By Chris Hofmann President Obama last week signed the most important education legislation in over a decade, the long-awaited reauthorization of ESEA and No Child Left Behind. The provisions of the law will have a profound effect on what school is like for my class of 26 fourth graders and will reverberate throughout the everyday...

With President Obama‘s signing the rewrite of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law yesterday, a new era of federal and state education policy has been ushered in. While the new law, Every Child Achieves Act (ESSA), doesn’t mean much for LA Unified in an immediate sense because it had already received a waiver from...

Los Angeles Unified and five other California school districts got welcome news today as the U.S. Department of Education extended their waiver from the No Child Left Behind law, giving them continued flexibility in how they spend millions to educate low-income students. Known collectively as the California Office to Reform Education (CORE), the districts won...

The Senate passed a rewrite of the expired No Child Left Behind law yesterday with broad, bipartisan support. The George W. Bush-era law is controversial due to the high-stakes standardizing testing it ushered in, and the Senate’s bill would strip away much of the federal government’s test-and-punish powers. The bipartisan support it received is in...

This story has been updated for clarification. A group of some of the largest school districts in California is launching an online bank of student assessment tools to help teachers measure learning as the rollout of the new Common Core curriculum gains speed this year. The 60 “performance modules,” covering multiple grades for both English language arts and math instruction, are free...

The chart above, courtesy of EdSource, shows how the group of nine California school districts including LAUSD propose to create their own accountability system, based on a broader range of measures than allowed under current federal law. “Standardized test scores, now the sole factor in current state API system, would now be one of three...