EDITORIAL EDUCATION'S HOPE CHARTER SCHOOLS OFFER CHANCE FOR REAL REFORM.

THE failure of Los Angeles school board President Caprice Young to win re-election in her west San Fernando Valley district has produced a positive result that could lead to faster education reform.

Now, instead of wrestling with the unmanageable Los Angeles Unified School District bureaucracy from within, she's overhauling California education from without.

Young is president and CEO of the new California Charter School Association, a statewide effort to organize and support educators, parents and communities in bringing real reform to their local school districts.

In their limited application so far, charters - which are fully public schools, but operate free from the usual district and state bureaucracy - have spurred tremendous innovation, diversity and improvement in public schools. They have given individual schools flexibility in setting curricula, in staffing and in operation, while meeting the specific needs of their communities.

The charter movement offers all the same benefits of vouchers - choice in education, competition in schooling, more community-based learning - without the potential drawbacks, such as selective admissions or the mixing of church and state.

Young and her organization hope to expand charter schools so that within 10 years they are serving 500,000 students statewide - nearly triple the 170,000 they serve today. She imagines nearly a third of those students coming from the LAUSD, learning in as many as 300 local charter schools.

That may sound overly ambitious, but Young has good reason to be optimistic. As she notes, ``The shift in the current political landscape is huge for charter school development.''

The reason: Arnold Schwarzenegger.

One of the greatest impediments to the charter movement, and for that matter, educational reform of any kind, is the entrenched education establishment of teacher and administrators organizations and a variety of special interests that are guardians of the status quo.

Under the state charter law, school districts no longer have a monopoly on sponsoring charters. The county and state can also get into the charter business, and now that a reform-minded governor is taking office - in the place of a predecessor who relied heavy on union and special-interest cash - Sacramento promises to be much more charter-friendly.

Add into the mix public discontent with the educational status quo, and the prospects for more charters are greater than ever. Young and the CCSA are perfectly situated to revitalize California education, to do away with the one-size-fits-all approach to schooling and replace it with a system that recognizes diverse needs, interests and values.

While charter schools began as an experiment in education reform, the experiment has proved a tremendous success. California is ready for an education revolution, and the charter movement is poised to help deliver it.