Granada Hills Charter High School wins national Academic Decathlon
Granada Hills Charter High School was named winner of the national Academic Decathlon on Saturday, emerging from a horse-race of a competition with a Texas school to keep the title in California for a ninth consecutive year.
The big win came at the end of an hours-long awards banquet in Charlotte, N.C., in which many of the students repeatedly walked through a maze of tables to the stage to accept medals for individual victories. Several students, such as Austin Kang and Elysia Eastty, received at least a half-dozen individual prizes.
Granada Hills' score of 52,113.5 made it, by far, the overall winner of the competition, besting Dobie High School, from the Houston area, by about 1,700 points. The win is the 18th for a California school, and the 12th for the Los Angeles Unified School District.
By winning the national decathlon, Granada Hills came out ahead of 35 other teams from across the country that gathered in Charlotte for days of testing on such subjects as math, social science, economics and music theory; they also participated in a rapid-response trivia relay called the Super Quiz. The teams consisted of nine A, B and C students.
Granada Hills' team includes Austin Kang, Celine Ta, Joon Lee, Harsimar Dhanoa, Shagun Goyal, Eugene Lee, Elysia Eastty, Riki Higashida and Sindhura Seeni. The coaches are Matt Arnold, Spencer Wolf and Nick Weber.
Related:
The pressure's on for Texas, California teams at Academic Decathlon
-- Rick Rojas in Charlotte, N.C.
EDITOR'S PICKS:
Interesting, but we don't really know how educated these students and their teachers are until we see there standardized test scores and value-added scores.
Posted by: David | April 30, 2011 at 12:39 PM
Go Scots!!!
Posted by: John Ferris | April 30, 2011 at 01:52 PM
Congratulations Granada! As an independent charter high school your magnificent achievements continue to be spectacular! Congratulations all!
Posted by: A. L. Hillary | April 30, 2011 at 03:09 PM
By any chance, did any of the Granda Hills teachers who educate these wonderful students, get Rif'd letters? USA, CA, and LAUSD need to invest in education to bring forth America's future prosperity.
Posted by: Rosario | April 30, 2011 at 03:10 PM
Congratulations to Granada Hills Charter High School's academic decathlon team and all who helped it along the way to its victory. It is an astonishing feat that teams from the Los Angeles Unified School District have now won 12 times over the 30 years the annual national competition has been conducted. That means high school teams from our district have won 40 percent of the annual national competitions. Those teams have come from several different high schools. That indicates there are teaching personnel in our district who are supremely capable as well as students who are supremely accomplished. Perhaps it is not beyond the realistic to hope that quality education on a broader scale--open to all at every school--will once again become available and even the norm in our school district. Again, congratulations to all involved.
Posted by: Peter323 | April 30, 2011 at 04:10 PM
Well done, GH!!
Posted by: MikeOHara | April 30, 2011 at 06:07 PM
Nice work, Granada Hills! Congrats on your big win and bringing the prize to California... once again!
Posted by: ScaryKlown | April 30, 2011 at 06:49 PM
No surprise here. The state that wants to delete facts from textbooks and put religion in instead, lost to a group of kids who are allowed learn real world stuff ??? More of this to come if they continue to set the standard for textbooks in the middle of the country while we teach facts and not beliefs. Should be fun to watch this year after year. Good job kids.
Posted by: Travis Y | April 30, 2011 at 07:34 PM
My heartiest congratulations to these wonderful kids!
But I don't understand why it isn't a top story, and treated as exceeding, say, 20 baseball wins or 10 football games or many basketball games. I believe our country will survive or fail depending much more on how many young people like these we can educate, and I mean that in the broad sense, not just "book learning," than on how individual athletes or sports teams do.
Posted by: Tim McAuliffe | April 30, 2011 at 10:01 PM
Congratulations, Granada!!! This is the same charter school that the local community overwhelmingly supported, and even voted for, to operate the new high school opening in the same neighborhood, VRHS #4. Granada's test scores have skyrocketed since 2003 when they went charter. Yet LAUSD voted against the community's wishes because they didn't want to lose another school to a charter.
Posted by: Pam | April 30, 2011 at 11:07 PM
Congratulations!
Posted by: Go geeks! | May 01, 2011 at 12:00 AM
But the Board of Education decided that despite Granada Hills Charter High School's proven competence, LAUSD District 1 was a better choice to run the new Valley Region High School #4.
Posted by: DKoyama | May 01, 2011 at 02:23 AM
Congratulations to everyone at GHCHS. This is a remarkable achievement and an illustration of the staggering work and commitment of the students and their coaches.
I do have one question. The LA Times and Rick Rojas must be aware that GHCHS is an indepedent charter school established in 2003. Why do they consistently refer to the school as part of LA Unified? This seems a strangely persistent mistake that a national newspaper should not keep repeating. Is there an explanation for this?
Posted by: Congratulation to GHCHS! | May 02, 2011 at 09:05 PM