Chartered Schools

California charter schools outperform traditional public schools in reading but significantly lag in math, according to a national study released Monday by researchers at Stanford University.

MUSIC Proving they have way better taste in music than you did in high school, the kids at Champs Charter School are putting on a music fest with some the best names in the L.A. beat scene, including Shlohmo and Jonwayne, alongside a bevy of food trucks and school group performances. We already feel old marveling at the precocity. Champs Charter High School, 6952 Van Nuys Blvd., Van Nuys. noon Sat. $10. aertalk.com

A lawsuit filed by the Los Angeles teachers union to block the city's school district from giving new campuses to charter schools was denied Friday by a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge. The suit was filed in December on behalf of United Teachers Los Angeles as a result of the Los Angeles Unified School District's controversial school reform plan, which sought to turn over 30 campuses to bidders from inside and outside the district, including charter school organizations. The lawsuit claimed that L.A. Unified could not allow charter operators to take over new campuses unless 50% of the district's permanent teachers petitioned for it. Charters are independently managed public schools and are generally nonunion.

The Los Angeles Unified school board did an injustice to hundreds of students and to the school reform movement when it overrode the recommendation of its staff and decided not to close a low-performing charter school. Academia Semillas del Pueblo in El Sereno is run by dedicated educators who are striving to provide their kindergarten-through-eighth-grade students with a safe environment, a lively and enriched curriculum, as well as skills in three languages. The school has been controversial because one of those languages is an indigenous language of Mexico, and part of the school's mission is to instill in children an understanding and appreciation of their cultural heritage.

The growth of charter schools has promoted segregation both in California and nationwide, increasing the odds that black, Latino and white students will attend class with fewer children who look different from themselves, according to two new studies. Charter school advocates contend that the researchers' presumptions about racial separation are out of date. They said parents -- including low-income minority parents -- are turning to charters for a quality education that traditional schools have not provided.

Forget bake sales. To reduce the impact of education budget cuts, an El Sereno charter school hopes to bolster its coffers with a jolt of caffeine, opening its own neighborhood coffeehouse Saturday. Semillas Community Schools will use profits from Xocolatl Cacao, Tea and Coffee House -- which has a full menu of drinks, sandwiches and pastries -- to shield its elementary and high school from future layoffs and program cuts. "I'd rather focus on developing a new language curriculum than a new chocolate drink," said Marcos Aguilar, Semillas' executive director.

Over the last decade, a quiet revolution took root in the nation's second-largest school district. Fueled by money and emboldened by clout from some of the city's most powerful figures, charter schools began a period of explosive growth that has challenged the status quo in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Today, Los Angeles is home to more than 160 charter schools, far more than any other U.S. city. Charter enrollment is up nearly 19% this year from last, while enrollment in traditional L.A. public schools is down.

Charter schools have been offered space at 39 traditional schools across Los Angeles, including Westchester High near LAX and Taft High in Woodland Hills. The offers far surpassed those in past years, but so has demand: 54 charter schools requested space for nearly 17,000 students, a near three-fold increase. In a related move, officials have frozen popular permit programs at affected schools to see if they will still have room to accept students from outside the attendance area. Under a legal settlement, L.A. Unified agreed to work harder to find space for charters -- publicly funded schools that operate independently.

Test results published in The Times on Tuesday and Wednesday did not include the complete list of charter schools. The chart below provides scores for those schools as measured by the percentage of students at or above the 50th percentile, which is the national average. The change in scores is the percentage of students who moved up or down in the rankings since 1998.

Los Angeles-area charter schools have won a $60-million grant to develop a teacher-evaluation system based at least partly on student test scores. The grant, part of $335 million in related awards announced Thursday by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, represents the largest private funding for an initiative of this sort. "Teachers matter more to student achievement, more than any other factor inside our school building," Melinda Gates said. "This is something we know absolutely for certain at this point."

A court ruling has invalidated the lease of a high-performing charter school in Glassell Park, threatening it with closure when the school year ends in June. The Alliance Environmental Science and Technology School, whose students have some of the highest test scores in the Los Angeles Unified School District, will lose its campus under a ruling last week by Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Ann I. Jones. Her ruling came in a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Community College District filed by a coalition of community groups over the college district's compliance with environmental laws.

Things would be easier if Academia Semillas del Pueblo didn't have such low test scores. Then, the focus could be on the El Sereno charter school's International Baccalaureate program. Or on its trilingual curriculum: English, Spanish and Nahuatl, an indigenous language of Mexico. Or on the two co-founders dedicated to teaching culture that stretches back to before colonial Mexico. Instead, the focus shifted in recent weeks to the campus' test results. Compared to schools statewide that serve similar students and when matched against campuses in the neighborhood, results are low. Last year, the school's score on the state's Academic Performance Index dropped 92 points to 624; the state target is 800. Just 22% of students tested at grade level in math, 30% in English.

Los Angeles school district officials are moving to retake control of Birmingham Community Charter High School, citing numerous alleged problems at the campus that broke away from the system three years ago. L.A. Unified Supt. John Deasy has faulted the leaders of the Lake Balboa campus for allegedly mishandling student expulsions and services to disabled students and for failing to respond adequately to allegations of racial discrimination. School officials said they are looking into the allegations, but are aware of no major problems.

A day after Mojave Desert school officials rejected a controversial effort by parents seeking major changes at their lowest-performing elementary school, the embattled campus finally appeared calm even as supporters vowed to continue the fight. David Mobley, principal at Desert Trails Elementary in Adelanto, said Thursday that the school was free from weeks of conflict between supporters and opponents of the petition to hand over management to a charter operator under the state's landmark parent trigger law. "It was nice to relax," he said.

In a stunning development, school officials in the High Desert community of Adelanto announced late Tuesday that parents aiming to transform their low-performing school into a charter campus had failed to collect enough signatures under the state's landmark parent trigger law. Shortly after the announcement, the school board voted 5 to 0 to accept Supt. Darin Brawley's recommendation to reject the petition. Brawley reported that the district could verify only 235 signatures of 466 submitted; among the signatures thrown out were 97 from parents who revoked them, saying they were misled or had signed in error.

A chance on charters Re "Whistle-blowers to open a charter," Jan. 18 Congratulations to the Los Angeles teachers who are opening their own charter school. They will have the professional autonomy to do the very best they can for their students without being micromanaged from above. They can manage the school themselves or select someone to be head teacher. They will be able to make key decisions about the budget as well as curriculum, instruction and staffing.

Los Angeles school officials lost a chance this week to test whether the booming charter movement can take on all the problems of the district's traditional, and often troubled, schools. On Tuesday, the Board of Education denied proposals from three major charter organizations that had sought to run newly built neighborhood schools, which would have included substantial numbers of limited-English speakers, special education students, foster children and low-income families. That is exactly the population that charter schools have been criticized for not sufficiently reaching.

Los Angeles teachers who became whistle-blowers during a cheating scandal won the right Tuesday to open their own charter school. The new enterprise, called Apple Academy, won unanimous approval from the Los Angeles Board of Education. The school's chief executive, former L.A. teachers union president A.J. Duffy, had been a longtime critic of charter schools. The cheating, which came to public attention last year, ultimately led to the shutdown last summer of all six Crescendo charter schools.

The Los Angeles Board of Education on Tuesday agreed to ban charter schools from offering admission to families in exchange for volunteer work or other services. The admission preference had been offered by two popular charter schools overseen by the L.A. Unified School District. One, Larchmont Charter School, ended the practice recently. The other, Los Feliz Charter School for the Arts, was already headed toward dropping the preference. The schools have long waiting lists; the law provides for a lottery when there are more applicants than spaces.