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By Erin Aubry Kaplan

The long-running battle between charter schools and traditional public schools has heated up nearly to a boiling point, with business magnate Eli Broad recently unveiling a campaign to charter-ize public ed in L.A. once and for all.

The drama is happening mostly at the top between the Broad camp and public school advocates–notably the teacher’s union, which has stepped up protests and criticism of Broad and his so-called reforms.

But beneath the drama is the story of one campus’s attempt to resist the takeover of a charter school, a story that illustrates the political complexity of the battle–the limitations of both sides, and how what almost always gets sacrificed in the struggle is what’s best for students.

The campus is Emerson Adult Learning Center, a dedicated adult-school campus that sits at a dead end of a leafy block off of Manchester Boulevard in Westchester.

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