Urban education reform fights are often explicitly cast in labor vs. anti-labor terms. And there's often truth in that. But Barr complicates this way of thinking. He's a Democrat and an organizer. His schools are unionized. When he needed the signature of unionized teachers to take over Locke High School, he went and got them. He's sincerely trying to partner with national unions like the AFT to expand his movement beyond L.A. There are bona fide anti-labor types within the public school choice movement, but Steve Barr isn't one of them.
Instead, what McGray very clearly describes is a fight against a school district that was willing to let a massively dysfunctional high school sit and fester for years on end. A district that stood side-by-side with the city teachers union in fighting to retain the right to continue that neglect. The article doesn't paint Barr as a miracle worker, or Green Dot as a source of fantastic new pedagogy and world-beating teaching. Rather, they've taken a building that wasn't actually functioning as a school in any true meaning of the word, and installed what all schools need: discipline, expectations that students will work, teachers who believe they can succeed. Charter schools were originally sold as a source of innovation. But as it turns out, many of the most successful charters have been a source of something even more important: competence.
Now U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is talking to Barr about expanding the Green Dot approach nationally, to target the bottom one percent of schools, the Locke's of America, schools where failure is least ambiguous and ongoing neglect hardest to justify. Barr wants to work with AFT President Randi Weingarten to get this done. It'll be fascinating to see if Barr's initial skirmishes in L.A. grow into something more.
4 comments:
good post, kevin --
the huffington post has my reactions to the piece, including some key things that the new yorker got wrong.
in case anyone's interested:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alexander-russo/a-new-kind-of-school-the_b_198953.html
I have a different perspective:
http://tinyurl.com/ooxrba
…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 at a public school repeatedly pepper-sprayed white middle-class students – but oh well, these are only poor minorities. And the outcry would probably be considerable if Unified hired the security guards too, but charter-school Teflong 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 certainly 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 carrying handguns and pepper spray? And wage escalating wars against our school districts? What a cheering scenario. Whatever works.
LA Unified has an in-house force of armed guards to patrol its schools. They regularly use pepper spray and clubs in response to campus violence, including riots at Locke (pre-Green Dot), Jefferson, Crenshaw, Manual Arts and other district-run schools.
I think it's safer for students to attend a school where private guards who perform badly can be fired (or the firm lose the contract) as opposed to a school where union-protected guards are difficult and expensive to fire if they're incompetent or abusive.
The New Yorker article is worth reading in its entirety for what it exposes about Green Dot. What I found astounding was the extent to which the article seemed to confer folk hero status on Steve Barr without even a hint about anything related to strategies for improving teaching and learning. Evidently, the Green Dot model isn't about that. The model as described in the article is about wresting control of the public schools from the bureaucracy, including, in the case of LA, the union. It is about building a political movement among parents and teachers to evict the current managers of schools, using the charter structure as the mechanism. Steve Barr himself and the people he brings in seem to have no particular expertise in education or anything related to running schools or teaching kids. Compared to a dysfunctional system, I suppose his charismatic approach has a certain attraction. He evidently gets the stamp of approval of the Arne Duncan Administration and many others. But can this possibly have become the substance of reform? Is this all the current "reformers" have to offer. I would like to think that our standard for strategies for reform and improving teaching and learning could aim a bit higher. The few School districts that have successfully nurtured the craft of teaching all across this nation show what it looks like to systematically create the deep teacher knowledge and skill sets that good education requires. The Green Dot approach that the New Yorker article descirbes as relying on green teachers straight out of college who are largely left on their own just doesn't cut it. If Green Dot schools are instilling a deep understanding of skillful teaching, it was not at all evident from the New Yorker article.
-- Mark
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