Howard Blume

The setting was the Athenian Room at downtown‘s grand Biltmore Hotel. It was time for the final question at the official introductory news conference of L.A. schools Superintendent Roy Romer. The reporter directed Romer’s gaze to the thin, quiet, impeccably dressed man near Romer‘s side. ”Why was he here?“ she......

The Ugly Reality Forget math and reading programs. Forget teacher accountability. Forget social promotion. The Los Angeles Unified School District faces a more basic looming catastrophe: space. The school system is about to put out a no-vacancy sign, with thousands of children waiting at the door. And the space race......

Photo by Debra DiPaolo Amid the historic upheaval in L.A.’s schools, one thing is certain. Come June 30, Interim Superintendent Ramon Cortines — an architect of the dramatic changes — will voluntarily walk out the door, returning to his retirement after a six-month tour of crisis. He’ll leave behind an......

Photo by Debra DiPaolo Eyes were riveted on Chicago in March when the Tribune Co. announced its $6.38 billion acquisition of the Los Angeles Times. What would the Times — which aspired to be a national giant — become if remade in the image of the Chicago Tribune, a strong......

Amid the conflagration of the Belmont Learning Complex scandal, one figure has stood out as Mr. Clean, in the most literal sense of the word. Environmental consultant Angelo Bellomo, a former state toxics official, has pushed and cajoled a recalcitrant school-district bureaucracy first to admit it had a school-safety problem......

Photo by Virginia Hunter Two months after the school board killed the Belmont Learning Complex — once and for all, it seemed — supporters of the high school project have massaged a faint pulse back into the corpse. The CPR has arrived in the form of a proposed environmental study......

The state’s most powerful legislator has cast his lot and the state’s cash with supporters of the abandoned Belmont Learning Complex project. State Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa disclosed, in a Sunday interview with the Weekly, that he will ask the Legislature to pay for completion of a safety analysis of......

As L.A. Times staffers filed into last week‘s employee briefing, they could see right away there was a new sheriff in town. There, front and center in Chandler Auditorium, was a mammoth screen with the words ”Tribune Publishing“ on one line and ”Jack Fuller, President“ on the other. Behind the......

AP Photo/John T. Barr This was not just another Sunday at the Los Angeles Times: At about 7:30 p.m., prim editor in chief Michael Parks calmly left his office, strode to the city desk, and requested the home phone numbers of Mayor Richard Riordan, Cardinal Roger Mahony and Governor Gray......

A Star Is Stillborn It seemed like a strange choice: the earnest but jowly -- almost Nixonesque -- mug of Ron Unz as the public face of Proposition 25, as the guy standing before the cameras in a last-minute television advertising blitz for the failed campaign-reform initiative. In fact, it......