Chartered Schools

Palisades Charter High School won the Los Angeles school district's Academic Decathlon competition Tuesday night. That means almost another month of studying for the nine-member team before the state competition in March. "It's a really dedicated, disciplined group," said Chris Lee, one of the team's co-coaches. Lee graduated from Palisades Charter in 1990, the last time the Pacific Palisades school won the local competition.

More Los Angeles campuses will have to make room for charter schools, even if some teachers are forced to give up their classrooms and become roving instructors, under a litigation settlement approved by the Los Angeles Board of Education on Tuesday. The agreement requires the school district to inventory all properties and work directly with charter schools to find space on or off campus. Charter advocates say finding and paying for facilities is their No. 1 challenge.

Just 25 of California's 2,462 high schools account for more than a fifth of the state's dropouts, with the problem heavily concentrated in charter and alternative schools, according to a study being released today by UC Santa Barbara. However, a UCSB researcher said it wasn't clear whether the schools were responsible for the problem or were simply the recipients of a disproportionate share of troubled students.

Public schools on the Palos Verdes Peninsula are among the state's highest achieving, and two of the wealthy enclave's high schools are ranked in the nation's top 100. But to a small band of parents, that's not enough.

The faculty at tradition-proud but low-performing Fairfax High School has worked for two years on a plan to improve the school while also attracting long-absent middle-class families. Scheduled to start next fall, the new setup includes dividing the sprawling campus into small academies -- each with a different theme, each designed to devote attention to every student. But there's something Fairfax wasn't planning on.

Supporters of a breakaway charter school in the high-achieving Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District have dropped the effort, at least for now. The proposed charter, which some parents said would have provided an alternative to the standardized-testing culture of district schools, bitterly divided the wealthy enclave.

A popular former principal of Locke High School filed a lawsuit Monday accusing the Los Angeles Unified School District and its top officials of illegally firing him last year after he threw his support behind a plan to turn over the troubled campus to a charter school operator. Frank Wells said he lost his job because of comments he made criticizing the district and supporting the charter petition of Green Dot Public Schools.

The Los Angeles Board of Education voted Tuesday to allow a low-performing charter school to remain open even though for two years it flouted city rules and a district agreement not to operate in an unsafe building. The renewal of Academia Avance by a 6-1 vote was based on recent improvements in the school's academics and facilities, officials said. The board's action extended the operation of the Highland Park charter by one year, a qualified endorsement.

Students at Hip Hop High know all about adversity. For many, life has been a minefield of gangs, violence and family chaos. They were academic failures, most of them, kicked out of school after school, allowed to fail their way from one grade to the next. At their charter school in Hawthorne, they say, they found a home -- a place that is quirky and rough-hewn, but one where students are given the motivation to learn.

On its face, it's an ambitious plan: Expand one of Southern California's biggest charter groups from 13 to 35 schools in eight years until it becomes, in effect, the second-largest district in South Los Angeles. But that's just the beginning. Mike Piscal, the hard-charging founder of the Inner City Education Foundation, has a far more audacious goal than that. As he sees it, the expansion plan he is announcing today will lead to nothing less than the transformation of South L.A.