Pied Piper of charters fights back

Education agitator Steve Barr’s many detractors will tell you that he’s a megalomaniacal publicity hound. So why don’t I feel dirty standing beside him, dutifully taking notes as he rhapsodizes about a sheet-metal warehouse in Watts?

The building is as ugly as the pit bull pacing behind the rusted chain-link fence that protects it, but Barr sees only potential beauty.

If he has his way (he usually does), by next fall that tin shed and weed-strewn lot will offer academic refuge to 300 students desperate to escape nearby Locke High School. And I’m pretty sure he sees that as a glorious affront to the educrats who, two weeks ago, gave him a public spanking, thinking, perhaps, that it would stifle the uppity charter movement’s most conspicuous rising star.

Barr is the big, ball-cap-wearing founder of Green Dot Public Schools, a self-proclaimed reform movement based on such tenets as limiting schools to no more than 525 students, keeping them open late, cutting bureaucratic overhead and requiring parents to participate.

Since 1999, Green Dot has opened 10 high schools serving some of Los Angeles’ poorest neighborhoods. These campuses run on taxpayer money but are immune from many of the constraints that hobble their public competitors. Barr has become a pedagogic Pied Piper, leading droves of dissatisfied students -- mainly black and Latino -- away from existing public schools. Many energetic teachers have followed them out the door.

Los Angeles’ education establishment has tended to disdain charter schools. Late last year that appeared to be changing. Apparently figuring “if you can’t beat ‘em, let ‘em join you,” Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. David Brewer, board President Marlene Canter and other district insiders began working with Barr on a “partnership” that would allow Green Dot to work within the system, putting its imprint on Watts’ problematic Locke High without the usual student and teacher exodus.

A key sticking point concerned how teachers would be treated. District teachers belong to United Teachers Los Angeles; Green Dot’s are affiliated with the California Teachers Assn. And Green Dot uses its own contract, one that includes a bit more pay and considerably less union influence.

Despite all that, efforts to integrate the Green Dot approach at Locke seemed to be progressing until last month. Then, in part as a hedge against the possibility that the district would retreat or become even pokier, Barr asked the board for 12 new charter licenses.

The district’s own lawyers warned that rejecting his request would almost certainly prove illegal. Charter laws, after all, were put in place specifically to overcome institutional inertia. Boards can give applications a thumbs down only by documenting specific academic, financial or procedural failings.

But Marguerite Poindexter LaMotte, Jon Lauritzen and Julie Korenstein, the board members most beholden to UTLA’s money and support, voted against Green Dot despite the law, spurring Barr to stomp away from the Locke partnership effort.

Korenstein, the only nay-saying board member to return my call, said the union had no influence on her vote. She said she would vote for the charters if Green Dot schools that began opening last year around Jefferson High show that they’re doing better than the school they’re drawing from. Those results will be available in August.

Korenstein’s high-minded patience suggests that she sees herself as a wiser fiduciary custodian than such venture philanthropists as Eli Broad and Bill Gates, who have given Green Dot millions of dollars based in part on the academic record of its many schools that have been around long enough to be tested. These schools, though often merely keeping up in math and science scores, in total significantly outperform schools statewide with similar demographics.

Canter, usually a charter skeptic, worked hard on behalf of the Green Dot partnership. She says she was “surprised and disappointed” that the board shot down the applications.

Brewer says he remains confident that a charter-district partnership will happen, either when Barr gets over his anger or with another charter operator if he doesn’t.

But why did the district’s new leader let his board blow the whole thing apart? Why couldn’t the former admiral overcome what Barr calls “the blob” -- the swarm of congenitally timid bureaucrats who surround district big shots, whispering every reason why nothing new should ever, ever, ever be attempted?

Why couldn’t the man who’s always talking big about transforming the district, always talking big about innovation and his commitment to poor kids, minority kids, impose his will on the likes of Lauritzen and Korenstein?

“You will see my leadership on this come forward shortly,” Brewer says. “It ain’t over until it’s over.”

It could take weeks or months for the county Office of Education or state Board of Education to overturn the board’s decision or for the state attorney general’s office to intervene.

Barr says Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown, a former boss, asked him to forward the board’s denial and legal opinions.

“I did look into that,” Brown says. “I experienced something similar as mayor when I applied to have the Oakland Military Institute approved as a charter. The president of the school board said that to approve a military school in Oakland would be like approving a Ronald Reagan museum in Berkeley.”

The law, however, is clear and the rejection was reversed at the state level, Brown says. He did not want to comment on the merits of the Green Dot case, but said he finds it unacceptable that more and more school districts statewide seem to be rejecting charters for political reasons.

The ever-impatient Barr says he is confident that he’ll soon have all the charters he needs to offer at least half of Locke’s students an alternative. Meanwhile, he plans to circumvent the board’s intransigence by opening two schools near Locke with charter licenses that his organization got but never used when it set up schools around troubled Jefferson High.

He has an ally in Timothy Watkins, president of the Watts Labor Community Action Committee, which owns the tin warehouse Barr covets.

A lifelong resident of the neighborhood and well-known activist, Watkins, 53, is not happy that students drop out of Locke at alarming rates while the campus maintains “jail-like overcrowding.”

“My efforts to work with the district,” he says, “have met with dismal failure.”

So he’s negotiating to lease his organization’s properties to Green Dot and has agreed to join Green Dot’s board.

That accomplished, Barr and his team will swoop into the neighborhood to alert parents that, come fall, two new 150-student ninth-grade classes will be open to enrollment, with another grade to follow each subsequent year.

The Green Dot folks will plant trees and build basketball courts. They’ll spruce up the buildings or set up portable classrooms in the weed-strewn parking lot.

If permits are slow in coming, they’ll herd the students into local offices or motels to get the teaching started on time, Barr says.

Barr’s defiance will, no doubt, further agitate some on the school board. Barr doesn’t care.

“Part of me understands Korenstein and Lauritzen,” he says. “They live in the Valley. But LaMotte?”

I get his point. LaMotte portrays herself as a watchdog for the rights of poor students, minority students, the sort of students who overwhelmingly fill (or flee) those seats at Locke.

So why does the African American board member throw up roadblocks?

LaMotte has a reputation for not returning journalists’ calls, but she has said things in the past that suggest she’s among those who dismiss Barr as an arrogant media hound.

I see his lack of aversion to publicity as part of a refreshing eagerness to engage parents and the public in saving students from lousy schools.

Arrogance is what those board members displayed by ignoring students’ and parents’ frantic pleas for help.

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To discuss this column or the question, “Should school districts do more to encourage charter schools?” please visit latimes.com/schoolme. Bob Sipchen can be reached at bob.sipchen@latimes.com.