By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, April 2012
In mid-April 2012, KPCC’s Tony Pierce posted a sharp critique of how LA Times reporter Howard Blume had been covering an LAUSD proposal to eliminate D-grades from passing-grade calculations. Pierce’s blog post called out the structural under-resourcing of LA Times education reporting. Steve Lopez had been one of the LA Times columnists periodically weighing in on education-policy questions.
Then
Howard Blume had been the LA Times’s lead LAUSD reporter for years prior to the 2012 Pierce critique. The proximate LAUSD policy at issue in April 2012 — a proposed elimination of D as a passing grade — was a substantive policy change that would have affected graduation requirements, GPA calculations, and college-eligibility metrics for hundreds of thousands of LAUSD students.
Tony Pierce had been one of KPCC’s senior editorial figures across the early-2010s post-LA Times-pre-LAist era. The April 2012 LAUSD critique was structurally a public-radio-newsroom critique of a metropolitan-daily newsroom’s coverage of LA’s largest local-government entity.
Steve Lopez was the LA Times’s most-cited columnist throughout the same window. The Pierce critique implicitly raised the question of whether the LA Times’s full editorial bench was substantively engaged with LAUSD policy at the depth the city’s largest school district warranted.
The original FishbowlLA framing — by Richard Horgan — picked up the cross-newsroom critique with appropriate weight.
Now
Howard Blume continued at the LA Times for years after the 2012 Pierce critique. The LA Times’s broader education coverage has continued through subsequent decades of LAUSD policy evolution.
Tony Pierce continued at KPCC for years after the 2012 piece. KPCC merged with LAist in 2018-2020 producing the current LAist-LA-region public-radio newsroom structure.
Steve Lopez retired from the LA Times in 2022 after a long columnist tenure.
LAUSD itself has continued through multiple substantial post-2012 institutional cycles: the post-2014 superintendent transitions (Deasy, Cortines, King, Beutner, Carvalho), the 2019 teachers strike, the pandemic-era school closures and reopening cycles.
The 2012 piece reads now as one of the documented moments when LA-region public-radio was substantively pushing back at LA-daily-paper editorial decisions — a kind of cross-newsroom accountability dynamic that has become rarer across the post-2018 consolidation.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.