Opinion: Steve Barr unplugged: LAUSD will go green

Tim: Am I right in thinking that Locke is a bigger project than you’ve taken on in the past? Barr: Yeah. Tim: Then the first of two pie-in-the-sky questions: How big can your model scale? Barr: We don’t want our model to scale. We want our model to be a model that can enforce change, that all schools adopt that model. So what I’m saying by that is, it’s a little bit tricky: We don’t want to be, you know, ten years from now, be the only group out there taking over high schools, fighting this fight. We gotta figure out a faster way to get them to ask us, and then take all our tenets within their model. That’s always been the idea. So we think what’ll happen, and this was the bet at Jefferson, and it’s going to be what’s going to happen after Locke, at least the way we see the world: What happens when those schools are open and those teachers are making more money under improved work conditions, and they’re successful. What do you think the teachers at Jordan are going to do, and at Washington Prep and at Fremont. It’s already happened, and Joel [Rubin] reported on it, after the original revolt, is that there are schools lined up, like the planes lined up at LAX, hovering over the city, that want to do this. We don’t have the capacity to serve all those schools. We’ve had to do a lot of pushing off those teacher collectives that want to do it. But we sure as hell want to show you how to do it, and teach you to do the same thing, and help you with your the back office, and we’ll give you our union contract. But the idea that this is really some market share issue, that we want ten more schools to prove it... We will keep doing what we’re doing until the district looks like us. I think Locke will be, will create a demand. I think it really will. I think there was a demand for it when those teachers revolted that day. That was just... The calls that came in the next week or so were just bizarre. I mean, chapter chairs. It’s not like it was just the lunatic fringe of teachers; this was the front line of UTLA’s defense. Joel Rubin: Assuming it takes a year or two for the district to, even, you know, for that break to happen, what is your capacity? Could you do another high school the year after Locke? Barr: Yeah. Rubin: And another one after that? Barr: Yeah. Lisa Richardson: Could you do a Santee? Barr: Absolutely. If you have the... See, the reason why, in some ways it seems humongous with, at some point, you look at Locke and Watts and say: My God, look at all the problems. In another sense, especially after this — this was the hardest year of Green Dot. We doubled in size, and we took in attendance area. That was pretty hard. Can we do that with the advantage of not being in the facility business? Which takes up 80% of the bandwidth of the executive team of this organization — converting crappy churches into marginal classrooms is really hard. The C.U.P. process, I mean, tenant improvements — can you get that on time? I mean it’s an insane amount of work. And also pulling off what we’re pulling off — all of that with 30% less money. So we have meetings where the teachers want this, the teachers want that. I think we’ve come pretty close to hitting our ceiling for potential on the one-off charter schools. I think the average is 700 [API scores]; I think we could probably get to 750, if we stopped running.

But the potential of actually being out of the facility business and really focusing all our energy on taking Sandy’s department and tripling it. Taking all our real estate people out of the organization, and getting all those resources for the things they want on the wish list. My God, the potential. But that can only happen with a district partnership like Locke, or the district evolving into more of a Green Dot model. Tim: What are the, uh — this is the second pie-in-the-sky question. I mean, at the same time this is happening we have the mayor’s, uh, families or clusters or whatever they are — archipelagos of schools... And uh... Barr: I think the dirtier version is the cluster-(blank) of schools... Tim: ... So this, uh, that possibly might, uh, might lead to some other model of how to do things. So what are we going to see, what’s the district gonna look like in ten years? Barr: Oh, it’s gonna, it’s gonna be... Tim: Other than being smaller, what’s gonna be the difference... Barr: No, it’s gonna be 1500 autonomous, 500-seat-small schools built in cluster forms. So what I mean by that is, every high school will have 10 autonomous schools on it. Every middle school will. The problem will be: what happens when you don’t fail half the kids, the growth. And what happens when the middle class comes back. What happens when Ivanhoe parents stick around for Thomas Starr and into Marshall, instead of fleeing into the private schools. So I think the district uses all these levels around 725 or 750 [thousand]; that actually should be 1.1 or 1.2 [million] if you look at it. Which is a great problem. So the question then becomes where do you put everybody? So we’ve got to go up and down, not horizontal anymore. We’ve got to go up. And we’ve misused property, we’ve got to eliminate a lot of the portables and we’ve got to be more open about two-acre small schools. So Locke is a perfect example. Locke will be a 20-acre school, but we’ve got to have five or six schools around it, just like USC when it grows you’ve got to take up more space. But you don’t have to do it in 20-acre blotches. You can be more creative about that. Like in downtown: The first seven floors of every building in downtown L.A. are unusable because they don’t have views. You need to put tax breaks in to put schools in those things. When you build a downtown it can’t just be with the idea that 25-year-old hipsters are going to revitalize a downtown area; it’s that you actually build some life into these areas so people can send their kids to school. I don’t know if you remember: When Jerry Brown became mayor of Oakland, he had this whole idea about how do you get 10,000 people to move to downtown Oakland? He didn’t do it just by developing lofts, but you’ve gotta build schools. And you’re starting to see a little of the retail starting to come back down here, but nobody’s talking about schools downtown. Where are these people gonna send their kids? Tim: Well hipsters don’t like kids. Barr: I was an old hipster in Gilmore’s building, and then, that was really cute until, you know, my wife got pregnant and then you go: Well, we’re on Skid Row, there’s $15 burgers across the street at Pete’s and uh, this isn’t a great neighborhood. And we fled to Silver Lake. So what’s gonna sustain that growth? So you’ve just got to be creative about it, and it’s, what’s frustrating about it -- that’s why I’m encouraged by the mayor’s engagement with it, this mayor’s, is that you’ve just got to have all those people thinking about it, talking about it together. But I think the hardest part is getting the district to, you know, to play well with others. They just haven’t for a long time; they’ve just been their own little...cluster. Howard Blume: Would the mayor be better off if he put all his effort into the Green Dot model rather than what he’s doing? Barr: Well I think you’re going to see a lot of the Green Dot model in what he’s doing. I think it’s, I mean, where else do we go? It’s just, there’s something very exciting about having a mayor-- Blume: He mentioned the Belmont pilot [which Barr had criticized earlier in the meeting], is what the mayor mentioned as his model. Barr: Well I think he said a model. He mentioned a few models. But you know, I think you’ve got Ray Cortinez, and you’ve got Marshall. And you’ve got the mayor, and you’ve got an election coming up. So you’re not going to go recreate, you know, Green Dot for the school district. So I think there are going to potential partnership opportunities for all of us to work together. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re heavily involved in Gompers, and the elementary and middle schools that feed into Locke. You know, we’ve had some preliminary conversations about that. I think Green Dot’s back office will probably be involved in a lot of — I would assume, because I don’t know where else you’re going to find that kind of capacity. The district has got categorical bean counters that, who can’t move fast, as we’ve seen over and over again. It’s hard to recreate. So you’re not going to get success unless you streamline.