Green Dot revolution targets school that outperforms current Green Dotters

June 11, 7:07 PMSF Education ExaminerCaroline Grannan

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The in-your-face organizer of Green Dot charter schools, Steve Barr, is putting together what’s basically a fake parents’ movement down in Los Angeles – or at least it’s a top-down alleged parents’ movement, created by Barr and run by paid organizer Ben Austin. The common term for a fake grassroots organization like this is “Astroturf.”

“Barr envisioned” the Astroturf organization “as an independent, assertive alternative to the PTA,” according to the L.A. Times.

“The plan,” says the Times, “is for parents to form chapters all over town and improve schools, one by one, using the growing leverage of the charter school movement. The goal is to unite a city of overworked and isolated parents with a brash promise:

“If more than half of the parents at a school sign up, Barr's organizers say they will guarantee an excellent campus within three years. They call it the Parent Revolution.

“… Funding for the parent groups has come from Green Dot, philanthropist Eli Broad, the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce and the Service Employees International Union.” (Barr is a rare charter operator with union ties – though he made the entire faculty at his recent takeover school reapply for their jobs and kept only a fraction, a strategy that’s normally viewed as heavy-handedly anti-labor.)

Needless to say, it's not hard to win plenty of converts with a convincing pitch selling parents on a “guarantee” of making sweeping improvements at their kids’ schools.  It’ll be interesting to see how the promise plays out.

I took a look at the fake parent group's website and noted this line in the bio of hired-gun leader Ben Austin, parent of a preschooler:

“Ben is looking forward to sending Fiona to their wonderful neighborhood elementary school, Warner; and is currently working on a Parent Revolution at their failing middle school, Emerson.”

I object on principle to referring to schools as "failing" – that’s a simplistic and sweeping condemnation. There are children attending the schools damned as “failing,” and to me that amounts to telling them, “You’re failures.”

But forget my opinion; we want data. So I looked up the most recent Academic Performance Index score for Emerson (Ralph Waldo Emerson Middle School, Los Angeles Unified). (The API is California’s accountability reporting system for school achievement; it ranks schools based on a compilation of standardized test scores into a score on a 200-1000 scale, with 800 and up viewed as excellent.)

The 2008 API for “failing” Emerson is 701 – neither stellar nor disgraceful. SFUSD has some very highly regarded and sought-after schools with APIs well below 701.

I thought I’d see how the schools Green Dot runs – which are hailed far and wide as successful nationwide models – compare. Turns out the API of the 11 Green Dot schools averages 678.64. Hmm.

Four of Green Dot’s 12 schools have APIs far below Emerson’s 701:

Animo Jackie Robinson 597
Animo Justice 569
Animo Ralph Bunche 636
Animo Watts 614

Two more of Green Dot's "successful" schools have APIs of 705 (Animo Film & Theater and Animo South Los Angeles), which hardly leaves "failing" Emerson in the dust either. (All the listed Green Dot schools are in L.A. Unified.)

The rest of the Green Dot schools range from 715 to 749. (This tally excludes Locke, the highly publicized Watts high school newly taken over by Green Dot, which doesn’t yet have test scores from the Green Dot era.)

And by the way, even the L.A. Times, which has generally been starry-eyed about Green Dot, cops to the big advantage its schools have in terms of creaming more-motivated students (prior to the Locke takeover, which includes a commitment to accepting the students from the neighborhood).

"Green Dot charters, opened as alternatives to failing public schools, attracted motivated families that came from far-flung communities to place their children on waiting lists. As a result, enrollment was predictable and stable. ... The charter operator normally requires a certain amount of parent involvement."

Yet it appears that non-charter Emerson achieves its 701 API without the creaming advantage that the lower-performing Green Dot schools enjoy.

So I’m curious how Mr. Austin sees Emerson as “failing” and views Green Dot as its path to success.

I already know the answer will be some variation on “test scores are only part of the picture,” a view I agree with. Yet to the charter folks, test scores are THE picture when they’re blasting public schools as “failing.” They allow lots  more  nuance and margin for flexibility when it comes to their own schools.

I’ll post this information, share it with Mr. Austin and report on the response.

Follow me on Twitter @CarolineSF