A tall girl, her hair pulled back tightly in a ponytail, reached up to tape a bright hand-painted poster ("Valentines Day Candygrams") above a row of lockers.
"You're showing your butt crack," a boy walking by said.
"So? Everyone has one."
"I don't."
"Idiot." She rolled her eyes. The boy looked back over his shoulder and grinned.
Locke's hallways are now filled with these handmade signs--for dances, tryouts, movie nights, college tours. They used to be banned; kids would vandalize them. Instead, there was graffiti. "Everywhere you walked," Shannan Burrell, a junior, said. "About six out of ten, it was gang tags."
Shannan is curvy and baby-faced, with rosy brown skin. Her hair was in a bright-purple wrap. She lived nearby, with her mother, in a yellow house, close enough to walk to school in the morning (keeping quiet, looking straight ahead) but outside Locke's immediate neighborhood, which was a good thing. "It's dirty," she said. "Gangbangers out 24/7." She wears a necklace that spells out the name "Jerome" in curling, glittering script. He was her best friend, before he was shot and killed around the corner, when she was in ninth grade. "It was random," she said softly. "He was a schoolboy, for real."
When she entered Locke, three years ago, she liked it. "It was fun--wandering around the halls, around the campus," she said. "Just wilding out." She'd drop into classroom after classroom, looking for friends. "Like 'Come outside real quick,' " she said, laughing. "Quick" usually meant for the rest of class. "And we wouldn't just go to our lunch--we'd go to all of them," she said. "Why are we going to go to class if nobody ever says nothing?" But in her sophomore year she started getting in fights. "I felt like, at Locke, you have to earn your reputation," she explained. "And I earned mine, after like my third fight. But then, after that, it seemed like girls wanted to challenge me. So it got worse." She fought once or twice a week. Her grades were terrible.
She was eating with the football players, in the shade of the quad's only tree, when the riot began. Suddenly, everyone around her was fighting. A boy she'd never seen before punched her. "I wanted to cry, bad," she said. "But it ain't inside me to cry." Instead, she fought back. A few weeks later, she left her mother's house and moved in with her adult sister, about an hour away. But in the fall she decided to go back to Locke. She'd heard that there were going to be changes.
Old-timers and union loyalists who left Locke after the takeover insisted that Green Dot would find a way to weed out problem kids. Others, such as Cubias, worried that uniforms and the promise of tougher discipline would simply keep bad kids away. But teachers and administrators went out into the neighborhood to visit hundreds of parents and students and encourage them to reënroll. Eighty-five per cent of Locke students returned. (In a normal year, only seventy per cent would come back from summer break.) That meant hundreds more than either Green Dot or the city had projected.
"When I got to school, I was laughing at everyone else--I was, like, 'Ha, you got on a uniform,' " Shannan said. "They're, like, 'Ha, you got on a uniform, too!' " Green Dot split the incoming ninth grade into five new small schools, like the schools around Jefferson. Three of them ended up in buildings off campus; the other two were in Locke's prefabricated units, walled off by tall black fences. Then they split the upper three grades into two academies, one for each wing of Locke's original building. Each school had its own bell schedule, its own lunch period, its own entrance, and its own color polo shirt. Shannan drew white.
Locke's teachers were all dismissed and asked to reapply. Only about thirty per cent got their jobs back. Shannan's English teacher, Mr. Sully, was one of them. "He just, he a nice teacher," she said. "He keep you on your toes. If you ain't doing something, he'll make you do something." Dozens of kids told me this--that teachers make them do stuff now, whether they want to or not. Almost immediately, Shannan stopped ditching. For one thing, she couldn't get away with it anymore. ("They don't play," she said.) She stopped fighting, too.
Sully passed a new novel out to Shannan's class--"a book called 'The Bluest Eye,' " Shannan said. She was unimpressed with the cover and the first page. "I was like, 'Mr. Sully, this book about to be stooopid.' And he said, 'What did I say?' And I said, 'O.K., I won't use "stupid," but this book is about to be not interesting.' He sat me down and had a strong conversation with me." She agreed to give it a few pages. Then the character Claudia, a fighter, made her first appearance. "I hear her talk about beating up a girl name Rosemary, a little white girl. I was like, 'Oh, I'm going to read this!' " She giggled. "It's turned out to be a good book," she said. "That's the funny thing."
"There is no secret curriculum-and-instruction sauce at Green Dot at all," Don Shalvey said. "Steve hires good people. They're just doing old-school schooling."
Shannan doesn't like every class. Physics, she said, is boring. So is a test-preparation and college-readiness class, mandatory for most Green Dot students. But she tries to do the work now. When I asked her why, she thought about it for a long time. "Honestly, it didn't matter how you did before," she said. "Wasn't nobody really looking at Locke kids"--meaning to go to college. That's not true, of course, but it felt true to Shannan. "Now, if I make a bad grade, I'm like, 'Please, can I make it up?' "
There are problems that Green Dot can't fix on its own, however. According to Cubias, at least forty per cent of Locke's students come from single-parent households. "Another fifteen per cent are in foster care," he said. Green Dot requires parents to get involved at school, a minimum of thirty-five hours a year, but they can't make every parent a good influence. (Recently, after a girl tangled with a classmate, an assistant principal called the girl's mother, and when the woman showed up she started screaming at the other student.) Security can stop neighborhood gangs from tagging the halls or hoisting couches up to Locke's roof, which was a hangout last year, but they can't keep gangs out of kids' lives.
I made plans to attend classes with Shannan the next day, but when I arrived at her first-period class, English with Mr. Sully, she wasn't there. I called her house after school. The phone line was dead. (Her mother, a quiet, serious woman, has been out of work for at least two years. Her father has been in jail since around the time Shannan was a toddler.) When we finally talked, her voice was so flat that I didn't recognize it.
"I'm not going to be in school this week," she said. "I have to take care of family business."
"Did someone get hurt?" I asked.
"Yes."
"Was it a car accident or something?"
"Much worse," she said. "It's not something I want to talk about." Several days passed before she returned to classes.
There remain problems to address inside Locke, too. Fall semester was difficult. "We made so many mistakes," Cubias said. September was almost wholly devoted to coping with the crush of unexpected students. Administrators struggled to find good teachers who were still on the job market. Clubs and activities suffered. "It's hard to see incremental changes," a new principal, Veronica Coleman, said. "That turned into some low-level frustration for both students and teachers."
Sully told me that Locke is significantly calmer, and administrators are more present. And Green Dot got rid of the teachers who did little for students. But the takeover also chased away some good, experienced staff. Locke's overwhelmingly new and mostly young faculty members are learning how to work together. Sully still has problems with chronic truancy. He still sees kids out of uniform. And when Locke's test scores, their first since the takeover, come back this fall they are almost certain to be the lowest among Barr's schools. Sully guesses that the school might see a small bounce, but anything more than that would surprise him. Kids in Locke's upper grades have spent as many as three years in one of the city's worst academic environments. And, for the first time at a Green Dot school, there is no lottery process for admission. There is no waiting list. Locke is serving every kid in the neighborhood, including ones whose parents, in another neighborhood, would never research alternatives to the big traditional school. "Every child who is in his other schools is there because they have an advocate," Cortines said. "Not so at Locke. They took the whole population."
Even security remains a challenge. Green Dot blanketed the schoolyard with guards from a private security firm, club-bouncer burly, carrying handguns and pepper spray. Gangs have nowhere near the profile they once did, and fights, once a daily occurrence, are rare. Still, in mid-April, a student was shot, across the street, just before first period. And guards have occasionally displayed a heavy hand. Twice this year, they pepper-sprayed students; in both cases, Cubias said, they should have been able to cool the kids down before it came to that, but they were trained to secure facilities, not to supervise adolescents.
Yet, when I wandered around campus during lunch periods and between classes, looking for disgruntled kids, I never found any.
"The whole atmosphere is different," a Latino boy, sketching graffiti in a notebook, said. "The teachers pay more attention to you."
"You actually get through the lessons you're supposed to get through," Jamie, an African-American girl with straightened swept-back hair, said, as she picked at French fries with her friend Andrea.
"I noticed that, too," Andrea said.
"Last year, my grades got so bad--I got four D's! My will to get good grades improved," Jamie said.
"Will Locke be perfect?" Cortines asked. "I don't care. If they make mistakes, they'll find a way to do things differently. What we do in regular schools is keep doing the same thing, even if it doesn't work."
***
Barr is always talking about "the tribes." Union leaders and reformers, in his view, spend too much time fighting one another instead of finding common interests. Charter groups and unions agree on limiting central bureaucracy, giving teachers fewer students and more freedom, and concentrating funds in the classroom, but they mostly go at each other over tenure and the right to unionize. Ultimately, Barr's project isn't about fixing one broken school; he thinks he can resolve that impasse. His grander ambitions, as much as Green Dot's experience in Watts, are what brought him to Arne Duncan's office in March.
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.
Cortines has also agreed in principle to a partnership in Los Angeles. "We'll find out very quickly what he thinks a partnership is," Barr said. "I think a partnership is Locke, period." Federal money, Barr noted, and an alliance with the national union "will force Mr. Duffy"--the U.T.L.A. president--"to come along." Green Dot could take over as many as five Los Angeles schools in 2010, and maybe more.
This month, Barr expects to meet again with Weingarten and her staff and outline plans for a Green Dot America, a national school-turnaround partnership between Green Dot and the A.F.T. Their first city would most likely be Washington, D.C. "If we're successful there, we'll get the attention of a lot of lawmakers," Barr said.
There are risks for Barr in this kind of expansion. It will be months, and maybe years, before there's hard evidence about what Green Dot has accomplished at Locke. And that one takeover put a real strain on the organization. "If they were to take over another high school in Los Angeles, they could handle that," Steve Seleznow, the deputy director of education for the Gates Foundation, said. "I'm not sure they have the capacity to do five at once." Then he paused. "I'm sure Steve has the appetite for it," he added, and laughed. Barr's impatience and his willingness to overextend himself are a bigger part of Green Dot's institutional culture than any theory of education.
In the meantime, Barr and his supporters continue to campaign. On a recent morning, outside 135th Street Elementary School, in Gardena, near Watts, a gregarious woman with a streak of gray through her black curls, wearing a Los Angeles Parents Union sweatshirt, passed a sheet of paper to a young Latino man in a Sears Appliance Repair jacket. He was accompanied by two little girls with matching Hannah Montana backpacks. "Would you like to sign a petition to transform Perry Middle School and Gardena High School?" she asked. She waved down a car that showed no sign of stopping, and bent over at the window when it did. "Do you have time to sign my petition to transform Perry Middle School and Gardena High School?" she asked. Immediately, the driver pulled over. Organizers are now in many neighborhoods, targeting elementary schools, telling parents that they have time to blow up and rebuild their middle schools and high schools before their kids enroll.
Everyone signed up. It's like that whenever she goes out. "People know something is wrong," she told me. "But they think it's their kids. Or it's their neighborhood. Or it's because they're poor. If we have to, we'll build a whole bunch of little charters around the school and take the students," the woman said, loud enough for half the block to hear. "We're going to get the change one way or another."
http://www.newamerica.net/publications/articles/2009/instigator_13230
