Dept. of education The instigator

A crusader’s plan to remake failing schools.

by Douglas McGRay

teve Barr stood in the breezeway at pavement had been replaced by a lawn Alain Leroy , of thick green grass, lined with newly atS the edge of the Watts neighborhood planted olive trees. of , on a February morning. “It’s night and day,” Cortines said. He’s more than six feet tall, with white- In the past decade, Barr has opened gray hair that’s perpetually unkempt, and seventeen charter high schools—small, the bulk of an ex-jock. Beside him was locally managed institutions that aim Ramon Cortines—neat,­ in a trim suit— for a high degree of teacher autonomy the Los Angeles Unified School District’s and parent involvement—in some of the new superintendent. Cortines had to be poorest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, thinking about last May, when, as a se- as well as one in the Bronx. His charter- nior deputy superintendent, he had vis- school group is now ’s larg-­ ited under very different circumstances. est, by enrollment, and one of its most That was when a tangle between two rival successful. Green Dot schools take kids cliques near an outdoor vending machine who, in most cases, test far below grade turned into a fight that spread to every level and send nearly eighty per cent of corner of the schoolyard. Police sent them to college. (Only forty-seven per more than a dozen squad cars and surged cent of L.A.U.S.D. students graduate across the campus in riot gear, as teachers with a high-school diploma.) As of 2006, grabbed kids on the margins and whisked Green Dot’s standardized-test scores them into locked classrooms. were almost twenty per cent higher than The school’s test scores had been L.A. Unified’s average, and, adjusting for among the worst in the state. In recent student demographics, the state Depart- years, seventy-five per cent of incoming ment of Education grades their perfor- freshmen had dropped out. Only about mance a nine on a scale of one to ten; three per cent graduated with enough L.A.U.S.D. schools rate only a five. credits to apply to a California state uni- Barr himself has a colorful reputation. versity. Two years ago, Barr had asked He drives a decommissioned police car, L.A.U.S.D. to give his charter-school- a Crown Victoria with flood­lights, which management organization, Green Dot he bought from a friend, the former Fox Public Schools, control of Locke, and executive who launched the network’s re- let him help the district turn it around. ality show “Cops.” (“It’s faster than any- When the district refused, Green Dot thing on the road,” he told me, and when became the first charter group in the he wants to change lanes “people move country to seize a high school in a hostile out of the way.”) He met his wife, an takeover. (“He’s a revolutionary,” Nelson Alaskan radio reporter twenty years his Smith, the president and C.E.O. of the junior, at a Burning Man festival seven National Alliance for Public Charter years ago, and married her in Las Vegas Schools, said.) Locke reopened in Sep- three weeks later. And this is how he tember, four months after the riot, as a talks about working with what is argu- half-dozen Green Dot schools. ably the country’s most troubled big-city “Last year, there was graffiti every- school system: “You ever see that movie where,” Barr said. “You’d see kids every- ‘Man on Fire,’ with Denzel Washing- where—they’d be out here gambling. ton? There’s a scene in the movie where You’d smell weed.” He recalled hearing the police chief of Mexico City gets kid- movies playing in classroom after class- napped by Denzel Washington. He room: “People called it ghetto cineplex.” wakes up, he’s on the hood of his car Barr and Cortines walked to the quad, under the underpass, in his boxers, his where the riot had started. The cracked hands tied. Denzel Washington starts

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TNY—2009_05_11—PAGE 66—133SC.—#2 page—text changes asking him questions, he’s not getting the well-funded school, where the parents Dot. If the district refused both options, answers he wants, so he walks away from are involved, where accountability is put Barr would open his new schools and him, and leaves a bomb stuck up his ass.” on that staff, is not the right way to go,” begin stealing thousands of students, and Barr laughed. “I don’t want to blow up he said. “We get along really well, but I the millions of dollars in funding that L.A.U.S.D.’s ass. But what will it take get fucking impatient.” follow them. “If I take ten Locke High to get this system to serve who they need Cortines didn’t know that Barr was al- Schools, they can’t survive,” he said. to serve? It’s going to take that kind of ready planning his next assault on the dis- But, just weeks after Cortines’s visit to aggressiveness.” trict, one he described to me as “Arma- Locke, Barr got a call from the new Sec- Green Dot’s ascent stems mostly from geddon.” He planned to target five to ten retary of Education, Arne Duncan. He Barr’s skill as an instigator and an orga- nizer. Outrageous rhetoric is a big part of that, and it’s not uncalculated. “It takes a certain amount of panache to call the head of the union a pig fucker,” Ted Mitchell, the president of the California State Board of Education, said. (Those weren’t Barr’s words exactly.) “Steve has this ‘Oh, shucks, you know me—I can’t control my mouth’ persona. It allows him to get away with murder.” But, Mitchell points out, “he’s a public curmudgeon and a private negoti- ator.” And he has built Green Dot to be a political force unlike anything else in the world of education. For instance, Barr runs the only large charter organization in the country that has embraced union- ized teachers and a collectively bargained contract—an unnecessary hassle, if his aim was to run a few schools, but a source of leverage for Green Dot’s main pur- pose, which is to push for citywide change. “I don’t see how you tip a system with a hundred per cent unionized labor without unionized labor,” he said. First period at Locke was ending. Kids swarmed the halls, shoving and laughing and posturing and flirting for every last second of their five minutes of freedom. Barr was quiet with Cortines, almost solicitous. Cortines, for his part, seemed eager for peace. After years of failed attempts to fix Locke, nobody could ignore how much Green Dot had accomplished in a matter of months. Another fight between Barr and L.A.U.S.D. seemed inevitable, though. After Cortines left, Barr said, “Ray and I have had conversations about Fremont High School,” another large troubled Steve Barr used bare-knuckle political tactics to take over a Los Angeles school. school, in . But Cor- tines, he knew, was hesitant. “I’ve been of the largest, worst-performing schools flew to Washington, D.C., at the end of clear that we can talk,” Cortines told me in Los Angeles, and then submit a hun- March, for what he expected to be a social later. “I can’t necessarily deliver. I still dred charters for new schools to be clus- visit. At the meeting, Duncan revealed think we have to look at the evidence tered around them. Then he would give that he was interested in committing sev- from Locke.” Data like test scores, grad- the district a choice: it could either dis- eral billion dollars of the education stimu- uation rates, and student retention won’t solve most of the central bureaucracy, and lus package to a Locke-style takeover and be available until later this year. turn over hiring, firing, and spending de- transformation of the lowest-performing Barr doesn’t want to hear it. “Nobody cisions to neighborhood schools, or sur- one per cent of schools across the country, MARK ULRIKSEN can tell me that a small, autonomous, render leadership of the schools to Green at least four thousand of them, in the next

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TNY—2009_05_11—PAGE 67—133SC.—live art r18460 In fact, he’d been a mediocre student. Barr was born in 1959, just south of San Francisco, and lived with his mother in Monterey, near the military base, where she worked as a dental assistant and a cocktail waitress. When he was six, he and his younger brother spent a year in foster care. Later, they made their home in a trailer in Missouri, before moving back to California. In school, Barr was a good athlete, and popular. Every teacher knew his name. His brother, Mike, was quiet and overweight. Mike tried playing in the band for a while. (“Why do you give the chubby kid a tuba?” Barr asked, sighing. “Do you know how hilarious it “I huffed and I puffed and I blew their house down, is seeing a chubby kid try to get on the and now my head’s hot and I ache all over.” bus with a tuba?”) But soon Mike got lost in their large high school. Steve graduated, and went on to the Univer­- •• sity of California at Santa Barbara. Mike dropped out, and never really settled into several years. The Department of Educa- a few miles away. “Where the Beach an adult life. Eventually, he was in a mo- tion would favor districts that agreed to Boys went,” Barr said. “Now it’s a drop- torcycle accident. After a series of surger- partner with an outside group, like Green out factory.” ies, he lost his leg. He won a settlement, Dot. “You seem to have cracked the code,” He announced plans for the school at but that attracted the wrong friends. Duncan told Barr. a middle-school gymnasium crowded “You take a poor kid who has problems Duncan was interested in the fact with families. “I told the parents, ‘When and give him a lot of money . . .” Barr that Barr was targeting high schools, you come to this school, seven thousand said. When Barr was thirty-two, Mike not elementary or middle schools. “The dollars follows you’ ”—the rough sum died of a drug overdose. His mother toughest work in urban education today that California paid a to died shortly afterward, and Barr began is what you do with large failing high educate a child. “ ‘That’s your money. I to drift. schools,” Duncan told me. These schools will treat that like tuition.’ ” He promised He discovered charter schools by ac- get less study and less attention from them a school that was safe, local, and ac- cident. When President Clinton went charter groups and education reformers, countable. He said he’d need their help. to San Carlos to visit California’s first most of whom feel that ninth grade is And he gave everyone his home phone charter school, Barr tagged along, and too late to begin saving kids. “Teach for number and said that they could call him encountered the school’s founder, Don America, NewSchools Venture Fund, anytime. By the end of the night, he had Shalvey, and a Silicon Valley business- the Broad Foundation—all these folks a hundred and forty kids committed to man, Reed Has­tings, who had just are doing extraordinary work in public his ninth-grade class. Suddenly, he said, founded Netflix. Shalvey and Has­tings education,” Duncan said. “Nobody na- “I started shaking.” were about to draw up a ballot initiative tional is turning around large failing “I’m standing in front of these parents, that would increase the number of char- high schools.” who have no money—all they have is ter schools in California. Barr decided When Barr got back to Los Angeles, their kids,” he recalled. “And they’re trust- to help. “He came out of nowhere,” he told me, “We’re being asked, ‘Could ing me. I didn’t have a facility yet, and I Hastings said. And he brought a very you guys do five schools in L.A. next didn’t have a staff. It was February, and different approach. He persuaded them, year? Could you expand beyond L.A.?’ school was opening in August. I walked for instance, to try to make peace with If you’d asked a month ago, ‘What about out to the parking lot and threw up.” the California Teachers Association. Green Dot America?,’ I would have said, Opening a school was an unlikely “He helped us realize we were perhaps­ ‘No way.’ But if this President wants to move for Barr. He had done fund- overly simplistic in demonizing the get after it I’m going to reconsider.” raising for California politicians, helped union as the enemy,” Hastings said. “It organize the Olympic-torch relay be-­­ turned out C.T.A. was open to a stron- arr opened his first school in Au­- fore the 1984 Summer Games, and ger charter law.” gust of 2000, at the edge of Len- spent three years as an on-air televi­- As Barr worked on the campaign, he nox,B a poor, mostly Spanish-speaking sion reporter. He co-founded Rock the started to think about his own years in commun­ ­ity near Los Angeles Interna- Vote, and worked on Bill Clinton’s school, and his brother’s. High school, he tional Airport, under a landing path. 1992 Presidential campaign. But he’d decided, was the point where their lives The local high school, Hawthorne, was never thought much about education. diverged. When the charter-school mea-

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TNY—2009_05_11—PAGE 68—133SC.—Live art aA14191 sure passed, he broke up with his girl- Barr’s school beat Hawthorne High Los Angeles went more than thirty years friend, moved out of their apartment, School in every measurable outcome. without building a new high school, even gave up his convertible, and rented a de- “When the scores come out, I have to call as the city’s population swelled; schools crepit place in Venice, sight unseen. He Shalvey”—Barr’s charter-school mentor— like Locke, meant for about fifteen hun- moved in on Christmas morning, to a “and ask him, ‘Are they good?’ ” Barr said. dred kids, doubled their enrollment, pack- room strewn with needles, vomit, and “ ’Cause I don’t fucking know. I don’t ing classrooms and erecting cheap, prefab- feces. “I’m thirty-nine, I’m alone,” he know how to read test scores.” The night ricated units in their parking lots. Cubias said. “Merry fucking Christmas.” He tied school eventually moved, and Animo ditched class a lot and got bad grades. his chocolate Lab, Jerry Brown, in the Leadership took over the entire campus. But a substitute covering his English class corner, put on the Harry Belafonte album Last year, U.S. News & World Report thought he seemed out of place and rec- his mother used to play every Saturday ranked it among the top hundred public ommended him for an honors class. When morning, when they did chores together, high schools in the country. he showed up the first day, he recalled, he and scrubbed the apartment. met a girl with black hair and ojos tapa­ A year and a half later, he opened pair of skinny Latino boys with tíos—almond-shaped eyes—who carried Animo Leadership Charter High School, shoulder-length hair cruised down a novel wherever she went. He was smit- near Lennox. (He said that in Spanish Locke’sA breezeway on their skateboards. ten. “I had heard about kids who read animo can mean “courage” or “valor,” but Zeus Cubias, an assistant principal, books, but they were, like, mythical,” he prefers a Mexican surfing buddy’s turned and glared. It was a few minutes Cubias said, laughing. He asked a coun- translation: “Get off your ass.”) He hired after the last bell, and the two kids had sellor to give him the same class schedule five of his seven teachers straight out of swapped their uniform polos for black as the girl, and in that instant he passed college and rented classrooms at a night band T-shirts. from one world to another. She took all school. When one of the teachers quit in “What did I tell you? Don’t act the honors classes, on her way to graduating as the first couple of weeks, he replaced her fool,” Cubias said sternly, as the boys valedictorian. with his office manager. Barr worked picked up their skateboards. He turned to “These poor high schools, you have mostly without pay for the next few years, the taller boy. “Especially when you’re an Advanced Placement track, and the spending the last of his savings and his wearing a Guns N’ Roses shirt. Don’t em- teachers only believe in triage, so they put brother’s settlement, and doing such dam- barrass the shirt.” The boy laughed. “Next the kids who have a chance in that track,” age to his finances that Costco revoked his time, I’m taking boards,” Cubias said. Barr explained. “It’s built on the back of membership. He pitched in a lot himself. Cubias is compact and athletic, with the other three tracks.” “Maybe the most fun I had was going to floppy hair, a tidy beard, and three ear- Cubias ended up scoring a 5 on his test-drive school buses,” he said. rings. “I’d be doing the same thing when A.P. calculus exam, which no Locke stu- And he starting a surfing club. “There I was a kid,” he admitted. He grew up just dent had ever done before, and went to were a handful of kids at the school who a few blocks down the street, and gradu- the University of California at Santa Bar- were really fricking cool but weren’t being ated from Locke, class of ’92. He showed bara. Even before he left Locke, he knew reached somehow,” he said. “There was a me his freshman yearbook. “Here’s the that he wanted to come back and teach kid named Ricky. He was smart, charis- Jheri Curl mullet,” he said, flipping there. “Now, I’m bilingual, and a math matic. All the girls loved this guy. There through the faces. “Ghetto business in teacher, with a University of California was another girl named Stephanie, who I the front, ghetto party in the back. And certification,” Cubias said. “In this dis- think had a crush on Ricky.” They agreed here’s me, sporting my own mullet.” trict, I’m gold.” But when he first went to find twenty-five kids who would show The high school opened in 1967, two downtown to apply for a teaching posi- up before school, at 6 A.M. years after the Watts riots. Named for tion and said that he wanted a job at “ We were driving to the South Bay, Alain Leroy Locke, the country’s first Locke he was told, “You don’t have to Manhattan Beach. It was real quiet,” African-American Rhodes Scholar, it teach there. You’re qualified to teach at Barr recalled. “Halfway out there, one of was set on a twenty-six-acre plot near the this place, or this place, or this place.” the kids said, ‘Mr. Barr, do you have to edge of the neighborhood, and was meant The interviewer thought she was know how to swim to surf ?’ ” Half the to be a symbol of rebirth. But by the time doing him a favor. “These schools like kids couldn’t. Barr put his head in his Cubias was a freshman, jobs and middle- Locke and Fremont and Jordan, they just hands and laughed. class families had disappeared; the school, get the leftovers,” Cubias said. Locke “The Manhattan Beach school sys- like the neighborhood, became infamous. would have substitutes covering unfilled tem, they actually have surfing in gym Security guards with metal-detecting teaching positions well into the school class, so you have all these blond-haired, wands would interrupt class to spot- year. New hires were often uninspiring blue-eyed kids in the water,” Barr contin- check boys. and unprepared. “Damn the day the Uni- ued. “And here come these kids from As a freshman, Cubias landed in reme- versity of Phoenix started offering teach- Lennox. The Lennox surf team.” He dial and English as a Second Language ing credentials,” he added. mimicked a slow, tough walk. “Their classes. “I had a Spanish name,” he said. In the spring of 2007, a rumor spread gear’s a little off, you know, they’re all La- Most Latinos in Watts were recent immi- through the school. Teachers and parents tino, and a couple of black kids. I re- grants, and there were so many kids, and were summoned to a community meet- member them getting triple takes.” so few counsellors, that it was hard to keep ing at the middle school down the street. At the end of its first chaotic year, everyone straight. Locke had grown huge. The room was packed. Cubias took a seat

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TNY—2009_05_11—PAGE 69—133SC. near the front. The superintendent at the new teachers and administrators, and sell time got up to speak. He said that the dis- the idea to parents and community lead- trict was interested in handing over lead- ers. This is all before any public dollars ar- ership of Locke High School to a charter rive. Four years after Barr started Animo organization, Green Dot. Leadership, he had a nice school of about For Cubias, this was worse than five hundred students. But that barely neglect—to be abandoned by the dis- registered in a district with around seven trict and relegated to some white guy hundred thousand. Barr began to covet he’d never met. “We’ll see about that,” district schools with thousands of stu- he said. dents. (Locke had almost three thou- sand.) “We were trying to figure out how he sudden announcement stunned to get out of the charter-school business, United Teachers Los Angeles, the and how to get into the helping-schools- neighborhood,T and Locke’s staff, even transform business,” he said. the principal. Almost immediately, the Barr tested a new strategy at Jefferson superintendent began shying away from High School, a place that is much like the deal. Barr had learned by now to have Locke, a few miles to the north. In 2005, a backup plan ready. If the district re- over the course of a year, he met with the fused to give him Locke, he’d just open a superintendent to try to negotiate a deal bunch of Green Dot schools in Watts to transform the institution into a series of and take the kids. small autonomous schools. When talks Green Dot had become more profes- broke down, Barr hired a field staff from sional since Barr’s early days at Animo the neighborhood. They worked out of a Leadership. But it had also become more housing project across the street from the radical. When case-study writers from school and collected ten thousand signa- Harvard Business School asked Barr to tures from local parents. When the dis- describe the inspiration behind Green trict still balked, Barr gathered a thousand Dot’s model, he didn’t cite other schools; parents and marched to L.A.U.S.D.’s he named the Student Nonviolent Coor- central office, towing the paperwork for dinating Committee. He hired an oppo- five new Green Dot schools in little red sition researcher to investigate Green Dot wagons. Jefferson remained an L.A.U.S.D. and see what enemies might use against school. But the following fall more than him. He started a citywide group called half of its incoming freshmen entered the the Los Angeles Parents Union, an activ- lottery for a spot at one of Barr’s schools. ist alternative to the Parent-Teacher As- “When Green Dot was able to walk into sociation, in the hope of mobilizing foot a neighborhood, build strong coalitions soldiers for Green Dot’s escalating war with neighborhood groups, and begin to against the district. He even put a school- drain the school, I think that sent a shock board member on his payroll—“a mole,” wave through the system,” Ted Mitchell, Barr said—to report back on closed meet- the president of the State Board of Edu- ings. Judged purely on test scores, or cation, said. scholastic reputation, another group, Barr was ready to do the same thing Alliance for College-Ready Public at Locke. “What I didn’t foresee was the Schools, is probably the premier charter- teachers rising up,” he said. A group from school-management organization in Los the school—Zeus Cubias and a few oth- Angeles. “They’re brilliant about academ- ers—sent word that they wanted a meet- ics,” Barr said. But, as a political organi- ing. Barr agreed to meet them at a nearby zation that happens to run great schools, community center. Fifty or sixty teachers Green Dot is unique. sat on one side, in a semicircle; Barr sat As Barr became more political, he alone, facing them. began to worry about the limits of the “Locke is a cash cow,” he explained to charter movement. “There’s this cult them. It attracted more state and federal around charter schools,” Barr said. funding than schools in richer neighbor- “They’re not even close to being the an- hoods—“money-that’s-thrown-at-a- swer.” Opening a new school like Animo failed-school kind of money,” he said. Leadership takes an enormous amount of “According to our analysis, only about effort and money. Barr has to find a big sixty per cent of that money makes it into building in the right neighborhood, and the classroom.” convert it into classrooms, and fill it with A gigantic district like L.A.U.S.D.

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TNY—2009_05_11—PAGE 70—133SC.—#2 page—text changes has layer upon layer of bureaucracy. teacher said, ‘Let’s face it, the only time take the school. That meant all the eligi- Locke had two full-time employees who the district comes out here is when a kid ble younger teachers and a decent num- painted over graffiti. Bathroom monitors gets killed,’ ” Barr recalled. “Another ber of the older ones. Smith and Wells were contractually limited to bathroom- teacher said, ‘And the only time our started canvassing between bells. “It was related supervision. Locke often came in union comes out is when Green Dot’s a sneaky inside job, but there was no well under budget, yet students still mentioned.’ Somebody said, ‘What can other way to do it,” Smith said. shared textbooks, because the surplus we do?’ ” District administrators were furious. was locked up in some unnecessary line Barr explained that California law- They sent school police to find Wells and item. Byzantine chains of accountability makers had created an option for schools escort him off school property. But it was made it almost impossible to isolate to abandon the district for a charter ar- too late: Barr’s allies had the signatures. problems and fix them. rangement if at least fifty per cent of ten- Two days later, television crews gathered “There was yelling back and forth,” ured teachers vote to secede. “We’d be across the street for a press conference. Barr said. “A lot of the time I just sat interested in that,” Barr said. Kids milled around and stared. Smith there, let them work their shit out. A Barr had a stack of petition forms sent sneaked into a bathroom to write a young Latino math teacher, big guy, to the school. Cubias, an English teacher speech. “I’ve got security guards carrying fucking six foot five, he broke down and named Bruce Smith, and the principal, walkie-talkies, saying, ‘He’s walking started crying.” The teacher feared that Frank Wells, began circulating them. down the hall,’ ” Smith recalled. “I’m although Green Dot might get more Barr wasn’t sure he had the votes. Locke’s pretty nervous.” He hid in a stall, and kids to college, the most vulnerable kids, young teachers were mostly untenured scribbled notes for his remarks on an the hardest cases, might slip away. It’s a and ineligible. The older faculty tended index card: “Do what we’re doing: take big knock against charter schools— to be deeply skeptical of what Barr was back your schools.” sometimes fair, sometimes unfair—that selling. “A lot of these teachers have been Within days, the district and the only a traditional public school teaches all on the front lines during the whole de- teachers’ union counterattacked. “To kids. “We bombarded him,” Cubias said. mise of our public education system,” he take over a whole school—it was scan- Barr came back with the same answer said. “Now, every year or two, there’s dalous!” Karen Wickhorst, a French again and again: “How will it be worse some new reform. You get reform fa- teacher and, at the time, a site represen- than what you have now?” tigue: ‘Oh, God, another God-damned tative for United Teachers Los Angeles, Even if they agreed about the district’s bright idea from the business world.’ ” recently recalled. “A big public school! It ills, many teachers worried about Green Out of a total tenured faculty of seventy- was so underhanded.” Dot’s contract. At around thirty pages, three, Barr needed thirty-seven votes to The district banned Barr from the it would be only a tenth as long as their contract with L.A.U.S.D. “Union con- tracts are written in response to bad sys- tems,” Barr said. (A. J. Duffy, the presi- dent of United Teachers Los Angeles, counters, “Our view of a decent contract is it will provide longevity of teaching staff.” Too many charter schools, he ar- gues, churn through young teachers.) Green Dot offered no tenure and no lifetime benefits. But salaries would be about ten per cent higher; it spends more than sixty per cent of its staff budget on teacher salaries, a good deal more than L.A.U.S.D., Green Dot claims. Green Dot’s union—affiliated with the state- wide teachers’ association rather than with the more defensive one in Los An- geles—would protect them from ar- bitrary dismissal. And Barr promised teachers more freedom in the classroom. At his schools, the principals lay out firm curricular guidelines, in keeping with California state standards and Green Dot benchmarks, but teachers are free to huddle, and decide what to teach and how to teach it, for the most part, as long as students pass quarterly assessments. “After about five and a half hours, one

TNY—2009_05_11—PAGE 71—133SC.—Live art a14021—#3 page, fixed spacey line in lefthand column/now text changes school and summoned teachers to a meeting. Duffy, the union president, and the district’s regional administrator ad- Obscurity and Regret dressed the teachers. “They scared the shit out of everyone,” Barr said. Seven- The hand without the glove screws down the lid teen teachers revoked their signatures. on the jar of caterpillars, but the apple trees Barr set up a war room at Green Dot’s are already infested. The sun mottles offices. He wrote the number “17” on a the ground. The leaves are half-dead. whiteboard. Organizers mapped out the A shoe stomps the larvae streaming teachers who had rescinded their votes— onto the lawn as if putting out a cigarette on a rug. their issues, their biases—as well as new It was a stupid idea. It was a stupid thing to say teachers they might swing. “It was like the thought belonging to the body says to its source chasing down Senate votes,” Barr said. stomping on the bright-green grass as it spills its sweet guts. He got up at five, and met teachers at a doughnut shop before school. He went —C. D. Wright to their houses for dinner, and showed up at church on Sunday. Allies would sneak him onto the school grounds them. Instead, there was graffiti. “Every- around her was fighting. A boy she’d through a back gate, and he’d hold court where you walked,” Shannan Burrell, a never seen before punched her. “I wanted in a gym teacher’s office. junior, said. “About six out of ten, it was to cry, bad,” she said. “But it ain’t inside They got all seventeen votes back— gang tags.” me to cry.” Instead, she fought back. A but not one more. And Barr began to Shannan is curvy and baby-faced, few weeks later, she left her mother’s look ahead. “After the press conference, with rosy brown skin. Her hair was in a house and moved in with her adult sister, a dozen different schools contacted me,” bright-purple wrap. She lived nearby, about an hour away. But in the fall she he said. They were ready to lead their with her mother, in a yellow house, decided to go back to Locke. She’d heard own insurrections. “If I’d been prepared, close enough to walk to school in the that there were going to be changes. I could have run the table,” Barr said. morning (keeping quiet, looking straight Old-timers and union loyalists who Some of his closest confidants, though, ahead) but outside Locke’s immediate left Locke after the takeover insisted that worried that even one big high school neighborhood, which was a good thing. Green Dot would find a way to weed out might be too many. “Most people around “It’s dirty,” she said. “Gangbangers out problem kids. Others, such as Cubias, him, including me, said, ‘Oh, man, Locke 24/7.” She wears a necklace that spells worried that uniforms and the promise is going to kill you,’ ” Reed Hastings, of out the name “Jerome” in curling, glit- of tougher discipline would simply keep Netflix, said. “Creating new schools is tering script. He was her best friend, be- bad kids away. But teachers and admin- easy politics. It’s ribbon-cutting, it’s new fore he was shot and killed around the istrators went out into the neighborhood opportunities. Taking over a school—it’s corner, when she was in ninth grade. “It to visit hundreds of parents and students district property, those are union jobs. I was random,” she said softly. “He was a and encourage them to reënroll. Eighty- was afraid he would put in a lot of effort schoolboy, for real.” five per cent of Locke students returned. and not succeed. Or he’d get the conver- When she entered Locke, three years (In a normal year, only seventy per cent sion done and the difficulty of running the ago, she liked it. “It was fun—wandering would come back from summer break.) school would overwhelm him. And if he around the halls, around the campus,” That meant hundreds more than either did a bad job it would be a black mark for she said. “Just wilding out.” She’d drop Green Dot or the city had projected. everyone.” into classroom after classroom, look­ing “When I got to school, I was laugh- for friends. “Like ‘Come outside real ing at everyone else—I was, like, ‘Ha, tall girl, her hair pulled back tightly quick,’ ” she said, laughing. “Quick” usu- you got on a uniform,’ ” Shannan said. in a ponytail, reached up to tape ally meant for the rest of class. “And we “They’re, like, ‘Ha, you got on a uni- aA bright hand-painted poster (“Valen- wouldn’t just go to our lunch—we’d go form, too!’ ” Green Dot split the incom- tines Day Candygrams”) above a row of to all of them,” she said. “Why are we ing ninth grade into five new small lockers. going to go to class if nobody ever says schools, like the schools around Jefferson. “You’re showing your butt crack,” a nothing?” But in her sophomore year she Three of them ended up in buildings off boy walking by said. started getting in fights. “I felt like, at campus; the other two were in Locke’s “So? Everyone has one.” Locke, you have to earn your reputation,” prefabricated units, walled off by tall “I don’t.” she explained. “And I earned mine, after black fences. Then they split the upper “Idiot.” She rolled her eyes. The like my third fight. But then, after that, three grades into two academies, one for boy looked back over his shoulder and it seemed like girls wanted to challenge each wing of Locke’s original building. grinned. me. So it got worse.” She fought once or Each school had its own bell schedule, Locke’s hallways are now filled with twice a week. Her grades were terrible. its own lunch period, its own entrance, these handmade signs—for dances, try- She was eating with the football play- and its own color polo shirt. Shannan outs, movie nights, college tours. They ers, in the shade of the quad’s only tree, drew white. used to be banned; kids would vandalize when the riot began. Suddenly, everyone Locke’s teachers were all dismissed

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TNY—2009_05_11—PAGE 72—133SC. and asked to reapply. Only about thirty classmate, an assistant principal called per cent got their jobs back. Shannan’s the girl’s mother, and when the woman English teacher, Mr. Sully, was one of showed up she started screaming at the them. “He just, he a nice teacher,” she other student.) Security can stop neigh- said. “He keep you on your toes. If you borhood gangs from tagging the halls ain’t doing something, he’ll make you or hoisting couches up to Locke’s roof, do something.” Dozens of kids told me which was a hangout last year, but they this—that teachers make them do stuff can’t keep gangs out of kids’ lives. now, whether they want to or not. Al- I made plans to attend classes with most immediately, Shannan stopped Shannan the next day, but when I arrived ditching.­ For one thing, she couldn’t get at her first-period class, English with Mr. away with it anymore. (“They don’t play,” Sully, she wasn’t there. I called her house she said.) She stopped fighting, too. after school. The phone line was dead. Sully passed a new novel out to Shan- (Her mother, a quiet, serious woman, has nan’s class—“a book called ‘The Bluest been out of work for at least two years. Eye,’ ” Shannan said. She was unim- Her father has been in jail since around pressed with the cover and the first page. the time Shannan was a toddler.) When “I was like, ‘Mr. Sully, this book about we finally talked, her voice was so flat to be stooopid.’ And he said, ‘What did that I didn’t recognize it. I say?’ And I said, ‘O.K., I won’t use “I’m not going to be in school this “stupid,” but this book is about to be week,” she said. “I have to take care of not interesting.’ He sat me down and family business.” had a strong conversation with me.” She “Did someone get hurt?” I asked. agreed to give it a few pages. Then the “Yes.” character Claudia, a fighter, made her “Was it a car accident or something?” first appearance. “I hear her talk about “Much worse,” she said. “It’s not beating up a girl name Rosemary, a lit- something I want to talk about.” Sev­- tle white girl. I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going eral days passed before she returned to to read this!’ ” She giggled. “It’s turned classes. out to be a good book,” she said. “That’s There remain problems to address in- the funny thing.” side Locke, too. Fall semester was diffi­ “There is no secret curriculum-and- cult. “We made so many mistakes,” Cu- instruction sauce at Green Dot at all,” bias said. September was almost wholly Don Shalvey said. “Steve hires good devoted to coping with the crush of un- people. They’re just doing old-school expected students. Administrators strug- schooling.” gled to find good teachers who were still Shannan doesn’t like every class. Phys- on the job market. Clubs and activi­- ics, she said, is boring. So is a test-prepa- ties suffered. “It’s hard to see incremen-­ ration and college-readiness class, manda- tal changes,” a new principal, Veronica tory for most Green Dot students. But Coleman, said. “That turned into some she tries to do the work now. When I low-level frustration for both students asked her why, she thought about it for a and teachers.” long time. “Honestly, it didn’t matter how Sully told me that Locke is signi­ you did before,” she said. “Wasn’t nobody ficantly calmer, and administrators are really looking at Locke kids”—meaning more present. And Green Dot got rid of to go to college. That’s not true, of course, the teachers who did little for students. but it felt true to Shannan. “Now, if I But the takeover also chased away some make a bad grade, I’m like, ‘Please, can I good, experienced staff. Locke’s over- make it up?’ ” whelmingly new and mostly young fac- There are problems that Green Dot ulty members are learning how to work can’t fix on its own, however. According together. Sully still has problems with to Cubias, at least forty per cent of Locke’s chronic truancy. He still sees kids out of students come from single-parent house- uniform. And when Locke’s test scores, holds. “Another fifteen per cent are in their first since the takeover, come foster care,” he said. Green Dot requires back this fall they are almost certain parents to get involved at school, a mini- to be the lowest among Barr’s schools. mum of thirty-five hours a year, but they Sully guesses that the school might see can’t make every parent a good influ-­ a small bounce, but anything more than ence. (Recently, after a girl tangled with a that would surprise him. Kids in Locke’s

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TNY—2009_05_11—PAGE 73—133SC. upper grades have spent as many as unions agree on limiting central bureau- there, we’ll get the attention of a lot of three years in one of the city’s worst ac- cracy, giving teachers fewer students lawmakers,” Barr said. ademic environments. And, for the first and more freedom, and concentrating There are risks for Barr in this kind time at a Green Dot school, there is no funds in the classroom, but they mostly of expansion. It will be months, and lottery process for admission. There is go at each other over tenure and the maybe years, before there’s hard evi- no waiting list. Locke is serving every right to unionize. Ultimately, Barr’s dence about what Green Dot has ac- kid in the neighborhood, including ones project isn’t about fixing one broken complished at Locke. And that one whose parents, in another neighbor- school; he thinks he can resolve that im- takeover put a real strain on the orga- hood, would never research alternatives passe. His grander ambitions, as much nization. “If they were to take over an- to the big traditional school. “Every as Green Dot’s experience in Watts, are other high school in Los Angeles, they child who is in his other schools is there what brought him to Arne Duncan’s could handle that,” Steve Seleznow, because they have an advocate,” Cor­ office in March. the deputy director of education for tines said. “Not so at Locke. They took Duncan asked Barr what it would the Gates Foundation, said. “I’m not the whole population.” take to break up and remake thousands sure they have the capacity to do five Even security remains a challenge. of large failing schools. “One, you have at once.” Then he paused. “I’m sure Green Dot blanketed the schoolyard to reconstitute,” Barr told him—that Steve has the appetite for it,” he added, with guards from a private security firm, is, fire everyone and make them reap-­ and laughed. Barr’s impatience and club-bouncer burly, carrying handguns ply or transfer elsewhere in the district. his willingness to overextend himself and pepper spray. Gangs have no­where “Arne didn’t seem to flinch at that,” he are a bigger part of Green Dot’s insti­ near the profile they once did, and said. “Second, if we can figure out a na- tutional culture than any theory of fights, once a daily occurrence, are rare. tional union partnership, we can take education. Still, in mid-April, a student was shot, away some of the opposition.” Duncan In the meantime, Barr and his sup- across the street, just before first period. asked Barr if he could persuade Randi porters continue to campaign. On a And guards have occasionally displayed Weingarten, the president of the Amer- recent morning, outside 135th Street a heavy hand. Twice this year, they pep- ican Federation of Teachers, to support Elementary School, in Gardena, near per-sprayed students; in both cases, Cu- the idea. “I’d love to do that,” she told Watts, a gregarious woman with a bias said, they should have been able to Barr, but she also expressed concerns. streak of gray through her black curls, cool the kids down before it came to “She said, ‘I can’t be seen as coming in wearing a Los Angeles Parents Union that, but they were trained to secure fa- and firing all these teachers.’ ” So they sweatshirt, passed a sheet of paper to a cilities, not to supervise adolescents. talked about alternatives, like transfer- young Latino man in a Sears Appliance Yet, when I wandered around campus ring teachers or using stimulus money Repair jacket. He was accompanied by during lunch periods and between classes, for buyouts. two little girls with matching Hannah looking for disgruntled kids, I never Cortines has also agreed in principle Montana backpacks. “Would you like found any. to a partnership in Los Angeles. “We’ll to sign a petition to transform Perry “The whole atmosphere is different,” find out very quickly what he thinks a Middle School and Gardena High a Latino boy, sketching graffiti in a note- partnership is,” Barr said. “I think a School?” she asked. She waved down a book, said. “The teachers pay more at- partnership is Locke, period.” Federal car that showed no sign of stopping, tention to you.” money, Barr noted, and an alliance and bent over at the window when it “You actually get through the lessons with the national union “will force Mr. did. “Do you have time to sign my pe- you’re supposed to get through,” Jamie, Duffy”—the U.T.L.A. president—“to tition to transform Perry Middle School an African-American girl with straight- come along.” Green Dot could take over and ?” she asked. ened swept-back hair, said, as she picked as many as five Los Angeles schools in Immediately, the driver pulled over. at French fries with her friend Andrea. 2010, and maybe more. Organizers are now in many neighbor- “I noticed that, too,” Andrea said. This month, Barr expects to meet hoods, targeting elementary schools, “Last year, my grades got so bad—I again with Weingarten and her staff and telling parents that they have time got four D’s! My will to get good grades outline plans for a Green Dot America, to blow up and rebuild their middle improved,” Jamie said. a national school-turnaround partner- schools and high schools before their “Will Locke be perfect?” Cortines ship between Green Dot and the A.F.T. kids enroll. asked. “I don’t care. If they make mis- Their first city would most likely be Everyone signed up. It’s like that takes, they’ll find a way to do things Washington, D.C. “If we’re successful whenever she goes out. “People know differently. What we do in regular schools something is wrong,” she told me. “But is keep doing the same thing, even if it they think it’s their kids. Or it’s their doesn’t work.” neighborhood. Or it’s because they’re poor. If we have to, we’ll build a whole arr is always talking about “the bunch of little charters around the school tribes.” Union leaders and reform- and take the students,” the woman said, ers,B in his view, spend too much time loud enough for half the block to hear. fighting one another instead of finding “We’re going to get the change one way common interests. Charter groups and or another.” 

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