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The 2000 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles Tells the Story of a City—and Nation—in Transition In 2000, I ended up in a cage outside the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in downtown Los Angeles wearing a dark suit, swimming against the current in a sea of pierced protesters, raging against Rage Against the Machine. As […]

Original By New Reality Roundup Fifteen years ago Ben Austin burst onto the education advocacy scene when he launched Parent Revolution. The group went on to invent and pass into law California’s landmark parent trigger law, which empowers parents to transform failing schools through community organizing. Ben eventually raised more than $20 million to bring

The arguments made by the Los Angeles Unified School District to fight a 2021 lawsuit attempting to reopen schools sparked a campaign to enshrine a constitutional right to a high-quality education. Let the politics begin. As COVID-19 began to abate in 2021, a group of Los Angeles parents filed a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Unified School

By Antonio Villaraigosa and John Deasy Over the course of the pandemic and two years of prolonged school closures, public school students experienced historic ​setbacks in math and reading progress. California’s Smarter Balanced test showed that less than half of California students met the standard for English language arts, and fourth- and eighth-graders suffered the sharpest decline in

By Arne Duncan  March 2, 2022 A generation ago, leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King and Thurgood Marshall advocated for quality education as a civil right for all children. A decade ago, President Barack Obama declared education “the civil rights issue of our time.” And yet, the tragic reality today for millions of children is that

Originally published in The 74 Million The author will be part of an elite panel of experts Wednesday discussing the growing movement to establish a constitutional right to quality public education. Click here for details and registration information. Marking the third Martin Luther King holiday of the pandemic has highlighted the cruel open secret that American public education

Public-school education has gone from bad to worse. In theChicago Public Schools, only 26% of 11th-graders were at grade level in reading and math in 2019. Remarkably, the school system had a record-high graduation rate of nearly 84% in 2021. Those students must have had strong senior years!This is why over half of first-year community-college

Many schools across the United States are grappling with ways to close the achievement gap between white students and students of color. Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports on those efforts in Minnesota, which has some of the worst disparities. This report is part of our ongoing “Race Matters” coverage, and the “Agents for