Yesterday, the Santa Ana Unified School District Board of Trustees renewed the charter for Nova Academy, which "allows some students to earn associate arts degrees from Santa Ana College at the same time they earn high school diplomas."

That's good news for Nova students, but a district like SAUSD is beyond the remedy of such incrementalism. The vast majority of SAUSD students lack the opportunities a charter school like Nova supplies.

Rather than plodding along the well-worn path of mediocrity and failure, SAUSD should adopt a radical approach like converting as many district schools as possible to charter status. Such a move would enable those schools to escape stifling red tape of the California Education Code, control their own budgets, and focus on discipline and the fundamentals of a quality education.

Each charter school would serve as a laboratory of what does and doesn't work -- and since they are self-governing, charter schools can more quickly abandon failed approaches. The district could then restrict itself to oversight, a role that wouldn't require a much smaller district bureaucracy. 

SAUSD already has a few charter schools, as well as some "fundamental" schools that are popular with Santa Ana parents for their back-to-basics approach and higher test scores. Parents used to camp out overnight to enroll their children, which to adopting a lottery system for enrollment.

It would be encouraging if the initiative for something as bold as this were to come from the SAUSD itself, but that hope should be filed under U for "Unlikely."

Some enterprising Santa Anans ought to contact charter school operator Green Dot and ask them to bring their "Parent Revolution" to Santa Ana.

A May 11 Los Angeles Times article reported on Green Dot:

"...Steve Barr is launching an effort through which parents would wrest political control of the L.A. school system from unions, school bureaucrats and other entrenched interests.

The plan is for parents to form chapters all over town and improve schools, one by one, using the growing leverage of the charter school movement. The goal is to unite a city of overworked and isolated parents with a brash promise: 

If more than half of the parents at a school sign up, Barr's organizers say they will guarantee an excellent campus within three years. They call it the Parent Revolution.

With parents, they predict, they'll have the clout to pressure the Los Angeles Unified School District to improve schools. They'll also have petitions, which Barr and his allies will keep at the ready, to start charter schools. If the district doesn't deliver, targeted neighborhoods could be flooded with charters, which aren't run by the school district. L.A. Unified would lose enrollment, and the funding would go to the charters instead of to the district."

Santa Ana is smaller theater of battle than LA Unified, and the Santa Ana teachers union isn't as powerful as UTLA. Why not? What does Santa Ana have to lose? After all, do Santa Ana's public schools exist for the benefit of children and parents, or that of the district bureaucracy and the unions?