CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
September 8, 2011 | Jason Song
The long lines in front of Garfield High School started Tuesday. But it wasn't students eager to get into classes at the East Los Angeles school, which began on Wednesday along with most L.A. Unified campuses. Instead it was parents either handing in proof that their children had been vaccinated against whooping cough or trying to find out where to get the mandatory shot. "They just want to comply with the rules; they want to make sure that their kids will get a good education," Principal Jose Huerta said.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
May 1, 2011 | By Rick Rojas, Los Angeles Times
Just shy of a year ago, the students on Granada Hills Charter High School's Academic Decathlon team told themselves that they would win a national title. It took months of practice, weekends and holidays lost, and spring break spent hunkered down in a classroom, studying guides thicker than a phone book. But in a hotel banquet hall here Saturday, the students embraced each other, their parents screamed, their coaches looked to be in a state of shock: Granada Hills was the national champion.
BUSINESS
February 4, 2011 | By Richard Verrier, Los Angeles Times
British chef Jamie Oliver's food revolution is giving LAUSD officials a case of indigestion. The Los Angeles Unified School District has suspended all filming of reality TV shows in district schools after a standoff with the celebrity chef, who had been filming his ABC show "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution" at West Adams Preparatory High School in central Los Angeles for the last two weeks. This week the district denied Oliver's license to film at Manual Arts Senior High School in South L.A., which, like West Adams, is operated by MLA Partner Schools under a contract with LAUSD.
OPINION
August 17, 2010
What we can learn Re "Who's teaching our kids?," Aug. 15 My wife and I are both retired California public school educators. We want to commend The Times for its investigation into the effectiveness of teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District. You have brought much-needed light. Though our respective careers were far different — my wife taught in elementary grades; I worked in secondary grades — we often had to evaluate ourselves because there was no way to compare our performance with other teachers'.
OPINION
August 17, 2010
The Los Angeles Unified School District has done an admirable job of collecting useful data about its teachers ? which ones have the classroom magic that makes students learn and which ones annually let their students down. Yet it has never used that valuable information to analyze what successful teachers have in common, so that others can learn from them, or to let less effective teachers know how they're doing. For the record: This editorial says the federal Race to the Top grant program pushed states to make students' test scores count for half or more of a teacher's performance evaluation.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
July 14, 2010 | By Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times
The price tag for a complex of schools at the site of the famed Ambassador Hotel has become the Los Angeles Unified School District's most expensive school project, now surpassing $578 million. The latest cost increase, approved Tuesday by the Board of Education, adds $6.6 million for expenses related mostly to safety and historic preservation at the complex for 4,200 students. The main campus of the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools will open this fall. Two small schools already operate on the back portion of the 24-acre Koreatown site.