Earlier this week the Los Angeles Unified School District announced an interesting partnership with a national education reform organization called Future is Now Schools—or FIN—to create a group of “teacher-driven” academies within the LA school district.
The plan is for these new “hybrid learning” academies to be located in Silverlake, the Fairfax area and Venice, although no sites have, as yet, been firmly established. They are scheduled to open in time for the 2013-14 school year.
“I’m excited about the potential of this partnership to reinvigorate innovation in our school system,” Superintendent John Deasy said in a district-released statement. “We have the opportunity to make LAUSD a leader in collaborative education reform.”
While LAUSD’s partner— FIN—may not be a name familiar to most Los Angeles education watchers, its founder and board chair, Steve Barr, is very well known in LA as the founder of the influential Green Dot charter schools, which now runs 18 schools in the LA area.
THE BACK STORY
The emergence of Green Dot, which Barr began in 2000, is viewed by many as being greatly influential in stimulating—and at times forcing—reform in the Los Angeles public school landscape during a period when LAUSD’s disastrously failing inner city middle and high schools often made national news.
Back then, Barr pushed reform from outside the LAUSD tent, even going so far to engineer what the district viewed as a hostile takeover of Alain Leroy Locke High School by Green Dot in 2008. This was at a time when Watt’s-located Locke—with its 28 percent graduation rate and 90 percent of its students performing below basic or far below basic on standardized tests—was emblematic of the worst of the LAUSD’s institutional failures.
Now, four years later, a UCLA study showed the Locke schools to be “significantly outperforming their counterparts on a number of state test score measures, as well as in remaining in high school over time, and in taking and passing challenging courses.”
Barr left Green Dot in 2009, and formed the national organization Green Dot America, which morphed into FIN. Thus far, FIN is in collaboration on schools in both New York City and New Orleans, in New York especially, working closely with the teachers’ union.
COMING INSIDE THE TENT
So what brought Barr’s focus back to LA, and drew him into a partnership with the district that had, in the past, often treated him as an antagonist?
When I spoke to Barr after the announcement, he told me that one of the factors was his warm relationship with district Superintendent John Deasy, whom he said, he views as one of the most innovation-friendly administrators he’s ever met.
But, most important to his decision, Barr said, was the fact that his daughter, Zofi age 6, was already at school age, with his son Jack, 4, rapidly zooming that direction.
“I’m committed to sending them to public school, and to an LAUSD public school,” he said. “Los Angeles should have the best public school system in America. That’s what I want for my kids. I want my kids to go through LAUSD from kindergarten through the 12th grade”
But right now LAUSD is far from the greatest. And, given the state’s economic woes, if it is to just stay even, it needs additional tax revenue.
So what to do?
“Here’s the thing,” Barr said, “If you want to change your school district the fastest, you ‘ve got to be able to knit some coalitions together, and you’ve got to work with the [teachers’] unions.”
When Barr began Green Dot, he discovered that UTLA—LA’s often obstructive teacher’s union—had little interest in speaking with him, much less partnering with with him. In fact, UTLA’s then president A.J. Duffy, lost few opportunities to make clear his disdain of Barr and his charter ideas.
So Barr says he began talking to the union members themselves and, over time, developed relationships with some of UTLA’s more progressive factions, the members of which wanted more innovative approaches to education and helped to vote in UTLA’s current president, Warren Fletcher.
According to Barr and Deasy, the LAUSD-FIN partnership schools will be teacher-centric with teachers and administrators making most of the significant organizational and curriculum decisions, while the district oversees the operation of the physical plant.
TARGETING THE LAUSD EX-PATS
Most of Green Dot’s original charters were in traditionally underserved, lower income neighborhoods in South LA, East LA, Watts and Inglewood, where many of the existing schools were underperforming in the extreme.
With his new district partnership, Barr wants to focus on such areas Venice, Fairfax, and his own community of Silverlake—all three of them neighborhoods that have high functioning elementary schools but middle and high schools that could use improvement. His idea is to woo middle class families who’ve fled to private schools, to come back to the district. “You’ve got to get a lot of middle class voters to have skin in the game if you want to flip this district,” he says.
Otherwise the needed tax hikes are unlikely to pass. And you’re going to have more people fleeing to charters, he added.
WHAT ABOUT THE MONEY?
Okay, I say to Barr, but luring back large numbers of middle class parents is the long game. What about now? How does he feel about leaping back into the world of LA schools during this period of ghastly fiscal scarcity in which the district is shutting down much of adult ed and firing nurses?
Barr laughed. “You can get overwhelmed by it or look at it as an opportunity. For example, there’s an opportunity to capitalize on the new technology in a way that will individualize education for students who are at different levels,+ and yet be less labor intensive for teachers, he says.
Barr has already recruited 8 teachers as his core advisors, he says. “We’re talking about an idea that involves master teachers who get paid a lot more, recruiting and training the best and the brightest out of [teaching] programs like those at UCLA.
EDUCATION AND POLITICS
When Barr and Deasy made their partnership announcement, not absolutely everyone was thrilled.
In a post on her blog, Former U.S. Education Secretary Diane Ravitch declared it “puzzling” that “the district is ceding control” of some of its schools to Barr.
“To my knowledge, he is not an educator,” she wrote snippily.
“No, I’m not,” said Barr when I mentioned Ravitch’s post. “I hire educators.” He pauses. “What I am is someone who understands politics.
“This the thing that people don’t get. Good teachers know how to educate kids. That isn’t the issue. What we face here aren’t educational problems, they’re political problems.” Barr pauses one more time. “And that’s where I come in.”
Photo by WitnessLA