Hollywood loves to glamorize the heroic inner-city teacher, and occasionally celebrates the heroic inner-city principal . But it can't be too long until it gives Big Screen treatment to the heroic inner-city charter school network leader. Jay Mathews surely hopes the KIPP guys will inspire such a movie (he successfully sold the rights to "Stand and Deliver ," and is no doubt trying to do the same for "Work Hard, Be Nice "). But put your hands on Douglas McGray's New Yorker profile of Green Dot 's Steve Barr , and tell me it doesn't read like an inspirational, action-packed script with a likeable maverick as the lead.
For wonks, the story of Barr's takeover of LA's Locke High School won't be new. But the colorful details (especially about Barr) are priceless. There's Ted Mitchell, quoting Barr (slightly incorrectly, it turns out) calling the LA teachers union president a "pig f&#ker." There's the story of him taking a group of Latino and black kids surfing, only to discover that half of them can't swim. And there's this:
[Barr] drives a decommissioned police car, a Crown Victoria with floodlights, which he bought from a friend, the former Fox executive who launched the network's reality show "Cops." ("It's faster than anything on the road," he told me, and when he wants to change lanes "people move out of the way.") He met his wife, an Alaskan radio reporter twenty years his junior, at a Burning Man festival seven years ago, and married her in Las Vegas three weeks later. And this is how he talks about working with what is arguably the country's most troubled big-city school system: "You ever see that movie ???Man on Fire,' with Denzel Washington? There's a scene in the movie where the police chief of Mexico City gets kidnapped by Denzel Washington. He wakes up, he's on the hood of his car under the underpass, in his boxers, his hands tied. Denzel Washington starts asking him questions, he's not getting the answers he wants, so he walks up away from him, and leaves a bomb stuck up his ass." Barr laughed. ???I don't want to blow up L.A.U.S.D.'s ass. But what will it take to get this system to serve who they need to serve? It's going to take that kind of aggressiveness."
For free-market types, and even for charter school devotees, though, the narrative will disappoint, as Barr makes it clear that charters and choice are hardly the answer (they are merely a means to an end, the end being the transformation of big, lousy urban schools). Nor does he think real change can happen without the involvement of the unions. ("I don't see how you tip a system with a hundred percent unionized labor without unionized labor.")
Barr is a revolutionary, but he might be going mainstream. The article reports on his conversations with Arne Duncan, who seems intent on steering a lot of stimulus cash Green Dot's way.
Duncan asked Barr what it would take to break up and remake thousands of large failing schools. "One, you have to reconstitute," Barr told him--that is, fire everyone and make them reapply or transfer elsewhere in the district. "Arne didn't seem to flinch at that," he said. "Second, if we can figure out a national union partnership, we can take away some of the opposition." Duncan asked Barr if he could persuade Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, to support the idea. "I'd love to do that," she told Barr, but she also expressed concerns. "She said, ???I can't be seen as coming in and firing all these teachers.'" So they talked about alternatives, like transferring teachers or using stimulus money for buyouts.
So watch out for Green Dot National in the near future, and Green Dot, The Movie just a few years after that.
