Students

The Los Angeles teachers union and the city's school district are battling over a district practice that, a Times' analysis suggests, contributes to higher scores on state tests. The practice is "periodic assessments," a bureaucratic name for exams administered by the Los Angeles Unified School District. The goal is to give teachers insight into what students need to learn while there remains time in the current school year to adjust instruction.

When Leslie Lobel was a student at Tufts University in the late 1970s, her dormitory roommates learned a simple code when they wanted to be left alone for a sexual romp: "There was a Dry Erase board and you would write, 'Come back in 20 minutes.' Sometimes you were locked out, and sometimes you were fortunate enough to be the one locking someone else out." Students did not rely on rules or handbooks to understand they needed to figure out how to navigate one simple equation of freshman life: randy students, minus pesky parents, equals sexual freedom.

Porter Middle School administrators believed a boy was dealing pot on campus. So they allegedly sent a student to buy some. The sting worked -- to a point. The student successfully bought drugs and the administrators at the Granada Hills campus reported the incident to authorities.

One of the best-loved murals on the campus of 186th Street Elementary School in Gardena depicts some of the world's most inspirational figures -- Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez -- underlined by a question, "Are you a peacemaker?"

His style is a mix of Socrates and Don Rickles. His goal is to coax, bully, tease, demand and manipulate ex-convicts into getting ready to find a job. One of the first chores is to get them to drop the habits they picked up behind bars: lying, faking, refusing to make eye contact, getting verbally aggressive when disrespected, thinking of the whole world as just another overbearing prison guard. Scott Silverman is relentless. "You're doing that thing again, something between a smirk and what you call a smile," he tells one student.

Even as Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa promises to enlist teachers and parents in his reform plan for Los Angeles schools, he has largely overlooked another group with a stake in his new enterprise: students. Villaraigosa might want to listen to 16-year-old Yamileth Capetillo, who goes to class on an empty stomach many days because her crowded high school, the Santee Education Complex near downtown, runs out of hot food for the second lunch shift.

A group performed a yoga sunrise salutation to kick off the program at Fullerton College. UCLA marked the day with panel discussions and art displays. Caltech students used food to make their point, while Loyola Marymount University students dumped plastic bottles onto the lawn outside the library. And at Santa Monica College, along with speeches from politicians, students invoked Dr. Seuss to teach kindergartners about protecting the environment.

Tens of thousands of Los Angeles students could be on the brink of being qualified to apply to the state's four-year universities, according to a report made public Monday. The report's authors asserted that huge numbers of students could, with the right advice and academic assistance, become bound for the University of California and Cal State University systems. The bad news is that, in too many cases, they aren't getting this help.

Culinary students working the post-Oscars Governors Ball on Sunday night say there is only one star they are there to please, and it isn't George Clooney. More than 80 student chefs will be looking to Wolfgang Puck as they prepare food for 1,600 members of the Hollywood elite. In fact, star-gazing is strictly forbidden. "We have a ton of food to prepare!" Puck said from the main kitchen of his Hollywood & Highland Center base of operations.

Students at Corinthian Colleges and other for-profit learning institutions are getting a painful lesson in credit-crunch economics: Some lenders, including giant Sallie Mae, are turning off the money faucets for less credit-worthy applicants. That means students at these commercial schools who use high-rate private loans to bridge gaps in their tuition costs or who fail to qualify for conventional loans and grants may have a harder time financing their educations.