As reported yesterday in LA School Report, LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy and others are in Washington today, making a final push to persuade the Obama Education Department to approve its revised application for a waiver from No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the 2002 federal education law. Superintendent Deasy has said that a NCLB waiver would free up...

Rafe Esquith may or may not be LAUSD’s best classroom teacher, but he’s certainly one of the most well-known — at least outside of LA. His familiarity comes largely thanks to his own writing (including a new book coming out this year) and others like Washington Post education columnist Jay Mathews writing about him as...

More than a week after they first surfaced in the LA Daily News, we still don’t know very much about the harassment and employee abuse allegations being investigated against Board member Richard Vladovic. According to LAUSD, Board members cannot “impeach” a colleague, but there is a 2003-approved code of conduct covering Board member behavior towards...

While high-profile School Board votes are often said to be “baked” ahead of time — negotiated and known by the key participants well before the public vote — it’s not at all clear that was the case yesterday at the LAUSD School Board meeting, where the result was a 5-2 vote for Richard Vladovic as...

Earlier today, veteran LAUSD teacher and Incubator School founder Sujata Bhatt posted some thoughts about the backlash against a set of new standards and tests called the Common Core:  There’s been a lot of hullaballoo suddenly about the Common Core. Symptomatic of the strange political times we live in, the Tea Party Right and the...

A couple of weeks ago we published a list of LA’s Top Education Tweeters — a semi-complete compendium of prolific and/or important people and organizations. We got a lot of responses and suggestions — keep them coming, we’ll do an update soon! — and then this week the kind folks at the College-Ready Promise (@CollegeRdyPrmse)...

While laid-off teachers and ardent school reform critics may be all aglow over LAUSD School Board member Steve Zimmer’s “Pacino-esque” speech on behalf of the proposed teacher hiring/ class size reduction resolution last week, perhaps it’s not quite yet time for anyone to declare victory. Last Tuesday, the LAUSD Board debated and ultimately passed a...

Here’s the Education Week interview with United Way’s Ryan Smith (pictured) we mentioned last week. As you’ll see, the piece starts off with a few sentences about LAUSD’s challenges (high dropout rates, low scores compared to other big city school systems) and then moves on to Smith’s background (he’s a Native Angeleno) and views (very...

Political news site Politico is reporting that US Senate hopeful Cory Booker has hired Obama campaign veteran Addisu Demissie (pictured) as his campaign manager. As you may recall, Demissie’s Sacramento-based firm 50+1 was hired to field work during the LAUSD school board election primaries, in which the Coalition outspent the union-endorsed candidates but only won one of three...