In yesterday's War on Workers weekly entry, Laura Clawson had a link to this fascinating story of the Los Altos (CA) school district and their woes with an "extremely litigious charter school." I had heard a little bit about it as Los Altos is near where I live, but the more I read, the more stunned I got. I had to dig a little deeper into this amazingly atrocious but accurate situation.
Los Altos is a fairly wealthy town in Silicon Valley. One unusual thing about governance around here: school districts and city boundaries are rarely the same thing. The Los Altos School District included the even wealthier town of Los Altos Hills, where zoning pretty much requires a minimum site of one acre for each house. That may not sound prohibitive to anyone living outside coastal California, but land in Silicon Valley is so expensive that most homes are built on lots between 5,000 and 8,000 square feet.