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...

Responding to incidents of iPad misuse at district schools and widespread public criticism over problems with the rollout, the LA Unified board yesterday approved setting a special meeting later this month to “publicly grapple” with iPad issues. The 5-2 vote on a resolution from Monica Ratliff, who chairs a committee that oversees the iPad initiative,...

Is the Los Angeles Unified School Board finally coming to terms with harsh fiscal realities of a post-recession world? That’s what it seemed like yesterday, when the members met for one of the shortest meetings in recent memory, only four hours. A combination of declining enrollment, federal cuts in special education and this year’s Federal sequestration...

The election campaign for president of the teachers union, UTLA, has expanded with a third candidate entering the race, joining the incumbent, Warren Fletcher, and a previously-announced challenger, Alex Caputo-Pearl, a member of the Progressive Educators for Action caucus within the union. The new candidate, David Garcia, is a former Navy corpsman and veteran of the first Gulf War...

Richard Vladovic, president of the LA Unified School Board, has agreed to meet with a coalition of community groups that claimed Vladovic was ignoring their requests to meet over spending issues. The meeting has been scheduled for 11 a.m. Oct. 18, and it follows a sequence of events that began with a letter the coalition, known as CLASS,...

Competing visions for future spending will be on grand display again Tuesday when the LA Unified Board of Education meets to put Superintendent John Deasy’s budget plan to a vote (or not) and consider a competing resolution (or not) that would tell him how to spend the money. (See the agenda here.) Confusing? Welcome to Budgeting 101,...

The Los Angeles Unified School District has begun the search to replace Deputy Superintendent for Instruction Jamie Aquino, who announced a week and a half ago that he would resign at the end of the year. The job posting seeks to find “an accomplished and visionary educator with considerable experience aligning student and school needs with...

LA Unified’s chief lawyer said today the investigation into harassment charges against School Board President Richard Vladovic was complete, and board members were briefed on its findings. “We have concluded the investigation, which was conducted by an outside firm. We are in the process of providing individual board members with the findings of that investigation,” LAUSD General...

An informal conference to discuss a possible settlement in one of the teachers union’s unfair labor practice charges against the LA Unified School District has been postponed; it was supposed to have taken place Thursday. It’s not clear when the sides will meet. The union filed the action in June with the Public Employee Relations Board (or...

Superintendent John Deasy and School Board members Steve Zimmer and Monica Ratliff flew to Washington D.C. last week, not for a relaxing getaway but to meet with lawmakers to discuss the impact of federal budget cuts is having on the district. Known as “sequestration,” the cuts are costing the district hundreds of millions of dollars...