Governor Jerry Brown is facing rising opposition to a bill designed to make it easier to fire teachers accused of abusing students. Critics say it doesn’t, and that could make it harder for him to justify signing it into law. The deadline for consideration is Sunday. Over the last few weeks, school district superintendents, education groups...

The old California Standardized Tests are a thing of the past. Governor Jerry Brown just signed Assembly Bill 484, which immediately suspends the old tests and funds a trial run this year of the new Smarter Balanced Assessments, which will be taken on computers and are aligned with the new Common Core curriculum. “I’ve said...

A broad coalition of more than 40 community and advocacy groups is jumping into LA Unified’s prolonged spending debate, urging the board to allow individual schools, rather than centralized administrators, to decide how to spend the billions of dollars coming into the district from Gov. Jerry Brown‘s Local Control Funding Formula program. Organized by the...

While a bill awaiting Gov. Jerry Brown’s signature would end statewide testing for a year – he’s expected to sign it – state officials plan to use older test results to assure that California receives its annual Title I allocations. To comply with federal regulations that states must provide annual test results to qualify for...

Meeting tomorrow for the second time in the new school year, the LA Unified school board will plunge back into a thorny debate over how to spend millions of new dollars flowing into the district from the state. It might not be pretty. Superintendent John Deasy is expected to respond to the board’s June directive to...

Superintendent John Deasy told LA School Report that the passage of Governor Jerry Brown’s Local Control Funding Formula was “probably the most important education public policy decision in 40 years.” “This is beyond phenomenal,” he said. “I feel great.” The LA Times editorial page also praised Brown this morning, saying, “with his decisive and, yes, stubborn insistence on fixing what...

State lawmakers have reached an agreement with Governor Jerry Brown about how to overhaul state education funding that — while altered somewhat from Brown’s original proposal — will still be of substantial financial benefit to LAUSD. “I applaud Governor Brown and our legislators for their work on the compromise announced on the Local Control Funding Formula,”...

Last week’s visit from Governor Jerry Brown in support of his proposed new funding formula garnered lots of media attention and the enthusiastic support of LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy (who’s depending on the $188 million bump in funding for LAUSD that would come from the Brown overhaul). But Brown hasn’t yet persuaded lawmakers in Sacramento...

The LA Times reported earlier this week that California has slipped another notch in public spending on K-12 education — from 23rd in 2008 to 35th in 2011 — part of a nationwide dip in spending reported by the Census Bureau. At least we’re not in Illinois, where education funding dropped the most (7.4 percent) over the same time period....

Governor Jerry Brown continued to promote his Local Control Funding Formula proposal at a Friday morning press conference at East LA’s Humphreys Elementary. Joining him was an All-Star cast that included LA Chamber of Commerce CEO Gary Toebben, United Way CEO Elise Buik, School Board member Bennett Kayser, former State Senator and City Council candidate Gil...