The LA Unified board has scheduled a special meeting next week to initiate discussions on how to conduct the search for a successor to Superintendent Ray Cortines, who has expressed a desire to step down by December. “The board will meet on July 30 to start just the technical part of the [search] process,” board president Steve...

* UPDATED Superintendent Ramon Cortines is putting off retirement for another year. The LA Unified school board yesterday voted unanimously to extend Cortines’s contract through the end of the 2015-16 school year. Terms of the deal are still under review, “but nothing, including salary, was expected to change from the previous pact,” district officials said...

In the first contract talks under LA Unified’s new superintendent, Ray Cortines, negotiators for the district and the teachers union, UTLA, hit another snag yesterday as the district reasserted claims that unions demands are unsustainable and would lead to severe cutbacks to key programs, resources, and personnel that would detrimentally impact students. The union is...

* UPDATED If it’s Tuesday, there must be another LA Unified board meeting. Now that the John Deasy era is over, the seven members begin facing more mundane matters, and this time, tomorrow, the 10 am meeting has only one item for open discussion before the members move behind closed doors to discuss, among other...

What a momentous day it was. One superintendent out. Another steps in. The LA Unified community and social media were alive with chatter — people sorry to see John Deasy go, people celebrating his departure, people happy to see Ray Cortines return for a third deployment, people wondering what the school board was smoking in...

No one was more surprised that Ray Cortines became the latest LA Unified superintendent than Ray Cortines. “I hadn’t been planning to return, and I didn’t negotiate with the board,” he told LA School Report today. “The only caveat I put out was that it would have to be a unanimous vote, and I didn’t...

Ray Cortines appears  to be returning to lead LA Unified for a third time. With John Deasy resigning, Cortines was chosen unanimously by the seven member board, a condition Cortines insisted upon before agreeing to take the helm of the district, according to sources who were made aware of the board’s decision. An official announcement is...