The Instigator

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 bY DOuglAs McgRay teve Barr stood in the breezeway at pavement had been replaced by a lawn Alain Leroy Locke High School, of thick green grass, lined with newly atS the edge of the Watts neighborhood planted olive trees. of Los Angeles, 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 California’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 flood lights, 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 66 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 11, 2009 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 unionized 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 South Los Angeles. 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 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 11, 2009 67 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.

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