Didion rose to literary fame chronicling her love-hate relationship with her native California. In Where I Was From, she unleashed a cool invective about the state’s less than firm grasp of reality that still applies today: “A good deal about California, in its own preferred terms, does not add...

By Caroline Bermudez More than once in California, it has taken a major lawsuit to try to propel long-awaited change for its schools. In 1999, the State Allocation Board was sued because of overcrowding in Los Angeles public schools. Last year, a coalition of groups brought a lawsuit accusing the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD)...

By Michael Vaughn The Los Angeles teachers union just spent $82,000 on a report that concludes that the thousands of Los Angeles families who are choosing to send their children to charter schools are costing the LA school district a half-billion dollars annually. The report “doesn’t fault charters,” according to the LA Times, “saying that...