EDITORIAL LIBERATING SCHOOLS THE SCHOOL BOARD BACKS REAL REFORM BY COMMITTING TO CHARTERS.

THE Los Angeles school board did away Tuesday with its old practice of making excuses.

Instead, it made a commitment, and in the process, it made history.

After much controversy and debate, the board settled on a compromise plan for granting a one-year charter to Granada Hills High School.

With that, the 3,800-student campus will become the largest conversion charter in the country, and the Los Angeles Unified School District will move forward with the most valuable educational reform in decades.

Charter schools are public schools, in the sense that they are free, open to all and publicly funded. But unlike traditional public schools, they aren't weighed down by onerous regulations and meddling bureaucrats.

In charter schools, local communities and the faculty - not bureaucrats and politicians - make curricular, budgetary and administrative decisions. It's that independence that makes charter schools so promising.

And in the LAUSD, charter schools are the wave of the future.

The one-year compromise plan for Granada Hills falls short of the five- year charter that students, teachers and parents had hoped for, but it's enough to show what they can do.

Having given the community a taste of independence, the district will be hard-pressed to take it away next year, especially if - as is expected - Granada Hills High thrives because of its newfound autonomy.

In approving the school's charter, the school board had to look past some legitimate concerns, as well as some illegitimate opposition on the part of special interests. The teacher and administrator unions that dominate public education in Los Angeles have long viewed charters as competition, and they've made little secret of their wish for the whole charter movement to crumble or disappear.

But by giving its approval to Granada Hills High, the board has cast the special interests aside in the interest of all LAUSD students. That alone marks a milestone in district history.

The LAUSD has made a commitment, not only with Granada Hills, but with all its communities: If you can do better on your own, you may. The bureaucracy and the unions will no longer hold you back.

In addition to approving Granada Hills' charter, the school board passed charters for Palisades High School and Pacoima Elementary School. It also gave five-year renewals to two highly successful San Fernando Valley charters, Fenton Avenue Elementary in Lake View Terrace, and the the Vaughn Next Century Learning Center in Pacoima.

The fate of the charter school movement in L.A. never was so hopeful.

District bureaucrats were reluctant to support the schools, and it looked like the board might postpone all charter-related votes until new, union-backed members took office.

Thankfully, it didn't turn out that way. And now that the reform genie is out of the bottle, the special interests will have a hard time putting it back in, no matter who serves on future boards.

There will surely be more charter fights ahead, but they won't be a in vacuum. The school board has made its commitment to charter schooling, and in the months and years ahead, the public must demand that that commitment is honored.