Also in this week’s column: Omarosa reveals Betsy DeVos’ nom de Trump. Austin Beutner hires Chris Christie’s Newark schools supe. Gary Hart’s “legislative jiu-jitsu.”
Gubernatorial candidate Antonio Villaraigosa and state superintendent candidate Marshall Tuck are raking in donations from charter school supporters.
The Social Justice Humanitas Academy is one of a handful of community schools that have been dramatically closing opportunity and achievement gaps in some of Los Angeles’ toughest neighborhoods.
Perhaps no year in living memory presented greater challenges and opportunities to the press than 2017, and Capital & Main was no exception. In response to the Trump presidency, we expanded our coverage well beyond California, while continuing to investigate the fault lines that undergird the nation’s most populous state. We also deepened our reporting […]
Perhaps no year in living memory presented greater challenges and opportunities to the press than 2017, and Capital & Main was no exception.
The stage has been set for a Tuesday showdown between charter school operators and the Los Angeles Unified School District office charged with charter school oversight.
The 25-year experiment with charter schools has been a failure, former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch said this week at the annual conference of the Network for Public Education.
A low-turnout Los Angeles election, which set a new record as the most expensive school board contest in U.S. history, resulted in a 57-43 percent victory margin for an affable defender of “school choice.”
Does anyone really want a handful of corporations, the likes of McDonald’s and Burger King, teaching children and locking people up in prison?
A state report has criticized Alliance College-Ready Public Schools’ compliance level with federal student privacy rules during an anti-union campaign. BY BILL RADEN
A new study shows that tax dollars have been used to create privately held real estate empires — charter school properties that, because they aren’t owned by the public, could, theoretically, one day be converted into luxury condominiums or shopping complexes.
Like many Southern cities, Clinton, Mississippi, bears the scars of American slavery. A road cutting through the city’s center marks a key route used by slave traders in the decades before the Civil War.
In 2014, when teachers at Los Angeles’ Jefferson High School opened their own charter school, the Student Empowerment Academy, they hoped to bring the larger world into their classrooms. They got more than they bargained for. BY ROBIN UREVICH
Yesterday the subscriber-only political almanac California Target Book reported that spending by all independent expenditure committees (IECs) on legislative races in the general election had topped $41 million. That brought the year’s total of outside money for state Assembly and Senate seats, including primary races, to $70 million.
Under state law, an independent expenditure committee can funnel unlimited amounts of money from corporations, nonprofits and wealthy donors, as long as it does not coordinate spending activity with candidates, who are under strict, albeit voluntary campaign limits. Next week Bill Raden will report on the unprecedented amount of contributions made by California’s charter school lobbies to influence nearly three-dozen state Assembly and Senate races, along with several local school board elections.
For two decades businessman Bill Bloomfield has poured millions of dollars into political campaigns, and supported George W. Bush, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain. He has also used his personal wealth to back former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the gubernatorial effort of GOP candidate Meg Whitman.
Joel Warner reports on the Netflix CEO’s attempts to disrupt public education.
Aimee Roylance was thrilled when her son was accepted into Livermore Valley Charter School in 2010. “The experience overall was very positive,” she says. But she didn’t know what was going on behind the scenes.
When the Olympics ended so did a multimillion-dollar assault on democracy. From the start of the games in Rio to the closing ceremony, television viewers in Massachusetts had been bombarded with a $2.3 million ad campaign funded by Wall Street.
Residents of Montclair, New Jersey are growing concerned about the impact a proposed charter school would have on the town’s public school district.
Talking Points Memo recently launched a series called The Hidden History of the Privatization of Everything, focusing on what TPM calls “one of the most significant and pervasive politico-economic trends in the United States in the last half century.”
As the free market fairy tale goes, innovative charter schools force neighborhood schools to improve education, while schools that can’t compete eventually close. Parents are “customers” that need more “school choice,” and when a school fails, students simply find another.
When the Great Public Schools Now Initiative, the $490 million blueprint to turn half of Los Angeles’ public school system into charter schools, was first leaked to Los Angeles Times reporter Howard Blume, it triggered an uproar among the city’s education community.
Many parents of students who have successfully matriculated through the Los Angeles Unified School District believe that the key to a successful education means viewing a school as a community.
Despite the trendy popularity of charter schools in some circles, their wholesale replacement of traditional public schools is unnecessary.
Charter proponents, most notably the Walton Family Foundation, contribute large amounts of money to expand charter schools in select cities around the nation.
The original concept of charter schools emerged nationally more than two decades ago and was intended to support community efforts to open up education.
