Green light for Green Dot

This week’s New Yorker has a must-read piece on Green Dot Public Schools, a renegade charter school organization based in Los Angeles that has opened 17 urban high schools in the past decade. Founded by a revolutionary character named Steve Barr, Green Dot has bucked the trend by opening high schools in areas where everyone else has all but given up hope; most charters, in fact, are elementary or middle schools, because education wonks have already written off the older kids. Green Dot has had success turning around schools and boasts improved test scores, high graduation rates, and increased percentages of students who go on to college (although the numbers, like all numbers, are not entirely reliable).

Barr, a former political organizer who co-founded Rock the Vote and has no background in education, is a maverick with a take-no-prisoners approach to his mission. He’s known for organizing parents in a neighborhood, threatening to open charter schools that will “steal” the students (and the funds that follow them) from the district, and thus ensuring that he can take over the local high school. A charismatic figure who swears like a sailor, he’s wise to the problems that have plagued charter schools since the beginning, namely the teachers’ unions. From the get-go, he has worked with the unions rather than fighting them, and teachers at his schools have union contracts, although some still dispute whether the contracts are as good for teachers.

In its most recent audacious move, Green Dot completed what it terms a “hostile takeover” of Locke High School in Watts. Barr worked the teachers and the parents much like a lobbyist would work the halls of Congress and effectively forced the Los Angeles Unified School District to hand control of the troubled school to Green Dot. More on that later.

Barr has earned plenty of fans along the way, including Bill Gates and other corporate types.  Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is impressed; according to the New Yorker piece, Duncan has approached Barr about replicating his formula in schools nationwide. He has already opened a school in the Bronx, in addition to the schools in California.

Like many parents (and many teachers), I’m usually suspicious of Mr. Fix Its who come up with a new way to rewrite the rules on education overnight. When it started, Green Dot was, in Barr’s words, “flying by the seat of our pants academically.” That’s not the greatest way to start school reform, but the organization eventually hired a seasoned educator to oversee academics. But still, my initial response to Green Dot echoes that of a teacher quoted in the New Yorker piece:

Every year or two, there’s some new reform. You get reform fatigue: ‘Oh, God, another God-damned bright idea from the business world.’

Critics are suspicious of Green Dot’s ties to the corporate world and of its “hostile takeover” tactics, particularly at the Locke School. That said, who else was willing to go to bat for these kids, who attended a school where the walls were covered with grafitti and riots and brawls were commonplace? Today, the school is so squeaky clean the floors literally shine. Students wear uniforms and are met every morning by administrators who caution, “We will have order, OK?”

I’m not sure Green Dot is a cure-all: Who can tell? But I found a profoundly moving video that follows three students, one whose brother died in her arms, another who lost his mother to cancer and carries photos of her in his backpack, and another who sleeps on the couch in his father’s tiny apartment. In the video, produced by KCET, a burly teacher chokes up when he talks about his students: “The system has failed these kids,” he says, apologizing for his tears.

That is something to see. It’s also something to hear a student’s proud grandmother say of the boy she is raising, “When he graduates, I will just find me some bells to strap on my shoes.” Somebody has to give these young people a chance. And if Green Dot can do it, then go, go, go.

I urge you to watch the KCET segment, even if just for a few minutes. Skepticism remains, but the three featured students offer something truly special, and that is a thing called hope.