*Updated April 12 Driven by mounting urgency to improve struggling schools and widespread dissatisfaction with California’s school evaluation tool, LA Unified board members voted Tuesday to create an assessment framework that will allow parents to more easily compare schools as well as select the measures by which to evaluate them. The key difference from the California...

Test scores released Tuesday for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) continued a decade-long trend of stasis, with small improvements measured only for performance in eighth-grade reading. While states with disparate academic approaches have made some strides over the past few years — notably Florida and California — national averages have varied only slightly, despite...

Responding to years of pressure by Los Angeles community and education advocates, LA Unified next month may commit to funding schools based on a new ranking that gives priority to those with the highest-need students. Nearly $140 million in new funding is expected to flow to the district in the next two years as part...

Los Angeles parents will get a simpler way to evaluate and compare schools, if a plan by three LA Unified school board members is passed next month that gives schools a single score or rating based primarily on student achievement and growth. It’s been five years since the Academic Performance Index, which ranked California schools...

There’s been a lot of talk but little action from Los Angeles and California education officials when it comes to supporting the lowest-performing schools. Last week state board members again voted to put off revisions to California’s education plan, which are required in order for the plan to be approved by the federal Department of...

Oh, California, you paradise, you far-flung western shoal, you frontier beyond purple mountains and fruited plains, you earth-shaking technological marvel, you never-ending party — California, you’re the land of good news, where the economy booms and the culture is wildly, diversely, supremely cool. You’re the golden realm at the end of our national rainbow. Fittingly,...

California parents who want to know how schools are performing will now have to look deeper into the new California School Dashboard to figure it out. The dashboard, which was rolled out this spring as the state’s new way to assess schools and school districts, is a collection of color-coded boxes rating various aspects of...

California’s plan to comply with federal education law comes up short in nine key areas and is destined to have portions rejected, according to the influential California advocacy organization Children Now. Based on federal feedback to states that have already submitted their plans, the Oakland-based nonprofit, nonpartisan education advocacy organization has sent letters to the state...