In a provocative editorial this morning the LA Times talks about what I’ve been saying for six months, which is the fact that LAUSD is in the midst of a slow motion break-up from within.

But the Times goes much further and suggests that, rather than feeling threatened, maybe the district should make a deal with some of the successful charter school organizations and other outside innovators:

Right now, the district is staggering under multiple burdens. It’s considered a failing district under the No Child Left Behind Act. Its middle schools pass kids along even if they have little grasp of the required material; its high schools are too big and unsafe, and they lack qualified teachers in math and science. Far too many students drop out, and far too many of those remaining get low test scores and graduate unready for work or college. Its disadvantaged students need more resources in a state that spends less money per student than most.

Here’s one possible scenario for the district: Invite charters and other groups to take over your struggling middle and high schools and infuse them with new energy as well as private money. Focus instead on what you do well: educating young children.

Read the rest.

It’s not a bad idea.

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The best LA-based education drama of this past year has been the proposed—and now LAUSD school board approved— charter conversion of Locke High School by Steve Barr and Green Dot. A big part of the drama was the fact that LA’s teacher’s union, UTLA, did their best to derail the whole thing.

Now theres a related drama taking place on the east coast, where Green Dot wants to open a new charter school in the South Bronx. But this time UFT—the local union that represents New York City’s 110,000 public school teachers—has chosen to enthusiastically partner with Green Dot in the endeavor, instead of opposing it.

This past Friday, UTF and Green Dot announced in an joint press release that they’d cleared the second of three necessary hurdles when the State University of New York Board of Trustees approved the plan for the new school, which will begin with 100 9th graders, and eventually grow to 500 students, with no more than 25 kids in a classroom.

The last hurdle is the approval of the State Board of Regents.

According to UTF, this is the first such union/charter partnership in the nation.

So why can’t LA’s union and Green Dot forge their own cooperative bond?

Such questions are made more…..piquant....by the fact that the Green Dot/UTF announcement happened coincidentally to coincided with the release of a new national drop out data analysis conducted by Johns Hopkins for The Associated Press. It seems that Johns Hopkins decnstructed U.S. Education Department figures and came up to the discouraging conclusion that 1 out of every 10 American public high schools can be labeled a “Drop-Out Factory.”

Congress is hoping to address the nation’s drop out problem by tweaking the wildly flawed No Child Left Behind law to include accountability for drop out rates. (Since, as it stands now, NCLB “creates a perverse incentive,” as the AP puts it, for schools to encourage low-performing kids to drop out so they won’t bring down a school’s scores, some change might be in order.)

Did I mention that Green Dot’s existing LA schools have very low drop out rates and high graduation rates?

Consider it mentioned.

(AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

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The Locke High School charter conversion petition was approved by the LAUSD board of education at around 2:30 on Tuesday afternoon. The vote will allow Steve Barr’s Green Dot charter group to take over the troubled and low-performing high school, and break it up into five or six smaller schools. It is the first time a non-district group will run an LAUSD school.

The contentious discussion leading up to the vote involved a lengthy public hearing that featured upwards of thirty speakers, including eccentric LA surfer pundit, Zuma Dogg, who said he had just come from speaking at both the LA City Council and (I think) the Board of Supervisors. “Speaking here gives me a perfect trifecta!” he tells me cheerily.

The anti-charter speakers are made up of a small cadre of angry Locke teachers plus a bunch of UTLA union officials including union president, A. J. Duffy who weres his very snazzy, trademark, two-tone shoes, and insists the Green Dot petition is breaking the law.

“I’m not backing off,” Duffy stage whispers to UTLA VP, Linda Guthrie, after he leaves the mic.

Guthrie herself makes an impassioned pitch against the conversion. “If you do this,” she says, “you’re going to send a message throughout this district, that the district is unable to heal itself.”

“Well isn’t that the point?” mutters one Green Dot supporter. In truth, Guthrie has inadvertently brought up the outcome that many Locke transformation advocates are hoping for. Based on personal conversations, I know that Santee teachers are watching the Locke process closely trying to decide if they want to go charter too— as are several schools in the valley.

“If we get Locke,” says Steve Barr a few minutes later, “I think we’ll eventually get Jefferson.” In some ways, Jefferson and Santee are more pressing cases that Locke. Certainly, Locke is a perennial low scorer in the district (of the 1318 ninth-graders that enrolled at Locke in the fall of 2001, only a terrifyingly low 332 managed to actually graduate in spring, 2005. And only 143 of those getting diplomas had the right credits to apply for admission to the University of California and/or California State University systems). Sadly, however, Santee and Jefferson’s scores—and graduation rates—are worse.

Green Dot, on the other hand, graduates on average of 80 percent of its 9th graders and nearly all have the necessary A-G credits to apply to a state-run college or university. Moreover, the Green Dot schools run on a comparative shoestring and, both Jefferson and Locke have been recipients of some of the district’s biggest influxes of money.

Interspersed with the union speakers, there is a string of students and teachers from Locke—plus a couple of local church pastors. Each come up to the microphone when their names are called from the board chairwoman’s list, and then plead for three minutes for the conversion, many of them citing versions of the above list of facts.

“It’s too late for me,” said a sixteen year old Locke senior named Alnesha Jones, “but I want my younger brothers and sisters to have a good school…a good education… like Green Dot is talking about.”


“They tell us we’re taking a big risk going with Green Dot,” says one of the pastors. “But as a Bishop I know used to say, ‘ You can’t fall down if you’re already lying on the ground.’”

As the speakers continue to cycle up to the microphone, Steve Barr leans against a side wall and, although he looks decidedly exhausted, he professes not to be worried. “We went out and got more signatures,” he says, “so today we have 38 permanent teachers who have signed the petition, out of 71 teachers at Locke. That’s more than half, so they have to give it to us,” he says. “I’m betting it’s going to be five to two in our favor.” [For the back-story on the signature battle click here.]

If the UTLA group is negative about the conversion, board member Julie Korenstein is withering. The new board members don’t know what they’re stepping into with this “experiment,” she says. “This is the most serious issue of my entire time on the board of education.” Korenstein also maintains that charters are really “vouchers in disguise.” She talks about the “criminal” amount of ADA [average daily attendance] money from the State that the Locke charter will take away from the district. (Yeah, and we’ll have the nerve to want to put that money toward kids,” whispers a Locke teacher.) “If you want to make money, you become a charter school operator,” Korenstein says with a wave of her highly manicured hands. “I’m appalled at this new board that’s willing to say, “Give the children away.’ I’m ashamed to be on this board!”

At these last two statements, new board member, Richard Vladovic grows visibly red in the face. “I take it personally when an individual says I don’t know what I’m doing,” he says. “This is history being made. It’s not about who owns these kids. It’s about who’s going to help these kids. LA Unified has been too focused on adult agendas. If my child was going to Locke,” he says. “ I’d take the experiment, not the failure.”

Clearly anxious to bolster their reformist reputations, all four of the new board members are very vocally in favor of a conversion, with Marlene Cantor squeezing quickly into their camp waving lots of newly-minted “I’ve always been a reformist” statements. In the abstract, one could be cynical and dismiss their collective enthusiasm as political posturing. But Vladovic seems too passionate for a facile dismissal. And, while board chairman, Monica Garcia, has a slicker delivery style than the rest, she lays out some stark truths that the board has failed to ever before acknowledge, and her righteous, preacher-like fury appears to be genuine.

“We at LAUSD spend $7.7 billion dollars every year,” Garcia says, “And yet we still have graduation rates that hover between 40 and 50 percent,” she says.

“I’m supporting this charter today because I’ve had enough of yesterday.”

UTLA VP, Linda Guthrie, who has spoken passionately—and arguably the most effectively—against the conversion, rolls her eyes at this last. “Okay, I admit that’s a great line,” Guthrie leans over to whisper. Then her voice softens. “Look, it isn’t just the district that’s at fault,” she says. “We—the union—have failed these teachers and these kids too.”

A few beats later, Guthrie confides that she’s planning to run for president of UTLA to replace Duffie.


The vote is finally taken just around 2:30 pm, and, as Barr had predicted it is 5 to 2 in favor of the conversion (the YEAs are provided by the four reformers plus former board prez, Marlene Canter), The two against, are courtesy of the still-fuming Korenstein and and an aggressively frowning, Marguerite LaMott, who earlier harrumphed something about Green Dot’s petition signatures possibly being fraudulent. “Look, we verified them all,” sighed one of the district’s attorneys.

As the last “YEA” vote is cast—I think it was by Richard Vladovic—wild cheering erupts immediately.


When the cheering subsides, Duffy and other union officials say that they’re going to sue to stop the conversion. “This isn’t over, not by a long shot,” yells UTLA regional coordinator, Mat Taylor, as he stalks out of the auditorium.

[NOTE: The LA Times has pretty much outlined the union’s contention about the legality—or lack thereof—of the petition. Rather than give you a version from my own notes, I’ll refer you to Joel Stein and Howard Bloom’s able reporting on the subject.]

Nevertheless, as the rest file out of the place, there is the strong feeling that something of moment has happened.

“This is historic,” says board member, Richard Vladovic.

Dr. Frank Wells, the Locke principal fired over the charter issue, echoes Vladovic’s sentiment. “You saw history made here today,” he says. “The whole world is watching us.” Wells admits that getting fired for trying to do what he believed was right for the school “felt a bit bizarre. But today makes it all worth it,” he says, “seeing this come to fruition. We don’t want to just reform this school. We want to make it a model, one of the best in the state. I think that’s Green Dot’s mission. And if you’re not in it with that kind of mission,” Wells says, “you shouldn’t be working in these schools at all.”

With that, he heads off down Beaudry Street to take about 30 Locke students to a victory lunch. Each of the kids is wearing a shamrock colored Green Dot t-shirt emblazoned with the message: GOT COLLEGE….IN WATTS?

“We will now,” says a tall, pretty 17-year-old named Kacey Andrus who says she just got offered a basketball scholarship to USC. “I think we’ve done something good today.”

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This morning the Los Angeles Unified school board will vote on Locke High School’s petition to become a Green Dot charter school. The district has backed itself into a corner on this one so I predict an approval, yet not without a fight from the teachers’ union.

The truth is, if LAUSD doesn’t approve the charter, Steve Barr and the Locke leadership will just take it to the state level where it will be approved—thereby cutting the district out of any relationship with the school at all, now and forever

(Here and here are links to the back story if you want to refresh your memory.)

I’ll post all the details here at WLA as soon as there’s a decision. With any luck, I’ll know the outcome by lunch time, so check back.

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Well, they voted….and the Steve Barr/Green Dot/Locke charter contingent won, at least this round. But the lay of the land that was glimpsed today presages a win in the up-or-down vote that will take place at the LAUSD board meeting on September 11.

“I think Admiral Brewer realizes that,” said Locke teacher/activist, Bruce Smith, “and that’s one of the reason he’s with us.”

Put another way, the winds of history are at the backs of the charter folks, and the smart money says that anybody who obstructs this move will, when all is said and done, be blown to the sidelines.

“The thing is,” said Steve Barr this afternoon, as he, Bruce Smith, and axed Locke principle, Frank Wells, were sharing a victory chat, “the Locke teachers initiated this. We didn’t approach them.”

Barr also says that he’s specifically not making an effort to retrieve the rescinded signatures (although some have retracted their retractions anyway), “because I refused to validate the idea that the union can put all the teachers into lock down and keep them there until they’ve managed to intimidate the hell out of everyone and get people to rescind what were honest signatures gathered over a period of weeks.

“Look,” he says, “if our petition gets challenged, we’d be happy to have a public hearing on the whole thing. We know that our signatures have been verified both by Greg McNair (LAUSD’s director of charter schools) and by the LA Times. So, if we really delve into how [the district and the union] got the signatures rescinded, they might not like what we’re going to find.”

Barr has also, he says, had conversations with California Attorney General Jerry Brown, who is an old friend and political ally and has indicated he’ll look positively on the Green Dot/Locke petition issue.

“But I think Duffy and I are 60 percent there,” he says, and relates how a month or two ago, UTLA prez, A.J. Duffy had agreed to go out to Locke for a public one-on-one discussion with Barr at the invitation of sixty of Locke’s teachers, but the Locke union chapter chair spiked the event, so it never took place.

Yet, the truth is, if the petition is approved, it won’t really matter what A.J. Duffy thinks or does.

In the meantime, Barr and company are going ahead at Locke in anticipation of a positive outcome in September. “We have the beginning of a design team. We’re acting as if it’s going to happen because it is going to happen. And, I’m telling you, it’s going to be great.” As he says this last, Barr’s voice drifts into a timbre that is part cheerleader, part head coach, part religion-hawking visionary. It is a tone that many—try as they might—find hard to resist.

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Tuesday (today, by the time most of you read this) is the day that the LAUSD board will decide whether or not it wants to jump into the drama that unfolded last spring around Locke High School. More specifically, the board will vote Tuesday morning on a resolution introduced last month by new board member Richard Vladovic, which would mandate an up-or-down vote by the board on the the Locke/Green Dot charter petition.

If that sounds overly complicated, let me refresh your memories: Last May, Green Dot and Locke’s activist teachers formally submitted a petition asking for the low scoring high school to be converted to a charter school, with Green Dot the administrative entity. The petition was signed by approximately 60 percent of Locke’s 73 tenured teachers. The Green Dot supporters only needed 51 percent, to legally trigger a charter conversion. So, bingo, the charter was all set to be mandated…..but…..

…. the Empire Struck Back. Furious union and district officials met with teachers, then bullied, hectored and scared the bejeezus out of them. The upshot was, seventeen of the teachers rescinded their signatures, thus dynamiting the charter majority. (Whether all this rescinding is legal or not, is up for debate, but in any case, there was now a cloud over the petition. )

While they were at it, district officials also fired Locke’s principal, Dr. Frank Wells, for supporting the charter move, and demoted Bruce Smith, the senior teacher who was a leader in the charter fight. (He told me that, last week when he got his paycheck, instead of getting around $40 an hour he got $31.86, another questionably legal move on the part of district apparatchiks.)

Many disgruntled district watchers (myself included) then called on the newly reconstituted LAUSD board to prove their would-be-reformist mettle and thus step in and settle the issue. Whether or not they choose to be….as Mr. Bush might say….the deciders, is what is up for a vote today.

The drama was upped a few notches last Wednesday, when in a surprising turn of events, LAUSD Superintendent, Admiral Brewer, came over to Locke and, in a meeting with the faculty, publically supported the charter conversion. Since that time, six teachers have rescinded their rescinding—with another half-dozen still on vacation rumored to be planning to do the same.

So….this brings us to this morning’s meeting. Eight union people will speak against the charter conversion, with four speaking for it. (Weirdly, there were only eight speaker spots and the union simply gobbled them all up. It was only after the Green Dot group launched a strong protest that four additional speakers spots were opened up. Gee. How debate friendly!)

But here’s the thing: the stakes here are far greater than the fate of one inner city high school. The Santee teachers have told me they are watching Locke carefully to determine how they might fare with a similar movement. And if Locke and Santee both went Green Dot charter, what other high school dominos might then fall?

(It is telling that state senator Gloria Romero—who has recently let it be known that she plans to run for State Superintendent of Schools—made a point of meeting with some of Locke’s charter-supporting teachers earlier this month.)

If I was in town, I’d be down at Beaudry Street watching the board vote. But I’m not, thus I’ll rely on nefarious spies, education radicals and rogue informants.

So stay tuned.

(And, yes, that is Steve Barr in the photo.)

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The LA Weekly version of the story I first reported here about the battle going on at Santee Education Complex, came out on Thursday. Yet, even before the paper hit the news stand, there were new developments:

On Wednesday, popular Santee AP teachers, Anthony Marenco and Alexandra Avilla held a press conference to announce that they had resigned—essentially because of principal Vince Carbino, whom they said created an extremely hostile work environment. The same day, LAUSD officials issued their own statement about the whole mess, saying they were bringing in the city’s human relations commission to mediate the Carbino/Santee issue. The district made the unusual move at the urging of City Council member, Jan Perry, who has been a strong supporter of the beleaguered principal.

These two events finally got the LA Times to take notice of the story.

The district’s announcement was a move that many Santee faculty viewed with cynicism. “In other words, nothing’s going to happen,” said one teacher.

In response, a group of Santee faculty members issued their own press release Thursday stating that, if the district doesn’t make a very strong move regarding Carbino, they’ll look to converting Santee into a charter school.

The discussions, says the release, “are centered not on the removal and replacement of our ineffective Principal Carbino…..but in the removal and replacement of our ineffective Los Angeles Unified School District.”

Meanwhile, various teachers and school administrators who have worked with Mr. Carbino at this three previous school assignments, have been contacting me with their own unhappy Carbino experiences.

Most are quick to say that that principal Carbino is not without talents. But, the consistent message is that his liabilities greatly outweigh his advantages.

According to Jordan Henry, a Santee English teacher who called me today (as I was speeding across Montana), right now at Santee the faculty, sentiment against the principal is running high. When UTLA queried them about a week ago, 79 percent said they disapproved of the way Mr. Carbino was doing his job. “I think you can safely say that number is growing,” he said.

UPDATE: The district has reversed course and, late Friday afternoon, following a “hurried investigation,” has reassigned Carbino pending the outcome of mediation. Here’s the LA Times take on the district’s latest move.

NOTE: The LA Times also has a good story on the personal hardships created by LAUSD’s massive payroll screw-ups, which have been going on since early February after the new computerized system was put in. I’ve been hearing absolute horror stories on this issue myself (including word that one teacher is reduced to living out of his car). But over all, this is one more tale of the Gang…er…school district… that Couldn’t Shoot Straight. Good grief.

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As I wrote yesterday, last week, parents and students demonstrated at Santee Education Complex after principal Vincent Carbino made weird and unannounced mid-semester changes in the subject matter of more than 30 classes, wreaking havoc with students’ schedules, and in some case, disrupting graduation and college plans. This week it appears that matters on campus are continuing to escalate.

For instance, at a campus meeting on Monday afternoon Santee students read a letter requesting for the resignation of principal Vince Carbino.

Yet, while the Santee’s students and their parents continue to be upset, the school’s teachers are, if anything, are far, far angrier. And the faculty anger appears to be directed equally at Carbino and at LAUSD administrators whom they feel have turned a deaf ear to their escalating alarm regarding the school’s leadership.

On Monday, after the students made their presentation, a group of faculty members stayed to talk about some of their grievances against a principal whom they say gets his way through a combination of threats, bullying, withering public criticism of anyone who disagrees, and various forms of “harassment. “For instance, if he doesn’t like you, he’ll order regular police searches of your classroom,” says Jose Lara, a social studies instructor.

“So what’s happened is all the good teachers are leaving,” says Brent Boultinghouse, a bearded, genial-faced culinary arts teacher, who is also the school’s union rep. “Santee is hemorrhaging teachers. All because of Carbino.”

Jose Lara, explains that the district went so far as to send two full time “coaches” to the school to work with the principal. “But he won’t listen to them,” he says. “He won’t listen to anybody.”

The school’s English Department Chair, Gina Perry, agrees and then confides in a low voice that she’s reinstating some of the AP classes whether the principal likes it or not. “Sometimes you just do what you got to do,” she says. “It’s what the kids need.”

*****

Both Santee teachers and UTLA leadership contend that the reason that principal Carbino canceled or changed the various classes, including the 12 AP classes, was in reaction to a landmark court settlement called Williams v. the State of California. The 2000 case was a class action suit that contended that kids in the state’s poorest were being denied the right to an equal education because they didn’t have the same access to books, adequately trained teachers, and safe and clean school facilities, as those students in affluent areas.

In settling the lawsuit, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger agreed to pour $1 billion into schools with test scores in the bottom 30 percent — most of them schools whose students overwhelmingly live in poverty.

The settlement also created a system of annual checks, sending education officials into classrooms each fall to see if every student has a book and is learning in a safe school building. Those checks — and the money to buy textbooks and make repairs — have led to tangible improvements in low-performing schools, says the study commissioned by lawyers who filed the Williams suit.

Right before the change, say teachers, Santee was due for its annual Williams inspection.

“There’s no reason he shouldn’t have been able to get the textbooks,” says Dori Miles, the UTLA rep for LAUSD Local District, who met with Santee faculty members again on Monday. “But even if there was a problem, if he had just talked to the teachers and the parents about the issue, some kind of creative accommodation could have been made. That’s what good administrators do.”

Instead Carbino made the course changes unilaterally, says Miles, then left teachers and students to scramble to deal with the results. This meant that in many cases students found themselves suddenly stuck in courses that they’d already taken and passed, meaning that they would be a course short at graduation.

It also meant that teachers who say they’d spent weeks “preparing course outlines, lesson plans, and instructional goals” (as one teacher said in an unhappy letter), were expected to teach a course for which they had made no preparation.

In the case of the AP instructors who, for each course, had been required to get a detailed syllabus approved by the state’s college board in order to qualify for AP status, the change was particularly infuriating.

Yet even months before the course changes, in response to a year’s worth of escalating complaints, the union asked Santee faculty members to fill out a survey indicating if they approved or disapproved of the way Carbino was doing his job as principal. The results indicated that 9.5 % approved, 17.5 % were unsure, 73 % disapproved.

On August 9, the union sent an 8-page letter with nearly 50 pages of back-up material, to LAUSD’s local district superintendent, Carmen Schroeder, about “a matter of great urgency.” The letter talked about “verbally abusing students and staff” and “creating an education environment “characterized by hostility, fear and intimidation.” Mr. Carbino’s poor administrative judgment was “shattering” teacher morale, and “denying students access to a free and adequate” public education, ” said the letter.

It concluded: “…We urge you to immediately appoint a new complex wide principal.” The letter is signed by UTLA President A.J. Duffy.

Thus far, there has been no official response.

“Except Carmen Schroeder came to the school and asked me if I could get the students and the parents to stop their demonstrations,” says Boultinghouse. “I told her ‘no.’ I couldn’t.”
****************

The teachers say that if the union can’t push the district into taking firm action to remove the principal, the faculty is likely to take matters into their own hands.

“We’re looking at the idea of turning this school into a charter,” says Boultinghouse.

Lara nods. “Frankly, we’ve had conversations with Steve Barr and Green Dot.”

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Barr and baby Zofia during the 2005-06 Jefferson High takeover bid

Green Dot’s national profile just got another couple of bumps upward in the last 24 hours: One is in the form of a nicely reported Forbes piece by Peter Beller on the charter school group’s founder, Steve Barr.

The second is in the form of an intriguing event in the city of Chicago that may have Much Larger Implications for LAUSD’s relationship to Green Dot, although no one is yet talking about it openly.

I’ll get to Chicago in a minute. First Forbes.

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Graduate and family from Green Dot’s Animo Inglewood High School, where 80 percent of the students actually got diplomas, as opposed to Locke High School’s approximately 44 percent graduation rate.
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The New York Times, which has been doing more than the usual amount of LA coverage this month, knows a good story when it sees one….thus has an article in this morning’s paper analyzing the Greater Meaning meaning of the proposed takeover of Locke High School by charter school powerhouse, Steve Barr of Green Dot.

Here are some of the highlights.

Steve Barr, a major organizer of charter schools, has been waging what often seems like a guerrilla war for control of this city’s chronically failing high schools.

[snip]

In the process, Mr. Barr has fomented a teachers revolt against the Los Angeles Unified School District. He has driven a wedge through the city’s teachers union by welcoming organized labor — in contrast to other charter operators — and signing a contract with an upstart union. And he has mobilized thousands of black and Hispanic parents to demand better schools.

Educators and policy makers from Sacramento to Washington are watching closely because many believe Green Dot’s audacious tactics have the potential to strengthen and expand the charter school movement nationwide.

[snip]

Andrew J. Rotherham, who worked in the Clinton White House and is co-director of Education Sector, a research group in Washington, said, “Green Dot is mobilizing parents in poor neighborhoods and offering an alternative for frustrated teachers, and that’s scrambling the cozy power arrangements between the school district and the union to a degree not seen anywhere else.”

[snip]

[Ted Mitchell, head of the NewSchools Venture Fund] said that only Green Dot was mounting such an aggressive challenge to the local school board. “Many charter organizations try to induce different behavior by providing examples of good new schools,” he said. “But only Green Dot is trying to provoke a school district to behave in radically different ways.”

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