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Secrets of possible future success at Green Dot's new miracle school
Grannan read the widely-discussed New Yorker article with a careful, very school-savvy eye and she makes important points. For starters, how about that pepper spray? For more about the Green Dot entanglements, as well as the entanglements of the article author, go here.
by Caroline Grannan
The edublogs are buzzing about the May 10 New Yorker profile of Green Dot Schools and their in-your-face founder, Steve Barr (“The Instigator” by Douglas McGray).
The Green Dot charter school chain has grown in L.A. Unified and nearby districts to around 11 school sites – it’s a bit hard to count because there are multiple small schools in some sites. Green Dot has won attention for working with unions instead of around and against them, though it doesn’t offer seniority rights or serious job protection, so many union activists would view that as a bit hollow.
My husband, a veteran journalist, has always regarded my education activism with amused detachment and sometimes semi-joshingly plays devil's advocate with me. But unbidden, he read the Green Dot article and remarked, "Jeez, another bogus miracle story!" (I guess he has been paying attention to my kvetching over the years after all.)
To be fair, this article isn't gushing. I won't go into the parts about the personality cult of Steve Barr, similar to the personality cult of KIPP founders Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg. The larger-than-life legend-in-his-own-time stuff about Barr (who named his chocolate Labrador Jerry Brown, giving the "resistance" bloggers who keep tabs on the interconnections among the charter-school titans and their political and philanthropic supporters a new line to draw on their charts) takes up much of the article.
Summary: The existing Green Dot schools are highly regarded. They also benefit from the same huge advantage as other charters -- every student in them had someone in his/her life who cared enough about the kid's education to seek out a school and apply for it. So that rules out the entire "Incarcerated class" and the other kids who are at the highest risk and have the least support.
As always, the question is: What if the traditional public school down the street also admitted only those students who, as LAUSD superintendent Ramon Cortines says, are "there because they have an advocate” – also known as the “deserving poor"?
The exception: The article focuses most on Locke High School, a badly troubled large school near Watts that Green Dot took over and reopened this school year (fall '08). In some special arrangement, Green Dot supposedly committed to enrolling the same students as the bad old Locke, without the usual winnowing and sorting for those who "have an advocate."
There are no test results or other outcomes yet, since Green Dot has run the school only since last fall ('08). The reporter focused on one girl who was reasonably enthusiastic about school -- and who (the reporter acknowledges) missed "several days" of school to "take care of family business" during the time the reporter was researching the article. Her endorsement rings a bit muted.
Green Dot did a lot of physical renovation and re-landscaping -- well, yeah, because they have a whole lot of money and don't have to spread it around a district of several hundred schools and hundreds of thousands of kids.
I would question some of the reporter's depictions of before and after.
For example: he describes in the "before" scenario "layer upon layer of bureaucracy. Locke had two full-time employees who painted over graffiti.” [Note from Caroline: This doesn't clarify whether that was ALL they did, though it is clearly intended to imply that -- slippery wording or not? Are maintenance staff layers of bureaucracy? How does that compare to Locke II's maintenance staffing?]
“Bathroom monitors were contractually limited to bathroom-related supervision. [Note from Caroline: We don't know whether this was to ensure that the bathrooms were covered steadily or to protect the workers from being sent out on hardcore riot-squad duty. Neither seems outrageous. In a large rough school, bathrooms are notoriously dangerous as well as disgusting and subject to especially destructive vandalism -- so it’s open to debate whether that “layer of bureaucracy” qualifies as wasteful or frivolous. It’s not uncommon for children’s advocates to campaign for safe, clean, well-maintained school restrooms, so to those activists, this would be a valuable expenditure.]
“Locke often came in well under budget, yet students still shared textbooks, because the surplus was locked up in some unnecessary line item. [Note from Caroline: If I were editing this story, I would ask the writer to back up the claim that this school “came in well under budget,” which is basically unheard-of in California public schools. And the wording "locked up in some unnecessary line item" describes categorical funding – money designated only for particular purposes – which is the way the state of California allocates a lot of our education funding. The way to compensate for that, short of making the needed reforms to the funding system, is to have more money, as lucky Green Dot does.]
Post-takeover, the article reports: "Green Dot [has] blanketed the school with guards from a private security firm, club-bouncer burly, carrying handguns and pepper spray. ... Guards have occasionally displayed a heavy hand. Twice this year, they pepper-sprayed students..."
I wonder what public commotion would ensue if private security guards hired by a public school repeatedly pepper-sprayed white middle-class students – but oh well, these are only poor minorities. The outcry would probably be considerable if the guards were vendors for LAUSD, too, but charter-school Teflon protects Green Dot.
And I’ll bet my firstborn that if Green Dot owns up to two pepper-spraying incidents, there have been far more. Gosh, how idyllic. And critics call KIPP the "Kids in Prison Program" -- Green Dot is mounting a challenge for that title. I know; the supporters’ view is: whatever works. Don’t tase me, bro!
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This snippet also caught my eye: [Barr] "started a citywide group called the Los Angeles Parents Union, an activist alternative to the Parent-Teacher Association, in the hope of mobilizing foot soldiers for Green Dot's escalating war against the district. He even put a school-board member on his payroll – ‘a mole,’ Barr said -- to report back on closed meetings."
"Escalating war against the district." Gee, that’s good for our kids and schools. And is it actually legal to pay a school board member to reveal information about closed sessions? Whatever works.
If this experiment succeeds, great, and we’ll all learn a lot. Perhaps this will be the one that will transform urban public education. Will it show us that what all our schools need is to be blanketed with burly private security guards wielding handguns and pepper spray? And wage escalating wars against our school districts? What a cheering scenario. Whatever works.
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Follow me on Twitter@CarolineSF
— Caroline Grannan
San Francisco Examiner
2009-05-09
http://www.examiner.com/x-356-SF-Education-Examiner~y2009m5d9-Secrets-of-possible-future-success-at-Green-Dots-new-miracle-school
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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