Archive: Education

Also: Monica Rodriguez elected to the Los Angeles City Council. Board of Education member Steve Zimmer lost.

Carl Marziali is the former VP for media and public relations at USC.

Laura Greanias, former city editor of the LA Daily News, will now run the site for NYC nonprofit The Seventy Four.

Rep. Brad Sherman analyzes the language used, the likelihood that the writer was Muslim, and whether LA officials were right to act.

LA Unified closed all of its schools based on a crude email threat that many experts dismissed almost immediately as a probable hoax. Schools are open today.

The Washington Post looks at the relatively new Los Angeles Times practice of accepting money from nonprofits, including Eli Broad's, to help fund education reporting.

In the heart of Silicon Valley, a milestone has been reached. Plus more progress at Harvey Mudd.

Timed to today's start of school in LAUSD, the Times is "rededicating itself to coverage of teaching and learning" with Education Matters and new staffers.

Rafe Esquith has been in the LAUSD's dumb "teacher jail" status since March over a complaint over telling a joke about nudity in "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."

The seizure of 20 boxes of documents suggests the feds are investigating the contracts for iPads pushed by ex-Supt. John Deasy and approved by the Board of Education.

Ramon Cortines, now 82, takes over the LA schools system for the third time. This time he's an interim while a search is made for a successor to John Deasy.

The school board is likely to name an interim replacement in the morning. LA School Report was first to report that Deasy was out.

After stories by KPCC and the LA Times, and a critical internal report, the LAUSD superintendent agrees to re-bid the hugely expensive project to equip classrooms with tablet computers.

With students returning to school today, some residents are unhappy about the new policy that would put an AR-15 in the trunk on some on-duty campus police officers.

Retired school principal George McKenna won the vacant seat on the Los Angeles Unified school board in Tuesday's runoff, using his long name recognition and backing by UTLA to defeat Alex Johnson in the divisive runoff.

Since a former student at Marlborough wrote two weeks ago about her English teacher falling in love with her — and more — the scandal has roiled the Hancock Park campus and reached to Pasadena's Polytechnic.

Superior Court Judge Rolf M. Treu ruled Tuesday that the longstanding state laws which ensure job security for public school teachers are unconstitutional because of the harm done to students, especially low-income minority children, by incompetent classroom teachers.

For several years Bay has been senior editor of the Huffington Post Los Angeles operation, but her roots are in television news. She takes over in July. Took a long time to fill this one.

American University Preparatory School, which is taking applications from high school students around the world, will open in the fall in the former Laemmle movie theaters and adjacent converted office building at 3rd and Figueroa streets.

The renowned Crenshaw High School Elite Choir sang today for President Obama and the holiday celebration in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House.

Barbara Jones, who covers the LA Unified School District and the Board of Education for the Daily News, is leaving the newspaper business to become the chief of staff to board member Tamar Galatzan.

LaMotte died this morning while in San Diego for the annual convention of the California School Boards Association. The longtime member of the Los Angeles Board of Education from South LA was first elected in 2003.

In an joint opinion piece in the Los Angeles News Group papers, former mayor Richard Riordan and LANG columnist Tim Rutten write that the Los Angeles schools spend a lot more on students than district officials know or admit — with much lower results than they also will admit.

Days of backstage political drama end with the district's top official and the school board agreeing that he will continue to run the place until 2016.

Layoffs and retirements have left no one on staff to repair woodwinds. More than 2,600 broken instruments of all kinds sit on shelves, KPCC says in a story.

The largest gift ever to Georgetown, his alma mater, will establish the McCourt School of Public Policy.

Former Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has secured at least one university gig for the next phase of his political life. Harvard announced today that he will be a visiting fellow at Harvard's Institute of Politics.

The high school social studies teacher gained legend status on the Eastside for his mentoring of Chicano students and for being arrested during the 1968 Chicano walkouts. The middle school on the campus of Belmont High was named for Castro in 2010.

The vote counting in Tuesday's City of Los Angeles primary election provided no real surprises. Eric Garcetti and Wendy Greuel will face off in a May 21 runoff for mayor, as every poll said that they would. There will be runoffs in the other citywide races, and in at least two City Council districts.

Jason Leon, 32, a teacher at the Tarzana middle school, was taken into custody today on an arrest warrant and charged with four counts of child molestation and three counts of battery. The victims were girls aged 13 and 14 at the time of the alleged crimes.

Scot Graham, the LA Unified leasing chief who has sued ex-superintendent Ramon Cortines for sexual harassment and filed a $10 million claim with the district, says he first met Cortines in San Francisco's gay community in the 1980s. Now married to a man, Graham details in the Daily News numerous unwanted sexual advances allegedly made by Cortines, who is now 80.

A Sacramento judge rejected activist Molly Munger's argument that Jerry Brown's tax measure should not be listed first on the November ballot. Munger's group, Our Children, Our Future, said it won't appeal. "We're moving on," said spokesman Nathan Ballard.

Remember all those teachers who were summarily moved out of Miramonte Elementary School after two teachers were accused of sexually attacking children at the school? Fox 11's Phil Shuman found out what they are doing. It isn't teaching.

This piece ran in The Atlantic in March 1982 and is credited as an influential argument in the movement toward community policing embraced here and in New York by William J. Bratton. The magazine posted it online in its entirety following Wilson's death on Friday.

Superintendent John Deasy and UTLA president Warren Fletcher will be on "Patt Morrison" on KPCC this afternoon.

Things were "tense and emotional" outside the school in Florence-Firestone this morning.

Ricardo Guevara, a former teacher's aide at the Miramonte Elementary School's Early Education Center, was convicted in 2005 of committing lewd acts with children and sentenced to 15 years to life in prison.

If the children at Miramonte Elementary School weren't traumatized before, they will be when they get back to school on Thursday.

Martin Springer, who lives in Alhambra, was arrested by sheriff's detectives this morning after a short investigation into new reports of lewd acts with children.

Princeton University junior Andrew Blumenfeld won the final seat on the La Cañada Unified school board by ten votes.

A La Cañada High math teacher accused of calling a student "Jew boy,'' using other slurs and mocking a student's stutter will receive sensitivity training.

I don't know what's going on at Roy Romer Middle School in North Hollywood, but after watching this video posted today at YouTube, if I were on the school board or a news assignment desk, I'd get somebody out there tomorrow.

MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show will air live on Friday from the campus of Crenshaw High School — starting at 3 a.m. to reach the East Coast audience.

In their forthcoming book "Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World’s Richest Museum," reporters Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino detail Getty scams through the years.

I can't help but notice the detailed nature of the criticism leveled at the Times' adoption of "value-added" measures as its metric of choice for rating teachers.

Last week's very pointed academic criticism of the Los Angeles Times' work on teachers rankings has finally gotten a repsonse from the paper.

Times' controversial "value added" project is called a disservice worthy of an apology by Colorado researchers. The LAT spins it otherwise.

The student was shot today near Bell High school, the LAUSD school police officer outside El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills.

At least two students have been shot at Gardena High School, possibly by accident. The student suspected of the shooting is believed to be in a classroom and talking to...

When Monrovia High school's drama teacher wanted the students to produce "Rent," the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical with a cult following that deals with AIDS and homosexuality, the district's superintendent said no.

Jacob Soboroff, who made all those great videos for LA Observed a few years ago, is now co-host of "School Pride" airing Friday nights on NBC. The show did a makeover at Hollenbeck Middle School last week and will do LACES this week.

The L.A. Times headline more than doubles the fee hike proposed by the president of the University of California.

The body of Rigoberto Ruelas, a 5th grade teacher at Miramonte Elementary in South Gate, was found near his car in the Angeles National Forest.

The Los Angeles Times's controversial database rating LAUSD teachers based on test scores has been a big online traffic draw.

LA Observed columnist Bill Boyarsky, writing for the second time on the teacher effectiveness series that has been getting so much attention for the Los Angeles Times, argues that the debate over the stories is being over-simplified.

Just came across this piece with NBC 4 News Conference host Conan Nolan talking in some depth with Doug Smith, the data analysis editor who led the Los Angeles...

Board of Education member blasts the story, while a nationally respected author has praise.

Editorial Director Mark Katches explains in a blog post how a recent California Watch project on the shrinking school day came to appear in newspapers, on the air and on websites around the state.

Kevin Jolly, 45, left as superintendent of the Burbank schools a few weeks ago to take over a troubled school district in Mendocino County.

Sponsored by parents at Wonderland Avenue Elementary School in Los Angeles and posted at Funny or Die. It's pretty good.

Jay Mathews used to be Los Angeles bureau chief of the Washington Post and now writes the paper's education blog. In 1988 he authored a biography of Garfield High teacher...

Friends of Jamie Escalante are reporting that the retired Garfield High School teacher died this afternoon in Reno, where he was seeking treatment for bladder cancer.

Amy Beck is 33 and a sixth-grade teacher at Jordan Middle School in Burbank.

emember those defenses Supt. Ramon Cortines put up to justify his seat on the board of Scholastic Inc. — an arrangement that paid him $150,000 last year?

Superintendent Ramon Cortines got the payments for sitting on the board of Scholastic Inc., which has done $16 million in business with L.A. Unified in recent years, the LAT says.

Click to view larger. More by Steve Greenberg in the LA Sketchbook archive....

"Glee" star Chris Colfer is 19, gay and without children. So why does the Los Angeles Unified School District's auto-call robot keep phoning him at home to say his daughter...

See more by Steve Greenberg in the LA Sketchbook archive. Click to view larger....

Los Angeles native Steve Caplan sold his house in the Valley hills to move to Copenhagen, where his wife is from, to work on the coming United Nations Climate Change...

The founder and chairman of Green Dot Public Schools is stepping down to work on “national education issues,” a spokeswoman for Barr said Friday. Barr will become chair emeritus of...

District officials begin the year $140 million in the hole - and that's after $869 million in cost-cutting measures. Already, students can expect crowded classrooms, fewer teachers and limited services....

Departing Villaraigosa chief of staff Robin Kramer and publisher-education adviser David Abel both sent Bill Boyarsky emails about his LA Observed post on the mayor and charter schools. Bill talks...

Bill Boyarsky has been absent from LA Observed since February writing a book and taking some vacation. The book hits stores in September — and looks truly gorgeous. "Inventing L.A.:...

The weekend interview on the Wall Street Journal opinion page is with Eli Broad. In a discussion about education reform, Broad offers this explanation for why his Broad Superintendents Academy...

Occidental College professor and local progressive leader Peter Dreier has a pretty interesting blog post at the Huffington Post detailing how parents and school officials got the Pasadena Star-News to...

Tyree Wieder, who retired last summer after 14 years as president of Los Angeles Valley College, was tapped as interim chancellor of the entire district. She takes over for Marshall...