LA School Report

Last week, as leading education experts gathered — again —to ponder the nation’s sluggish recovery from pandemic learning loss, one speaker put the issue in stark relief.  “This is the biggest problem facing America,” Jens Ludwig, a University of Chicago professor, said flatly. Nonetheless, he told those assembled at the Washington, D.C., event sponsored by...

The conventional wisdom in some quarters is that the charter school movement has run its course. Abandoned by an increasingly progressive Democratic Party for being “neo-liberal” and by an increasingly populist Republican Party for being “technocratic,” charter schools (the story goes) are falling into the chasm that has opened up in the political center of...

High-dosage tutoring is one of the most effective tools to help students recover from lost learning, including in subjects like reading, where many are far behind. But what if schools didn’t wait until students fell behind? What if all kindergartners got a reading tutor from the start? That’s what the early-literacy tutoring company Once is...

For K–12 education, 2023 was a year spent over a threshold. Schools had one foot in the shutdown era, still struggling to restore a sense of normalcy that disappeared in 2020. A steep rise in behavioral and disciplinary issues, which many teachers hoped would be only the temporary product of COVID’s generational disruption to routines,...

The future of education has never looked more creative and promising. Since making its public debut last year, ChatGPT has profoundly impacted my perspective on generative AI in education. As a writer and former high school English teacher, I experienced an existential crisis watching the chatbot effortlessly generate lesson plans and rubrics — tasks that...

Each year, the ed tech company I work for, HMH, conducts a survey designed to understand the obstacles and opportunities teachers and administrators experience. This year’s Educator Confidence Report revealed new insights into how more than 1,200 K-12 teachers are feeling about the profession overall, as well as their attitudes toward generative artificial intelligence —...

Being bullied can make your life miserable, and decades of research prove it: Bullied children and teens are at risk for anxiety, depression, dropping out of school, peer rejection, social isolation and self-harm. Adults can be bullied too, often at a job, and they may suffer just as much as kids do. [cta_rss_snippet] I’m a...

2023 continued to be a tumultuous time for the nation’s second largest school district, as enrollment, transportation and other issues continued to disrupt Los Angeles Unified post-pandemic. The year began with a heated battle at LAUSD for special needs services, with parents and advocates slamming the district’s regressive rollout plan.  LA School Report also talked...

The results of the 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) are out, and the United States ranked 28th out of 37 participating Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries in 15-year-olds’ math reasoning skills. Across the globe, math performance declined significantly. Unfortunately, these low scores mask a more troubling fact: Our country’s math performance has been...

Public education is at an inflection point in the campaign for learning recovery. The average eighth grader is an entire school year behind, according to national data, and students in underserved communities continue to face the biggest setbacks in the wake of COVID. Many students have regressed since 2021, even after returning to fully in-person...