High Schools

One occupies $232 million worth of serious architecture on a promontory overlooking downtown Los Angeles. The other rents cramped space in a South L.A. church. One has an address that shouts prestige, with neighbors that include the city's Roman Catholic cathedral and Music Center. The other is across the street from an apartment building for the recently homeless. Two new high schools for the arts debuted this week -- a rare enough feat in a down economy. Despite the vast differences in their circumstances, it may be too early to say which of the two has the most potential to nurture the next generation of artists and performers.

This small city's namesake military base was decommissioned after World War II, but over the years Fort Oglethorpe, population 7,000, has retained its utilitarian, base-town ambience. Public life here unfolds on two busy four-lane thoroughfares clogged with used-car lots, fast-food joints and pawnshops. All that's missing are the troops. What Fort Oglethorpe does not lack is churches -- enough churches, in an array of Protestant flavors, to deliver salvation to brigades of sinners.

A winter of discontent at Birmingham High School in Van Nuys has given way to a spring of discord. Next, it appears, is the summer of dissolution. The school of 3,200 students is undergoing a fierce struggle over its future and, in a sense, over the destiny of public education in Los Angeles. On the one side are the principal and perhaps a majority of teachers, who want to leave the Los Angeles Unified School District and open in the fall as an independent charter.

While high schools across the state are toughening their graduation requirements to prepare students for college, one of the state's largest school districts is planning to make it easier for students to graduate. In a proposal that would cut out health, college and career planning, world geography and earth science as required courses, the Santa Ana Unified School District is seeking to reduce the number of credits necessary to graduate.

It was the day of the brainiac. Across California, nearly 10,000 students -- pencils in hand, minds reeling after hours of study -- battled in a series of academic contests Saturday that, unlike previous years, all landed on the same date. More than 100 high schools faced off in two regional decathlons at USC and UCLA, while 25 more competed in a science bowl at Caltech. And in a low-slung county district office in East L.A.

A high school coach who helped launch several professional football careers was gunned down in front of students Wednesday by a former player who may have had psychiatric problems, authorities said. Mark Becker unloaded several rounds into Aplington-Parkersburg High School football Coach Ed Thomas and was arrested in the driveway of his parents' home soon afterward, said Kevin Winker, assistant director of the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation.

The board of the Los Angeles Unified School District is opening 50 schools over the next few years and considering a proposal to allow some or all to be privately managed. Before taking this step, the board should take a hard look at the evidence about charter schools and privately managed schools. Because of a brilliant media campaign by charter school organizations, there is a widespread impression that any charter school is better than any public school. This is not true. Charter schools vary in quality from excellent to abysmal.

Billionaire Eli Broad's latest philanthropic act goes beyond bringing 17 new high-achieving charter schools to Los Angeles -- as though that weren't enough. It signals to the Los Angeles Unified School District that local education leaders have changed their thinking about the floundering public schools. They're tired of saying that the time for change is now. Instead, they're saying the time for change has passed. Having run out of hope for swift reform within L.A.

Really, this review should be on the science page, if we still had a science page. Because "High School Musical: The Music in You," a "documusical" airing on the Disney Channel Sunday, answers, at long last, one of the great mysteries of the universe: Is there a limit to the possibilities of the "High School Musical" franchise? And the answer is (cue ripping envelope): Yes! Yes, there is! And this is it. You will find no greater fan of the "High School Musical" weltanschauung than me.

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.