Erin Aubry Kaplan

The problems associated with big-city public schools run the gamut from A to Z, but A through G has quite a different connotation: It’s shorthand for the minimal coursework in seven disciplines, ranging from English and math to lab science and arts, that students must complete in order to qualify......

Photos by Kevin ScanlonI discovered Last Chance Boutique in Culver City like so many of us discover so many things here in L.A. — in the car. I saw it fleetingly at first, out of the corner of my eye on the driver’s side while I was cruising at about......

Billy Graham Parkway. The name of the main road leading out of the Charlotte airport told me more than I wanted to know, though nothing I didn’t expect, about North Carolina. It was my first visit. Behind L.A.-chic sunglasses, my eyes glinted in anticipation of a battle I’d been preparing......

Vermont Avenue has waited a long time for this. The South-Central corridor, less famous but grander than Crenshaw, Florence or Normandie, took the brunt of the fire and destruction in 1992 and has been the slowest to recover; closed storefronts and burned-out lots still dominate the scene at the ground-zero......

Public education, the favorite whipping boy of the right and of family-values enthusiasts of all stripes, has had a particularly bad first quarter in 2005. There was the depressing report issued by the state about the astronomical dropout rate of black and brown students — 50 percent, a figure that......

When I met with actor/activist Quentin Drew last spring to interview him for the Weekly’s annual theater issue, I was struck anew by two things: his height (he was 6-foot-8) and his youth. Nearly all the black people in L.A. who can rightly be called community leaders are warhorses from......

Six months ago, the rallying cry was raised by thousands, printed on T-shirts and bumper stickers that spread the message across L.A. in black and blue — apt-enough colors for a battle of this magnitude — and considered on talk radio from Pacifica to The Beat: Save King/Drew. As the......