I am facing a teenage Latina ticket seller on the other side of the plexiglass window at the AMC Theater in the Marina Marketplace.

"Two tickets for the 7 o'clock showing of Avatar, please."

She studies me for half a moment, then says, "Senior?"

"Did she actually say 'Senior'? No....

They didn't have to be here. I'm sure they had better things to do. Certainly more profitable meetings on their agendas.

But they gave their morning to 100 students at Venice High School. A hundred students who most people don't give the time a day. Heck, most people don't notice...

I stood in a crowd of four or five hundred red-shirted fellow teachers outside Los Angeles Unified School District headquarters near downtown LA late this afternoon. Inside the LAUSD Board was debating, and would later vote on a budget plan which called for a 12% teacher pay cut; plus...

Every day my heart gets broken.

The hurt starts before I step foot onto my campus. I live six blocks from my work site in a diverse, middle-class neighborhood called Mar Vista where two bedroom homes sell for $700,000 and the gentrified two-story jobs go for over a million.

In the spirit of generosity I've been thanking the gods that private school teachers' salaries are not connected to students' standardized test scores. Else Malia Obama's science teacher at the Sidwell Friends School might have lost her job faster than you can say "grade inflation."

On...

I'm a public high school teacher, and when I voted for Barack Obama I thought I was voting for change. Turns out, as far as education goes, I voted for Bush Lite.

According to a recent NY Times article, the Obama Administration is dangling $4.3 billion in education...

Dear Class of 2009, I said to my 32 senior English students on our last day of class together, for the past 13 years you've come to school five days a week, 8 hours a day, 40 weeks a year.

From the moment you entered kindergarten through tomorrow's graduation...

As I cruise around L.A., his eyes follow me. He's in my face when I stop for a coffee or pull up at an ATM. This blond, 30-something, smiling white dude on the ubiquitous billboards looks like he might have sold sub-prime mortgages and enjoyed it. In...

On Tuesday, April 21, 2009 the Supreme Court heard the case of Safford School District vs. Redding.

This is the case in which 13-year-old Savana Redding was strip-searched at her Tucson middle school by a nurse and a nurse's aide to see if she was hiding illegal drugs. Savana, who...

The education theory du jour is now official; it's all about that student-teacher relationship thing.

Luckily the gods of education have figured that out because I've been terrified for years that my high school English teaching position would be eliminated the moment some genius at Microsoft developed a software program...

I just Pay Pal'd $25 to enter a 2009 NCAA Basketball Tournament pool. And once again I'm confronted with which of 65 college teams, most of whom I know little or nothing about, to bet on.

This year I've adopted a new system. I'm betting on the colleges with the...

Dear Attorney General Holder:

You called us out. Challenged us to show some backbone and speak openly about race.

Well, here's what I know from having taught in big city public high schools for the past 15 years: We want your children to fail. That's the truth.

Don't get...

California's collapsing.

How bad is it? This afternoon as I passed Gap and Victoria's Secret at my local West LA I spotted not a single shopper. Across the street at DSW more people were working cash registers than lacing up shoes marked down 70%.

Illegal immigrants are fleeing California,...

Two and a half weeks into the Obama Administration and I've already chosen by favorite cabinet member -- of all time. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. A slam dunk. Literally.

But what gives? Where is he? If you're high up in government and pay your taxes on time are you...

President and Mrs. Obama read to second graders at Capital City Charter School in D.C. Terrific.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan worked wonders at C.E.O. of Chicago Public Schools. Love him.

No Child Left Behind may be left behind. Finally.

There's money in the stimulus package to rebuild public schools....