Chartered Schools

The Los Angeles Board of Education unanimously endorsed a model that could serve as an alternative to a district breakup Monday, approving the creation of a semiautonomous school complex in Pacific Palisades. The Palisades LEARN/Charter Complex would unite Palisades High School, Revere Middle School and the five elementary schools that feed into them.

Pressure to increase the number of charter schools in California appears to be mounting, as a watchdog group that oversees education is considering asking state officials to lift the 100-school cap limiting participation in the program. The Little Hoover Commission will not make its final recommendations until February. However, Commissioner Angie Papadakis, who heads the state group's charter subcommittee, said at a Los Angeles hearing Wednesday that expansion is essential.

Arts and education philanthropist Eli Broad today will announce his largest investment to date in Los Angeles charter schools, $23.3 million to jump-start at least 17 new campuses run by two major charter-school organizations. Broad's gift is believed to be the largest by any private donor to local charter schools and underscores his goal of creating effective schools outside the direct jurisdiction of the Los Angeles Unified School District. L.A.

Jennifer Murphy knows tough schools. She has been cursed at and threatened, has broken up fights and confiscated weapons. Still, she looks slightly queasy as she sits in her glass-walled principal's office, staring at a huge flat-screen monitor. A videotape is playing. It shows a teenage girl standing outside the main office of Murphy's school. The girl glances around furtively, then hoists herself onto a counter and slides through a pass-through window, into the office.

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.

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.

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.