Education Week - March 6, 2013 - 15

EDUCATION WEEK

BLOGS of
the WEEK
| NEWS |

Charters & Choice

Steve Barr’s Quest to Save
A New Orleans High School
Steve Barr, the colorful founder of
unionized charter schools who shook up the
Los Angeles Unified School District several
years ago with his efforts to both compete
and cooperate with the district to fix some
of its worst schools, is now at work in New
Orleans.
Barr’s Future Is Now Schools—which
he founded after leaving the Los Angelesfocused Green Dot schools network—is
midway through the first year of a
rescue effort to save one of New Orleans’
toughest high schools both pre- and postKatrina: John McDonogh in the city’s
Treme neighborhood.
I visited this school a handful of times
during the first 18 months it was open
following the hurricane. It was a deeply
troubled place that I remember most for
its fortification: metal detectors at every
entrance and an abundance of security
guards.
In the five years since I reported at
John Mac, the school churned through
numerous principals, was barely mustering
attendance of 50 kids a day, and was nearly
shut down by the Recovery School District.
In 2007, while still running Green
Dot, Barr won a knock-down, drag-out
fight to win control over the similarly
troubled Locke High School in the Watts
community of Los Angeles by organizing

teachers to support a conversion to a
charter school. Green Dot began its
overhaul of Locke in 2008, and while there
have been some academic gains, along
with other notable progress on safety and
school culture, the turnaround effort there
remains a work in progress. Barr left
Green Dot in 2009.
To lead the John Mac revival, Barr
said, he did a national search before
hiring Principal Marvin Thompson, who
had been working in North Carolina.
Never one to shrink from the media
spotlight, Barr also agreed to let
television cameras closely document the
first year at John Mac after getting the
blessing from Thompson and the high
school’s faculty.
The first two episodes of “Blackboard
Wars” recently aired on own, Oprah
Winfrey’s cable channel. The snippets
I’ve watched are pretty grim—violence
and post-traumatic-stress issues are
prominent—and don’t offer much hope for
an about-face in the first year.
Many of John Mac’s students, Barr
said, are overage and way behind in high
school credits, and a not-insignificant
number of them have been put out of the
city’s numerous other charter schools.
“This first year is literally about getting
the kids to even come to school,” he said.
“It’s about changing the culture.”
While that quite-public undertaking
unfolds in New Orleans, Barr is working
in a more behind-the-scenes manner
in Los Angeles (not his usual modus
operandi) to get approval for “pilot
schools” that he supports in the district.
The pilot schools would have much of the
same autonomy as charters, but would
still be in-district schools (so no drain on
lausd enrollment) that operate with a
collective bargaining agreement, albeit a
“thin contract.”

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MARCH 6, 2013

Barr now has a strong ally in
Superintendent John Deasy. This
relationship has put Barr inside the
district in a way that he hasn’t been
accustomed to.
His first pilot, called the Silver Lake
Studio School, has been given the green
light by the Los Angeles school board,
Barr told me. Another pilot, for Venice,
is still moving through the district’s
approval process.
“I keep telling these guys, you can either
do this or you are going to see charters
eating up the district schools,” he said.
—LESLI A. MAXWELL

| NEWS |

District Dossier

Superintendent of the Year
Focuses on Tech, Dropouts
Mark A. Edwards, the superintendent
of the 5,600-student Mooresville Graded
School District in North Carolina, is
the American Association of School
Administrators’ superintendent of the year.
The award was announced in Los Angeles
last month.
Mooresville’s 1-to-1 laptop program has
been held up as a model for school districts
looking to use technology effectively in
schools.
The district has seen its graduation rate
increase from 73 percent in 2007, when
Edwards arrived, to 90 percent last year.
Wanda Cook-Robinson, the
superintendent of the Southfield,
Mich., public schools; C.J. Huff, the
superintendent of the Joplin, Mo.,
schools; and Maryalice Russell, the
superintendent of the McMinnville, Ore.,
school district, were this year’s other
—JACLYN ZUBRZYCKI
finalists.

| NEWS |

n

www.edweek.org

State EdWatch

W.Va. Teachers Give an ‘F’
To Governor’s Proposal
When former West Virginia
Superintendent Jorea Marple was fired by
the state board of education late last year,
the board said one motivation was the need
for a significant change in direction for K-12
education in the state.
With a lengthy bill introduced in the
state legislature last week, Gov. Earl Ray
Tomblin, a Democrat, has shown exactly
how he wants “education reform” in his state
to proceed, at least initially. And the bill,
which has a focus on early education and
teacher qualifications, has been panned by
teachers.
The highlights of the plan include
expanding preschool to all-day programs;
allowing members of Teach For America
to fill classroom positions in “critical-need
areas”; and strengthening teacher education
in reading.
In addition, Tomblin’s plan would require
180 days of instruction in public schools,
yet at the same time provide “flexibility” for
school calendars to meet that requirement.
Tomblin also wants to create a commission
that would evaluate the structure of local
school boards.
So, how have the teachers’ unions reacted
in West Virginia? In a word, negatively.
They don’t like the idea of increasing
teacher-preparation requirements, yet at
the same time allowing tfa members to fill
classroom positions. In addition, they say
the plan doesn’t meet its promise to reduce
—ANDREW UJIFUSA
bureaucracy.

>>

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Education Week - March 6, 2013

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