the instigator

8/8/2019 The Instigator

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A crusader’s plan to remake failing schools.

Steve Barr stood in the breezeway atAlain Leroy Locke High School,

at the edge of the Watts neighborhoodof Los Angeles, on a February morning.He’s more than six feet tall, with white-gray hair that’s perpetually unkempt, andthe bulk of an ex-jock. Beside him wasRamon Cortines—neat, in a trim suit—the Los Angeles Unified School District’snew superintendent. Cortines had to be

thinking about last May, when, as a se-nior deputy superintendent, he had vis-ited under very diff erent circumstances.

That was when a tangle between two rivalcliques near an outdoor vending machineturned into a fight that spread to every corner of the schoolyard. Police sentmore than a dozen squad cars and surgedacross the campus in riot gear, as teachersgrabbed kids on the margins and whiskedthem into locked classrooms.

The school’s test scores had been

among the worst in the state. In recent years, seventy-five per cent of incomingfreshmen had dropped out. Only aboutthree per cent graduated with enoughcredits to apply to a California state university. Two years ago, Barr had askedL.A.U.S.D. to give his charter-school-management organization, Green DotPublic Schools, control of Locke, andlet him help the district turn it around. When the district refused, Green Dotbecame the first charter group in the

country to seize a high school in a hostiletakeover. (“He’s a revolutionary,” NelsonSmith, the president and C.E.O. of theNational Alliance for Public CharterSchools, said.) Locke reopened in Sep-tember, four months after the riot, as ahalf-dozen Green Dot schools.

“Last year, there was graffiti every- where,” Barr said. “You’d see kids every- where—they’d be out here gambling. You’d smell weed.” He recalled hearingmovies playing in classroom after class-room: “People called it ghetto cineplex.”Barr and Cortines walked to the quad, where the riot had started. The cracked

pavement had been replaced by a lawnof thick green grass, lined with newly planted olive trees.

“It’s night and day,” Cortines said.In the past decade, Barr has opened

seventeen charter high schools—small,locally managed institutions that aimfor a high degree of teacher autonomy and parent involvement—in some of thepoorest neighborhoods in Los Angeles,

as well as one in the Bronx. His charter-school group is now California’s larg-est, by enrollment, and one of its mostsuccessful. Green Dot schools take kids who, in most cases, test far below gradelevel and send nearly eighty per cent of them to college. (Only forty-seven percent of L.A.U.S.D. students graduate with a high-school diploma.) As of 2006,Green Dot’s standardized-test scores were almost twenty per cent higher thanL.A. Unified’s average, and, adjusting for

student demographics, the state Depart-ment of Education grades their perfor-mance a nine on a scale of one to ten;L.A.U.S.D. schools rate only a five.

Barr himself has a colorful reputation.He drives a decommissioned police car,a Crown Victoria with flood lights, whichhe bought from a friend, the former Foxexecutive who launched the network’s re-ality show “Cops.” (“It’s faster than any-thing on the road,” he told me, and whenhe wants to change lanes “people move

out of the way.”) He met his wife, anAlaskan radio reporter twenty years his junior, at a Burning Man festival seven years ago, and married her in Las Vegasthree weeks later. And this is how hetalks about working with what is argu-ably the country’s most troubled big-city school system: “You ever see that movie‘Man on Fire,’ with Denzel Washing-ton? There’s a scene in the movie wherethe police chief of Mexico City gets kid-napped by Denzel Washington. He wakes up, he’s on the hood of his carunder the underpass, in his boxers, hishands tied. Denzel Washington starts



Dot. If the district refused both options,Barr would open his new schools andbegin stealing thousands of students, andthe millions of dollars in funding thatfollow them. “If I take ten Locke HighSchools, they can’t survive,” he said.

But, just weeks after Cortines’s visit toLocke, Barr got a call from the new Sec-

retary of Education, Arne Duncan. He

flew to Washington, D.C., at the end of March, for what he expected to be a social

visit. At the meeting, Duncan revealedthat he was interested in committing sev-eral billion dollars of the education stimu-lus package to a Locke-style takeover andtransformation of the lowest-performingone per cent of schools across the country,at least four thousand of them, in the next

Steve Barr used bare-knuckle political tactics to take over a Los Angeles school.

well-funded school, where the parentsare involved, where accountability is puton that staff , is not the right way to go,”he said. “We get along really well, but Iget fucking impatient.”

Cortines didn’t know that Barr was al-ready planning his next assault on the dis-trict, one he described to me as “Arma-

geddon.” He planned to target five to ten

of the largest, worst-performing schoolsin Los Angeles, and then submit a hun-dred charters for new schools to be clus-tered around them. Then he would givethe district a choice: it could either dis-solve most of the central bureaucracy, andturn over hiring, firing, and spending de-cisions to neighborhood schools, or sur-render leadership of the schools to Green

asking him questions, he’s not getting theanswers he wants, so he walks away fromhim, and leaves a bomb stuck up his ass.”Barr laughed. “I don’t want to blow upL.A.U.S.D.’s ass. But what will it taketo get this system to serve who they needto serve? It’s going to take that kind of aggressiveness.”

Green Dot’s ascent stems mostly fromBarr’s skill as an instigator and an orga-nizer. Outrageous rhetoric is a big part of that, and it’s not uncalculated. “It takes acertain amount of panache to call the headof the union a pig fucker,” Ted Mitchell,the president of the California State Boardof 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 withmurder.” But, Mitchell points out, “he’s a

public curmudgeon and a private negoti-ator.” And he has built Green Dot to be apolitical force unlike anything else in the

world of education. For instance, Barrruns the only large charter organizationin the country that has embraced union-ized teachers and a collectively bargainedcontract—an unnecessary hassle, if hisaim was to run a few schools, but a sourceof leverage for Green Dot’s main pur-pose, which is to push for citywidechange. “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 andlaughing and posturing and flirting forevery 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 hadaccomplished in a matter of months.

Another fight between Barr andL.A.U.S.D. seemed inevitable, though.After Cortines left, Barr said, “Ray and Ihave had conversations about FremontHigh School,” another large troubledschool, in South Los Angeles. But Cor-tines, he knew, was hesitant. “I’ve beenclear that we can talk,” Cortines told melater. “I can’t necessarily deliver. I stillthink we have to look at the evidencefrom Locke.” Data like test scores, grad-uation rates, and student retention won’tbe available until later this year.

Barr doesn’t want to hear it. “Nobody can tell me that a small, autonomous, M

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several years. The Department of Educa-tion would favor districts that agreed topartner with an outside group, like GreenDot. “You seem to have cracked the code,”Duncan told Barr.

Duncan was interested in the factthat Barr was targeting high schools,not elementary or middle schools. “Thetoughest work in urban education today

is what you do with large failing highschools,” Duncan told me. These schoolsget less study and less attention fromcharter groups and education reformers,most of whom feel that ninth grade istoo late to begin saving kids. “Teach forAmerica, NewSchools Venture Fund,the Broad Foundation—all these folksare doing extraordinary work in publiceducation,” Duncan said. “Nobody na-tional is turning around large failinghigh schools.”

When Barr got back to Los Angeles,he told me, “We’re being asked, ‘Could you guys do five schools in L.A. next year? Could you expand beyond L.A.?’If you’d asked a month ago, ‘What aboutGreen Dot America?,’ I would have said,‘No way.’ But if this President wants toget after it I’m going to reconsider.”

Barr opened his first school in Au-gust of 2000, at the edge of Len-

nox, a poor, mostly Spanish-speakingcommunity near Los Angeles Interna-tional Airport, under a landing path. The local high school, Hawthorne, was

a few miles away. “Where the BeachBoys went,” Barr said. “Now it’s a drop-out factory.”

He announced plans for the school ata middle-school gymnasium crowded with families. “I told the parents, ‘When you come to this school, seven thousanddollars follows you’ ”—the rough sumthat California paid a charter school to

educate a child. “ ‘That’s your money. I will treat that like tuition.’ ” He promisedthem a school that was safe, local, and ac-countable. He said he’d need their help.And he gave everyone his home phonenumber and said that they could call himanytime. By the end of the night, he hada hundred and forty kids committed tohis ninth-grade class. Suddenly, he said,“I started shaking.”

“I’m standing in front of these parents, who have no money—all they have is

their kids,” he recalled. “And they’re trust-ing me. I didn’t have a facility yet, and Ididn’t have a staff . It was February, andschool was opening in August. I walkedout to the parking lot and threw up.”

Opening a school was an unlikely move for Barr. He had done fund-raising for California politicians, helpedorganize the Olympic-torch relay be-fore the 1984 Summer Games, andspent three years as an on-air televi-sion reporter. He co-founded Rock theVote, and worked on Bill Clinton’s1992 Presidential campaign. But he’dnever thought much about education.

In fact, he’d been a mediocre student.Barr was born in 1959, just south of

San Francisco, and lived with his motherin Monterey, near the military base, where she worked as a dental assistantand a cocktail waitress. When he wassix, he and his younger brother spent a year in foster care. Later, they made their

home in a trailer in Missouri, beforemoving back to California.In school, Barr was a good athlete,

and popular. Every teacher knew hisname. His brother, Mike, was quiet andoverweight. Mike tried playing in theband for a while. (“Why do you givethe chubby kid a tuba?” Barr asked,sighing. “Do you know how hilarious itis seeing a chubby kid try to get on thebus with a tuba?”) But soon Mike gotlost in their large high school. Steve

graduated, and went on to the Univer -sity of California at Santa Barbara. Mikedropped out, and never really settled intoan adult life. Eventually, he was in a mo-torcycle accident. After a series of surger-ies, he lost his leg. He won a settlement,but that attracted the wrong friends.“You take a poor kid who has problemsand give him a lot of money . . .” Barrsaid. When Barr was thirty-two, Mikedied of a drug overdose. His motherdied shortly afterward, and Barr began

to drift.He discovered charter schools by ac-

cident. When President Clinton wentto San Carlos to visit California’s firstcharter school, Barr tagged along, andencountered the school’s founder, DonShalvey, and a Silicon Valley business-man, Reed Hastings, who had justfounded Netflix. Shalvey and Hastings were about to draw up a ballot initiativethat would increase the number of char-ter schools in California. Barr decided

to help. “He came out of nowhere,”Hastings said. And he brought a very diff erent approach. He persuaded them,for instance, to try to make peace withthe California Teachers Association.“He helped us realize we were perhapsoverly simplistic in demonizing theunion as the enemy,” Hastings said. “Itturned out C.T.A. was open to a stron-ger charter law.”

As Barr worked on the campaign, hestarted to think about his own years inschool, and his brother’s. High school, hedecided, was the point where their livesdiverged. When the charter-school mea-

“I hu ff ed and I pu ff ed and I blew their house down,and now my head’s hot and I ache all over.”



sure passed, he broke up with his girl-friend, moved out of their apartment,gave up his convertible, and rented a de-crepit place in Venice, sight unseen. Hemoved in on Christmas morning, to aroom strewn with needles, vomit, andfeces. “I’m thirty-nine, I’m alone,” hesaid. “Merry fucking Christmas.” He tied

his chocolate Lab, Jerry Brown, in thecorner, put on the Harry Belafonte albumhis mother used to play every Saturday morning, when they did chores together,and scrubbed the apartment.

A year and a half later, he openedAnimo Leadership Charter High School,near Lennox. (He said that in Spanishanimo can mean “courage” or “valor,” buthe prefers a Mexican surfing buddy’stranslation: “Get off your ass.”) He hiredfive of his seven teachers straight out of

college and rented classrooms at a nightschool. When one of the teachers quit inthe first couple of weeks, he replaced her

with his office manager. Barr workedmostly without pay for the next few years,spending the last of his savings and hisbrother’s settlement, and doing such dam-age to his finances that Costco revoked hismembership. He pitched in a lot himself.“Maybe the most fun I had was going totest-drive school buses,” he said.

And he starting a surfing club. “There

were a handful of kids at the school who were really fricking cool but weren’t beingreached somehow,” he said. “There was akid named Ricky. He was smart, charis-matic. All the girls loved this guy. There

was another girl named Stephanie, who Ithink had a crush on Ricky.” They agreedto find twenty-five kids who would show up before school, at 6 A.M.

“We were driving to the South Bay,Manhattan Beach. It was real quiet,”Barr recalled. “Halfway out there, one of

the kids said, ‘Mr. Barr, do you have toknow how to swim to surf ?’ ” Half thekids couldn’t. Barr put his head in hishands and laughed.

“The Manhattan Beach school sys-tem, they actually have surfing in gymclass, so you have all these blond-haired,blue-eyed kids in the water,” Barr contin-ued. “And here come these kids fromLennox. The Lennox surf team.” Hemimicked a slow, tough walk. “Theirgear’s a little off , you know, they’re all La-tino, and a couple of black kids. I re-member them getting triple takes.”

At the end of its first chaotic year,

Barr’s school beat Hawthorne HighSchool in every measurable outcome.“When the scores come out, I have to callShalvey”—Barr’s charter-school mentor—“and ask him, ‘Are they good?’ ” Barr said.“ ’Cause I don’t fucking know. I don’tknow how to read test scores.” The nightschool eventually moved, and Animo

Leadership took over the entire campus.Last year, U.S. News & World Report ranked it among the top hundred publichigh schools in the country.

Apair of skinny Latino boys withshoulder-length hair cruised down

Locke’s breezeway on their skateboards.Zeus Cubias, an assistant principal,turned and glared. It was a few minutesafter the last bell, and the two kids hadswapped their uniform polos for black

band T-shirts.“What did I tell you? Don’t act thefool,” Cubias said sternly, as the boyspicked up their skateboards. He turned tothe taller boy. “Especially when you’re

wearing a Guns N’ Roses shirt. Don’t em-barrass the shirt.” The boy laughed. “Nexttime, I’m taking boards,” Cubias said.

Cubias is compact and athletic, withfloppy hair, a tidy beard, and three ear-rings. “I’d be doing the same thing whenI was a kid,” he admitted. He grew up just

a few blocks down the street, and gradu-ated from Locke, class of ’92. He showedme his freshman yearbook. “Here’s the

Jheri Curl mullet,” he said, flippingthrough the faces. “Ghetto business inthe front, ghetto party in the back. Andhere’s me, sporting my own mullet.”

The high school opened in 1967, two years after the Watts riots. Named forAlain Leroy Locke, the country’s firstAfrican-American Rhodes Scholar, it

was set on a twenty-six-acre plot near the

edge of the neighborhood, and was meantto be a symbol of rebirth. But by the timeCubias was a freshman, jobs and middle-class families had disappeared; the school,like the neighborhood, became infamous.Security guards with metal-detecting

wands would interrupt class to spot-check boys.

As a freshman, Cubias landed in reme-dial and English as a Second Languageclasses. “I had a Spanish name,” he said.Most Latinos in Watts were recent immi-grants, and there were so many kids, andso few counsellors, that it was hard to keepeveryone straight. Locke had grown huge.

Los Angeles went more than thirty years without building a new high school, evenas the city’s population swelled; schoolslike Locke, meant for about fifteen hun-dred kids, doubled their enrollment, pack-ing classrooms and erecting cheap, prefab-ricated units in their parking lots. Cubiasditched class a lot and got bad grades.

But a substitute covering his English classthought he seemed out of place and rec-ommended him for an honors class. Whenhe showed up the first day, he recalled, hemet a girl with black hair and ojos tapa-tíos—almond-shaped eyes—who carrieda novel wherever she went. He was smit-ten. “I had heard about kids who readbooks, but they were, like, mythical,”Cubias said, laughing. He asked a coun-sellor to give him the same class scheduleas the girl, and in that instant he passed

from one world to another. She took allhonors classes, on her way to graduating as valedictorian.

“These poor high schools, you havean Advanced Placement track, and theteachers only believe in triage, so they putthe kids who have a chance in that track,”Barr explained. “It’s built on the back of the other three tracks.”

Cubias ended up scoring a 5 on hisA.P. calculus exam, which no Locke stu-dent had ever done before, and went to

the University of California at Santa Bar-bara. Even before he left Locke, he knew that he wanted to come back and teachthere. “Now, I’m bilingual, and a mathteacher, with a University of Californiacertification,” Cubias said. “In this dis-trict, I’m gold.” But when he first wentdowntown to apply for a teaching posi-tion and said that he wanted a job atLocke he was told, “You don’t have toteach there. You’re qualified to teach atthis place, or this place, or this place.”

The interviewer thought she wasdoing him a favor. “These schools likeLocke and Fremont and Jordan, they justget the leftovers,” Cubias said. Locke

would have substitutes covering unfilledteaching positions well into the school

year. New hires were often uninspiringand unprepared. “Damn the day the Uni-

versity of Phoenix started off ering teach-ing credentials,” he added.

In the spring of 2007, a rumor spreadthrough the school. Teachers and parents

were summoned to a community meet-ing at the middle school down the street.

The room was packed. Cubias took a seat



near the front. The superintendent at thetime got up to speak. He said that the dis-trict was interested in handing over lead-ership of Locke High School to a charterorganization, Green Dot.

For Cubias, this was worse thanneglect—to be abandoned by the dis-trict and relegated to some white guy

he’d never met. “We’ll see about that,”he said.

The sudden announcement stunnedUnited Teachers Los Angeles, the

neighborhood, and Locke’s staff , eventhe principal. Almost immediately, thesuperintendent began shying away fromthe deal. Barr had learned by now to havea backup plan ready. If the district re-fused to give him Locke, he’d just open abunch of Green Dot schools in Watts

and take the kids.Green Dot had become more profes-sional since Barr’s early days at AnimoLeadership. But it had also become moreradical. When case-study writers fromHarvard Business School asked Barr todescribe the inspiration behind GreenDot’s model, he didn’t cite other schools;he named the Student Nonviolent Coor-dinating Committee. He hired an oppo-sition researcher to investigate Green Dotand see what enemies might use against

him. He started a citywide group calledthe Los Angeles Parents Union, an activ-ist alternative to the Parent-Teacher As-sociation, in the hope of mobilizing footsoldiers for Green Dot’s escalating waragainst the district. He even put a school-board member on his payroll—“a mole,”Barr said—to report back on closed meet-ings. Judged purely on test scores, orscholastic reputation, another group,Alliance for College-Ready PublicSchools, is probably the premier charter-

school-management organization in LosAngeles. “They’re brilliant about academ-ics,” Barr said. But, as a political organi-zation that happens to run great schools,Green Dot is unique.

As Barr became more political, hebegan to worry about the limits of thecharter movement. “There’s this cultaround charter schools,” Barr said.“They’re not even close to being the an-swer.” Opening a new school like AnimoLeadership takes an enormous amount of eff ort and money. Barr has to find a bigbuilding in the right neighborhood, andconvert it into classrooms, and fill it with

new teachers and administrators, and sellthe idea to parents and community lead-ers. This is all before any public dollars ar-rive. Four years after Barr started AnimoLeadership, he had a nice school of aboutfive hundred students. But that barely registered in a district with around sevenhundred thousand. Barr began to covet

district schools with thousands of stu-dents. (Locke had almost three thou-sand.) “We were trying to figure out how to get out of the charter-school business,and how to get into the helping-schools-transform business,” he said.

Barr tested a new strategy at Jeff ersonHigh School, a place that is much likeLocke, a few miles to the north. In 2005,over the course of a year, he met with thesuperintendent to try to negotiate a dealto transform the institution into a series of

small autonomous schools. When talksbroke down, Barr hired a field staff fromthe neighborhood. They worked out of ahousing project across the street from theschool and collected ten thousand signa-tures from local parents. When the dis-trict still balked, Barr gathered a thousandparents and marched to L.A.U.S.D.’scentral office, towing the paperwork forfive new Green Dot schools in little red

wagons. Jeff erson remained an L.A.U.S.D.school. But the following fall more than

half of its incoming freshmen entered thelottery for a spot at one of Barr’s schools.“When Green Dot was able to walk intoa neighborhood, build strong coalitions

with neighborhood groups, and begin todrain the school, I think that sent a shock

wave through the system,” Ted Mitchell,the president of the State Board of Edu-cation, said.

Barr was ready to do the same thingat Locke. “What I didn’t foresee was theteachers rising up,” he said. A group from

the school—Zeus Cubias and a few oth-ers—sent word that they wanted a meet-ing. Barr agreed to meet them at a nearby community center. Fifty or sixty teacherssat on one side, in a semicircle; Barr satalone, facing them.

“Locke is a cash cow,” he explained tothem. It attracted more state and federalfunding than schools in richer neighbor-hoods—“money-that’s-thrown-at-a-failed-school kind of money,” he said.“According to our analysis, only aboutsixty per cent of that money makes it intothe classroom.”

A gigantic district like L.A.U.S.D.



has layer upon layer of bureaucracy.Locke had two full-time employees whopainted over graffiti. Bathroom monitors were contractually limited to bathroom-related supervision. Locke often came in well under budget, yet students stillshared textbooks, because the surplus was locked up in some unnecessary line

item. Byzantine chains of accountability made it almost impossible to isolateproblems and fix them.

“There was yelling back and forth,”Barr said. “A lot of the time I just satthere, let them work their shit out. A young Latino math teacher, big guy,fucking six foot five, he broke down andstarted crying.” The teacher feared thatalthough Green Dot might get morekids to college, the most vulnerable kids,the hardest cases, might slip away. It’s a

big knock against charter schools—sometimes fair, sometimes unfair—thatonly a traditional public school teaches allkids. “We bombarded him,” Cubias said.Barr came back with the same answeragain and again: “How will it be worsethan what you have now?”

Even if they agreed about the district’sills, many teachers worried about GreenDot’s contract. At around thirty pages,it would be only a tenth as long as theircontract with L.A.U.S.D. “Union con-

tracts are written in response to bad sys-tems,” Barr said. (A. J. Duff y, the presi-dent of United Teachers Los Angeles,counters, “Our view of a decent contractis it will provide longevity of teachingstaff .” Too many charter schools, he ar-gues, churn through young teachers.)Green Dot off ered no tenure and nolifetime benefits. But salaries would beabout ten per cent higher; it spends morethan sixty per cent of its staff budget onteacher salaries, a good deal more than

L.A.U.S.D., Green Dot claims. GreenDot’s union—affiliated with the state- wide teachers’ association rather than with the more defensive one in Los An-geles—would protect them from ar-bitrary dismissal. And Barr promisedteachers more freedom in the classroom.At his schools, the principals lay out firmcurricular guidelines, in keeping withCalifornia state standards and GreenDot benchmarks, but teachers are free tohuddle, and decide what to teach andhow to teach it, for the most part, as longas students pass quarterly assessments.

“After about five and a half hours, one

teacher said, ‘Let’s face it, the only timethe district comes out here is when a kidgets killed,’ ” Barr recalled. “Anotherteacher said, ‘And the only time ourunion comes out is when Green Dot’smentioned.’ Somebody said, ‘What can we do?’ ”

Barr explained that California law-

makers had created an option for schoolsto abandon the district for a charter ar-rangement if at least fifty per cent of ten-ured teachers vote to secede. “We’d beinterested in that,” Barr said.

Barr had a stack of petition forms sentto the school. Cubias, an English teachernamed Bruce Smith, and the principal,Frank Wells, began circulating them.Barr wasn’t sure he had the votes. Locke’s young teachers were mostly untenuredand ineligible. The older faculty tended

to be deeply skeptical of what Barr wasselling. “A lot of these teachers have beenon the front lines during the whole de-mise of our public education system,” hesaid. “Now, every year or two, there’ssome new reform. You get reform fa-tigue: ‘Oh, God, another God-damnedbright idea from the business world.’ ”Out of a total tenured faculty of seventy-three, Barr needed thirty-seven votes to

take the school. That meant all the eligi-ble younger teachers and a decent num-ber of the older ones. Smith and Wellsstarted canvassing between bells. “It wasa sneaky inside job, but there was noother way to do it,” Smith said.

District administrators were furious. They sent school police to find Wells and

escort him off

school property. But it wastoo late: Barr’s allies had the signatures. Two days later, television crews gatheredacross the street for a press conference.Kids milled around and stared. Smithsneaked into a bathroom to write aspeech. “I’ve got security guards carrying walkie-talkies, saying, ‘He’s walkingdown the hall,’ ” Smith recalled. “I’mpretty nervous.” He hid in a stall, andscribbled notes for his remarks on anindex card: “Do what we’re doing: take

back your schools.” Within days, the district and theteachers’ union counterattacked. “Totake over a whole school—it was scan-dalous!” Karen Wickhorst, a Frenchteacher and, at the time, a site represen-tative for United Teachers Los Angeles,recently recalled. “A big public school! It was so underhanded.”

The district banned Barr from the



them. Instead, there was graffiti. “Every- where you walked,” Shannan Burrell, a junior, said. “About six out of ten, it was

gang tags.”Shannan is curvy and baby-faced, with rosy brown skin. Her hair was in abright-purple wrap. She lived nearby, with her mother, in a yellow house,close enough to walk to school in themorning (keeping quiet, looking straightahead) but outside Locke’s immediateneighborhood, which was a good thing.“It’s dirty,” she said. “Gangbangers out24/7.” She wears a necklace that spellsout the name “Jerome” in curling, glit-

tering script. He was her best friend, be-fore he was shot and killed around thecorner, when she was in ninth grade. “It was random,” she said softly. “He was aschoolboy, for real.”

When she entered Locke, three yearsago, she liked it. “It was fun—wanderingaround the halls, around the campus,”she said. “Just wilding out.” She’d dropinto classroom after classroom, look ingfor friends. “Like ‘Come outside realquick,’ ” she said, laughing. “Quick” usu-

ally meant for the rest of class. “And we wouldn’t just go to our lunch—we’d goto all of them,” she said. “Why are wegoing to go to class if nobody ever saysnothing?” But in her sophomore year shestarted getting in fights. “I felt like, atLocke, you have to earn your reputation,”she explained. “And I earned mine, afterlike my third fight. But then, after that,it seemed like girls wanted to challengeme. So it got worse.” She fought once ortwice a week. Her grades were terrible.

She was eating with the football play-ers, in the shade of the quad’s only tree, when the riot began. Suddenly, everyone

around her was fighting. A boy she’dnever seen before punched her. “I wantedto cry, bad,” she said. “But it ain’t inside

me to cry.” Instead, she fought back. Afew weeks later, she left her mother’shouse and moved in with her adult sister,about an hour away. But in the fall shedecided to go back to Locke. She’d heardthat there were going to be changes.

Old-timers and union loyalists wholeft Locke after the takeover insisted thatGreen Dot would find a way to weed outproblem kids. Others, such as Cubias, worried that uniforms and the promiseof tougher discipline would simply keep

bad kids away. But teachers and admin-istrators went out into the neighborhoodto visit hundreds of parents and studentsand encourage them to reënroll. Eighty-five per cent of Locke students returned.(In a normal year, only seventy per cent would come back from summer break.) That meant hundreds more than eitherGreen Dot or the city had projected.

“When I got to school, I was laugh-ing at everyone else—I was, like, ‘Ha, you got on a uniform,’ ” Shannan said.

“They’re, like, ‘Ha, you got on a uni-form, too!’ ” Green Dot split the incom-ing ninth grade into five new smallschools, like the schools around Jeff erson. Three of them ended up in buildings off campus; the other two were in Locke’sprefabricated units, walled off by tallblack fences. Then they split the upperthree grades into two academies, one foreach wing of Locke’s original building.Each school had its own bell schedule,its own lunch period, its own entrance,and its own color polo shirt. Shannandrew white.

Locke’s teachers were all dismissed

school and summoned teachers to ameeting. Duff y, the union president, andthe district’s regional administrator ad-dressed the teachers. “They scared theshit out of everyone,” Barr said. Seven-teen teachers revoked their signatures.

Barr set up a war room at Green Dot’soffices. He wrote the number “17” on a

whiteboard. Organizers mapped out theteachers who had rescinded their votes—their issues, their biases—as well as new teachers they might swing. “It was likechasing down Senate votes,” Barr said.He got up at five, and met teachers at adoughnut shop before school. He wentto their houses for dinner, and showedup at church on Sunday. Allies wouldsneak him onto the school groundsthrough a back gate, and he’d hold courtin a gym teacher’s office.

They got all seventeen votes back—but not one more. And Barr began tolook ahead. “After the press conference,a dozen diff erent schools contacted me,”he said. They were ready to lead theirown insurrections. “If I’d been prepared,I could have run the table,” Barr said.

Some of his closest confidants, though, worried that even one big high schoolmight be too many. “Most people aroundhim, including me, said, ‘Oh, man, Lockeis going to kill you,’ ” Reed Hastings, of

Netflix, said. “Creating new schools iseasy politics. It’s ribbon-cutting, it’s new opportunities. Taking over a school—it’sdistrict property, those are union jobs. I

was afraid he would put in a lot of eff ortand not succeed. Or he’d get the conver-sion done and the difficulty of running theschool would overwhelm him. And if hedid a bad job it would be a black mark foreveryone.”

Atall girl, her hair pulled back tightly

in a ponytail, reached up to tapea bright hand-painted poster (“Valen-tines Day Candygrams”) above a row of lockers.

“You’re showing your butt crack,” aboy walking by said.

“So? Everyone has one.”“I don’t.”“Idiot.” She rolled her eyes. The

boy looked back over his shoulder andgrinned.

Locke’s hallways are now filled withthese handmade signs—for dances, try-outs, movie nights, college tours. They used to be banned; kids would vandalize

The hand without the glove screws down the lidon the jar of caterpillars, but the apple treesare already infested. The sun mottlesthe ground. The leaves are half-dead.

A shoe stomps the larvae streamingonto the lawn as if putting out a cigarette on a rug.It was a stupid idea. It was a stupid thing to say the thought belonging to the body says to its sourcestomping on the bright-green grass as it spills its sweet guts.

—C. D. Wright



and asked to reapply. Only about thirty per cent got their jobs back. Shannan’sEnglish teacher, Mr. Sully, was one of them. “He just, he a nice teacher,” shesaid. “He keep you on your toes. If youain’t doing something, he’ll make youdo something.” Dozens of kids told methis—that teachers make them do stuff

now, whether they want to or not. Al-most immediately, Shannan stoppedditching. For one thing, she couldn’t getaway with it anymore. (“They don’t play,”she said.) She stopped fighting, too.

Sully passed a new novel out to Shan-nan’s class—“a book called ‘The BluestEye,’ ” Shannan said. She was unim-pressed with the cover and the first page.“I was like, ‘Mr. Sully, this book aboutto be stooopid.’ And he said, ‘What didI say?’ And I said, ‘O.K., I won’t use

“stupid,” but this book is about to benot interesting.’ He sat me down andhad a strong conversation with me.” Sheagreed to give it a few pages. Then thecharacter Claudia, a fighter, made herfirst appearance. “I hear her talk aboutbeating up a girl name Rosemary, a lit-tle white girl. I was like, ‘Oh, I’m goingto read this!’ ” She giggled. “It’s turnedout to be a good book,” she said. “That’sthe funny thing.”

“There is no secret curriculum-and-

instruction sauce at Green Dot at all,”Don Shalvey said. “Steve hires goodpeople. They’re just doing old-schoolschooling.”

Shannan doesn’t like every class. Phys-ics, she said, is boring. So is a test-prepa-ration and college-readiness class, manda-tory for most Green Dot students. Butshe tries to do the work now. When Iasked her why, she thought about it for along time. “Honestly, it didn’t matter how

you did before,” she said. “Wasn’t nobody

really looking at Locke kids”—meaningto go to college. That’s not true, of course,but it felt true to Shannan. “Now, if Imake a bad grade, I’m like, ‘Please, can Imake it up?’ ”

There are problems that Green Dotcan’t fix on its own, however. Accordingto Cubias, at least forty per cent of Locke’sstudents come from single-parent house-holds. “Another fifteen per cent are infoster care,” he said. Green Dot requiresparents to get involved at school, a mini-mum of thirty-five hours a year, but they can’t make every parent a good influ-ence. (Recently, after a girl tangled with a

classmate, an assistant principal calledthe girl’s mother, and when the womanshowed up she started screaming at theother student.) Security can stop neigh-borhood gangs from tagging the hallsor hoisting couches up to Locke’s roof,

which was a hangout last year, but they can’t keep gangs out of kids’ lives.

I made plans to attend classes withShannan the next day, but when I arrivedat her first-period class, English with Mr.Sully, she wasn’t there. I called her houseafter school. The phone line was dead.(Her mother, a quiet, serious woman, hasbeen out of work for at least two years.Her father has been in jail since aroundthe time Shannan was a toddler.) When we finally talked, her voice was so flatthat I didn’t recognize it.

“I’m not going to be in school this

week,” she said. “I have to take care of family business.”“Did someone get hurt?” I asked.“Yes.”“Was it a car accident or something?”“Much worse,” she said. “It’s not

something I want to talk about.” Sev -eral days passed before she returned toclasses.

There remain problems to address in-side Locke, too. Fall semester was diffi-cult. “We made so many mistakes,” Cu-

bias said. September was almost wholly devoted to coping with the crush of un-expected students. Administrators strug-gled to find good teachers who were stillon the job market. Clubs and activi -ties suff ered. “It’s hard to see incremen-tal changes,” a new principal, VeronicaColeman, said. “That turned into somelow-level frustration for both studentsand teachers.”

Sully told me that Locke is signi-ficantly calmer, and administrators are

more present. And Green Dot got rid of the teachers who did little for students.But the takeover also chased away somegood, experienced staff . Locke’s over- whelmingly new and mostly young fac-ulty members are learning how to work together. Sully still has problems withchronic truancy. He still sees kids out of uniform. And when Locke’s test scores,their first since the takeover, comeback this fall they are almost certainto be the lowest among Barr’s schools.Sully guesses that the school might seea small bounce, but anything more thanthat would surprise him. Kids in Locke’s



upper grades have spent as many asthree years in one of the city’s worst ac-ademic environments. And, for the firsttime at a Green Dot school, there is nolottery process for admission. There isno waiting list. Locke is serving every kid in the neighborhood, including ones whose parents, in another neighbor-

hood, would never research alternativesto the big traditional school. “Every child who is in his other schools is therebecause they have an advocate,” Cor-tines said. “Not so at Locke. They took the whole population.”

Even security remains a challenge.Green Dot blanketed the schoolyard with guards from a private security firm,club-bouncer burly, carrying handgunsand pepper spray. Gangs have no wherenear the profile they once did, and

fights, once a daily occurrence, are rare.Still, in mid-April, a student was shot,across the street, just before first period.And guards have occasionally displayeda heavy hand. Twice this year, they pep-per-sprayed students; in both cases, Cu-bias said, they should have been able tocool the kids down before it came tothat, but they were trained to secure fa-cilities, not to supervise adolescents.

Yet, when I wandered around campusduring lunch periods and between classes,

looking for disgruntled kids, I neverfound any.

“The whole atmosphere is diff erent,”a Latino boy, sketching graffiti in a note-book, said. “The teachers pay more at-tention to you.”

“You actually get through the lessons you’re supposed to get through,” Jamie,an African-American girl with straight-ened swept-back hair, said, as she pickedat French fries with her friend Andrea.

“I noticed that, too,” Andrea said.

“Last year, my grades got so bad—Igot four D’s! My will to get good gradesimproved,” Jamie said.

“Will Locke be perfect?” Cortinesasked. “I don’t care. If they make mis-takes, they’ll find a way to do thingsdiff erently. What we do in regular schoolsis keep doing the same thing, even if itdoesn’t work.”

B

arr is always talking about “thetribes.” Union leaders and reform-

ers, in his view, spend too much timefighting one another instead of findingcommon interests. Charter groups and

unions agree on limiting central bureau-cracy, giving teachers fewer studentsand more freedom, and concentratingfunds in the classroom, but they mostly go at each other over tenure and theright to unionize. Ultimately, Barr’sproject isn’t about fixing one brokenschool; he thinks he can resolve that im-

passe. His grander ambitions, as muchas Green Dot’s experience in Watts, are what brought him to Arne Duncan’soffice in March.

Duncan asked Barr what it wouldtake to break up and remake thousandsof large failing schools. “One, you haveto reconstitute,” Barr told him—thatis, fire everyone and make them reap-ply or transfer elsewhere in the district.“Arne didn’t seem to flinch at that,” hesaid. “Second, if we can figure out a na-

tional union partnership, we can takeaway some of the opposition.” Duncanasked Barr if he could persuade Randi Weingarten, the president of the Amer-ican Federation of Teachers, to supportthe idea. “I’d love to do that,” she toldBarr, but she also expressed concerns.“She said, ‘I can’t be seen as coming inand firing all these teachers.’ ” So they talked about alternatives, like transfer-ring teachers or using stimulus money for buyouts.

Cortines has also agreed in principleto a partnership in Los Angeles. “We’llfind out very quickly what he thinks apartnership is,” Barr said. “I think apartnership is Locke, period.” Federalmoney, Barr noted, and an alliance with the national union “will force Mr.Duff y”—the U.T.L.A. president—“tocome along.” Green Dot could take overas many as five Los Angeles schools in2010, and maybe more.

This month, Barr expects to meet

again with Weingarten and her staff andoutline plans for a Green Dot America,a national school-turnaround partner-ship between Green Dot and the A.F.T. Their first city would most likely be Washington, D.C. “If we’re successful

there, we’ll get the attention of a lot of lawmakers,” Barr said.

There are risks for Barr in this kindof expansion. It will be months, andmaybe years, before there’s hard evi-dence about what Green Dot has ac-complished at Locke. And that onetakeover put a real strain on the orga-

nization. “If they were to take over an-other high school in Los Angeles, they could handle that,” Steve Seleznow,the deputy director of education forthe Gates Foundation, said. “I’m notsure they have the capacity to do fiveat once.” Then he paused. “I’m sureSteve has the appetite for it,” he added,and laughed. Barr’s impatience andhis willingness to overextend himself are a bigger part of Green Dot’s insti-tutional culture than any theory of

education.In the meantime, Barr and his sup-porters continue to campaign. On arecent morning, outside 135th StreetElementary School, in Gardena, near

Watts, a gregarious woman with astreak of gray through her black curls,

wearing a Los Angeles Parents Unionsweatshirt, passed a sheet of paper to a

young Latino man in a Sears ApplianceRepair jacket. He was accompanied by two little girls with matching Hannah

Montana backpacks. “Would you liketo sign a petition to transform Perry Middle School and Gardena HighSchool?” she asked. She waved down acar that showed no sign of stopping,and bent over at the window when itdid. “Do you have time to sign my pe-tition to transform Perry Middle Schooland Gardena High School?” she asked.Immediately, the driver pulled over.Organizers are now in many neighbor-hoods, targeting elementary schools,

telling parents that they have timeto blow up and rebuild their middleschools and high schools before theirkids enroll.

Everyone signed up. It’s like that whenever she goes out. “People know something is wrong,” she told me. “Butthey think it’s their kids. Or it’s theirneighborhood. Or it’s because they’repoor. If we have to, we’ll build a wholebunch of little charters around the schooland take the students,” the woman said,loud enough for half the block to hear.“We’re going to get the change one way or another.”

the instigator

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