Sometimes the most interesting political commentary is found in the comics... or in the ads.

Monday's editions of the Los Angeles Times, Daily News and La Opinion carried a full-page ad from a coalition of civic and community organizations aimed at influencing the negotiations between the Los Angeles Unified...

Nearly half the rankings handed out to L.A. Unified teachers by the Los Angeles Times may be wrong. This is one of the conclusions reached by Derek Briggs and Ben Domingue of the University of Colorado at Boulder, who conducted a reanalysis of the data used by the Times in...

The Los Angeles Times teacher rankings bomb has ignited a firestorm of controversy, a little light and a lot of heat.

Pundits have lined up and taken sides. Education secretary Arne Duncan has supported the pending release data on 6,000 Los Angeles Unified School District teachers, ranking them by...

Every so often a newspaper story changes everything, or at least a lot. Such a story appeared in Sunday's Los Angeles Times, when the test scores of students from different teachers were compared. And the teachers were named.

In coming articles, the scores of hundreds of other teachers...

Ray Cortines gave himself a birthday present last week. At age 78, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, whose remarkable energy has allowed him to persevere through in-your-face politics and spirit-crushing budget cutbacks, announced his intent to retire in the spring.

A transition is in the offing...

Jennifer Bestor doesn't sound like a radical, but she has methodically peeled back a veil that clouds the inequity caused by the way California taxes commercial property.

She is a stay-at-home mom in Menlo Park who just happens to have 20 years' experience in business and finance. She's also ticked...

The idea of peer review for teachers has been around for a generation. It's controversial, but mostly in the places that don't use it. Places such as Montgomery Country, Maryland, and 80 other districts that have strong programs consider them successful. The Los Angeles Unified School District and...

There's a glimmer of education's future in Scotland, and it's called Glow. I spent four days in Glasgow last fall looking at that country's $100 million investment in educational technology, and I came away impressed with what ought to be possible in Southern California.

I watched biology teacher Jaye Richards...

There has been a good bit of grousing lately from teachers, particularly teacher activists. President Obama's tough love stance, which advocates tying student outcome measures to teacher compensation has not gone down well. I hear murmurs of "union busting," and "we'll just sit on our hands at the next election."

Get Los Angeles Unified, the mayor, unions, and universities together to help schools get better? Yeah, we've heard that story before. They've got the attention span of a moth and fly away toward the next political flame.

This time it might be different.

Last month these worthy parties signed something...

By Charles Taylor Kerchner and Dominic J. Brewer

The Los Angeles Unified School District board, which in August voted 6-1 for a competition between internal and external education providers, did its best to kill it off on last week. A different policy for change is needed. Here's why.

The...

Superintendent Ramon Cortines has made everyone angry. His recommendation for who should run 30 Los Angeles schools gave each of the competing organizations a little, but everyone has a grievance. Demonstrations are planned before, during, and after the Los Angeles Unified School District board meets on Tuesday.

Expect a...

In the contest to determine who will run the schools for 36,000 Los Angeles students, all the votes are in, except those that count. Over the last three weeks, school communities went to the polls. And two panels of expert reviewers have issued their opinions. Despite all the...

Think of it as a big chem lab experiment. The Los Angeles Unified School District is testing the hypothesis that allowing a bunch of people to compete for running schools will yield better ones. It's a starkly different idea than the traditional civil service model and probably the boldest experiment...

The California Legislature and Governor Schwarzenegger did cartwheels last week to pass education legislation that is opposed in part or whole by virtually every education interest group in the state. The public rationale for this seemingly odd behavior is that the new statutes would make the state eligible to compete...

Betting on technology to change teaching wagers against history, but that's what the authors of Disrupting Class do, and persuasively. Every technological tweak, from student workbooks in the 1920s to television in the 1950s, was accompanied by the prediction that teaching would change. All these predictions proved wrong. But the...

When policy wonks pick interesting examples of urban education reform, Los Angeles Unified School District is not among them. It should be.

Through the bump and rub of messy politics and a generation of reform efforts, the country's second largest school district has moved away from a classic hierarchy and...