Reflecting on Green Dot’s Disastrous Locke Takeover

“Green Dot came and made it into more of a jail.” — Chris

My history of opposing the Green Dot Charter School Corporation back when I was an activist is well known. On Schools Matter alone there’s over a dozen pieces I wrote on them.

These days, as an educational rights attorney, I’ve successfully litigated against the corporate charter chain on a few occasions. Today I had a legal research assignment that involved looking up information on them and I came across this academic paper:

Taken Over: The Story of the Locke High School Takeover Through a Qualitative Study of Student Voice

by Loyola Marymount University’s Joshua Michael Beardall.

I only had a few minutes to skim through the paper, but it features some excellent feedback on how the students felt about the hostile take-over of a once public school by the corporate charter chain. Written through a Critical Race Theory (“CRT”) lens, the paper takes a student-centric view of what Green Dot did. It also exposes the intrinsic racism of Green Dot and its carceral, white supremacist campuses. Passage like this confirm what activists have said for years:

“The students also believed that the community and school did not interact and that the school was in opposition to the community surrounding it…”

I recommend people check the paper out.

Reflecting back on the hostile Locke takeover, a couple of things come to mind. First, the takeover was, and still is, a disaster. The Green Dot Corporation had to restructure Locke a number of times as their failed management and policies played out. Second, Green Dot, which boasted it would dramatically improve student scores on racist and classist standardized tests, actually set records for having so many schools at the very bottom — including four Locke HS branches in the bottom 25 SAT scores in 2015.

Ironically, the well-healed, white executives running Green Dot at the time of the take-over boasted that they would “turn the school around” and make it a “great school” in short order. Boastful Marco Petruzzi claimed they’d do it in three years. Braggart Steve Barr said they’d do it in one. Neither prediction by the two non-educators came true. Green Dot has run Locke for more than a decade now. Where’s all the compliant press parroting bromides of how Green Dot “cracked the code”?

Petruzzi was a hedge fund manager prior to running the corporate charter school behemoth Green Dot. His lack of background in pedagogy showed in everything he did. Today he’s a furniture salesman. Truth is, Petruzzi’s always been a furniture salesman. This passage by one of his vendors sums up the real essense of the “education reformer,” Marco Petruzzi:

“…Marco Petruzzi, is an ex-Bain partner who joined Dovetail in 2018 to increase sales and profitability and overhaul their physical and technology infrastructure. Marco appreciates working with analysts that can make short work of thorny Excel problems, as well as going beyond spreadsheets to assist in the technical complexities of an ERP database migration.”

KPCC did a piece on how the Green Dot Charter Corporation did not meet its promises with Locke. This passage is instructive:

“Yet for all these improvements, Green Dot has also found out just how difficult it is to act on its initial promises. Locke High School's graduation rate — at 55.9 percent — is one of the lowest of any comprehensive high school in L.A. Unified, charter or otherwise.”

Caught this during further search: ‘The Myth of Charter Schools’ Marco Petruzzi, reply by Diane Ravitch.

The schools Steve Barr made: Green Dot Charters post NINE of lowest fifty SAT scores

"The lowest-performing, based on test scores, is the large Green Dot chain." — Los Angeles Times

Beleaguered Green Dot schools have dealt with charges of racism, embezzlement, poor performance, and even cheating. Green Dot Founder Steve Barr created a mythology about his corporate charters that persists even today. Barr photo http://www.flickr.com/photos/kk/
CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Corporate profiteer Steve Barr is in the news again. Now he is mulling a run at Los Angeles Mayor. Barr calls himself an "educational innovator" despite having no background in either education or pedagogy. While his attempts to "turn around schools" have been epic failures in New Orleans and Los Angeles, his Green Dot Corporate Charter Chain is frequently held up as a measure of his so-called success. Except they're anything but successful.

Green Dot Corporate Charter Schools hold the dubious record of NINE of the lowest fifty average SAT scores in Los Angeles County for 2015. The billionaire backed charter chain, founded by corporate executive Barr and run by hedge fund manager Marco Petruzzi, group of SAT bottom dwellers leads all other charter chains in comprising 18% of the fifty worst. These schools were (lower numbers are worst performing):

• 4. Animo Locke Charter High School #1 (Los Angeles): SAT Composite 1033
• 12. Animo Watts Charter High (Los Angeles): SAT Composite 1092
• 14. Animo Locke Charter High School #2 (Los Angeles): SAT Composite 1104
• 16. Alain Leroy Locke High (Los Angeles): SAT Composite 1107
• 19. Animo Ralph Bunche High (Los Angeles): SAT Composite 1117
• 25. Animo Locke Technology High (Los Angeles): SAT Composite 1129
• 26. Animo Oscar De La Hoya Charter High (Los Angeles): SAT Composite 1129
• 34. Animo Jackie Robinson High (Los Angeles): SAT Composite 1150
• 50. Animo South Los Angeles Charter (Los Angeles): SAT Composite 1180

The privately managed charter chain's marketing slogan is "…all students graduate prepared for college, leadership and life." These dismal SAT scores would seem to indicate otherwise. For context 1500 is considered the minimum threshold for college readiness, while 2052 was the composite average for Freshmen accepted into UCLA in 2013.

Barr has never been able to get his own house together at his lucrative charter chain. Why would we trust him meddling with our public schools?

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(Source: LATimes accessed 20160210)

Shirlee Smith: Parent Revolution? Not really

"The idea of the Parent Revolution is to say fuck you." — Ben Austin (Executive Director, Parent Revolution) [1]


Shirlee Smith's brilliant essay on the so-called Parent Revolution (née Los Angeles Parents Union) is factual, cogent, and strikes at the heart of the astroturf phonies' real agenda. She exposes Ben Austin, Pat DeTemple, Gabe Rose and their little band of privatization profiteers, and also lists some of their plutocratic funders.

Parent Revolution? Not really

Originally published at http://www.pasadenasun.com/news/opinion/tn-pas-0916-commentsmith,0,7623274.story yet now somehow mysteriously gone.

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NOTES
[1] http://blogs.uscannenberg.org/neontommy/2010/03/trigger-law-gives-parent-revol.html this one sided pro-privatization article quotes Austin as saying "The idea of the parent revolution is to say fuck you." While we already knew that was how Austin felt about our communities, poor people, and people of color, to hear it coming from the wealthy white charter profiteer's mouth was quite startling. This footnote was first published in Ben Austin's Biography.

Perfidious Petruzzi calls for accurate evaluations of Green Dot Charter Corporation?

"The lowest-performing, based on test scores, is the large Green Dot chain." — Los Angeles Times

Wall Street privatization darling Marco Petruzzi (above) led a beleaguered Green Dot through charges of racism, embezzlement, poor performance, and now cheating. Green Dot Founder Steve Barr (below) created a mythology about his corporate charters that persists even today. Barr photo http://www.flickr.com/photos/kk/
CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

There are some serious issues with Howard Blume and Sandra Poindexter's article entitled "L.A. Unified bests reform groups in most cases, data shows," but when the charter charlatans exposed in the piece start to foam at the mouth with hubris and hypocrisy, they need to be shown up for what they really are. The corporate crooks at Green Dot wasted no time writing an audacious fact-free response to the Los Angeles Times piece, ironically entitled "A call for accuracy in evaluating school progress."

Their amateurish essay is replete with sloppy prose and is the epitome of the corporate reformers' need to constantly shift metrics in order to fulfill their only goal — money making. Green Dot corporation, namely their well heeled CEO Marco Petruzzi, insisted that they would not only "turn" Locke around, but claimed that if we gave them three years, they would give us a great school. By anyone's reckoning they haven't delivered, and now they're moving the rhetorical goal-post in order to protect their powerful special interests. Showing even more hubris than Petruzzi was Green Dot's founder, Steve Barr, who boasted "We can turn around Locke High School in a year."

Let's be clear, the non-educators at Green Dot are claiming Retention, Rigor, and Results, but for Fall 2010 Locke Senior High Admissions into the California State University system: 88% were NOT proficient in mathematics and an astonishing 98% were NOT proficient in English. That's rigor? That's the result of A-G course preparation? So they get millions in extra funding, weed out most of their students with disabilities and students with disciplinary problems, but still only manage to get two percent of their students ready for college level English? Only a former hedge fund manager could be so mendacious. Those dismal proficiency scores are just Locke's dubious results, Green Dot's other "results" include three schools with the lowest 100 APIs in Los Angeles County. They also feature five schools with the lowest 35 average SAT scores in the County. Green Dot's wealthy white CEO asks us to "draw accurate conclusions" about his corporate charter empire, but wants us to ignore an overwhelming preponderance of evidence in the process.

While social justice activists are opposed to using test scores for punitive and other high stakes decision making, we have to bear in mind that Green Dot themselves uses these selfsame metrics to increase their market share and hostilely seize public schools like Locke. Suddenly, when those metrics don't favor them, Green Dot has spin galore about why they should be able to pick their own methodology for comparisons. How convenient for the lucrative corporate charter-voucher sector. Yet when we do the same for public schools we're "making excuses," "lowering expectations," or pandering to a chimerical "status quo." I recently called out another corporate reformer on this same double standard.

When we look at the scamsters and snake oil salesmen of Green Dot Charter Corporation, especially in the light of their recent cheating episodes, we need to understand that they will say and do anything to increase market share while continuing to "educate" poor children on the cheap. Given the not-so-rigorous results above, Green Dot's CEO should ignominiously resign, their unelected corporate board should be dissolved, and their schools should be converted to public schools within our school district. It's shameful that Green Dot is held up as a model, and it's unconscionable that the U.S. Secretary of Education Duncan went as far as to say that "they cracked the code" to turning around ailing schools. Green Dot has cracked the code to duping the public and does one thing well — it shovels money into the pockets of those who already had money to begin with. Our communities deserve far better, and we want democratically run schools, not privately run 501C3s run by incompetent businessmen.

How Green Dot Bought Signatures and Support

Posted at YouTube:

Maria Guadalupe Mena of Garfield High School:
"Community members stated they were offered monetary compensation [by Green Dot] in exchange for their signature on a petition."

"The day of the 'Public School Choice' vote, Parent Revolution and Parent Union representatives informed us they were court mandated to support the rally to work off their community service".

"We're unhappy that reform decisions have been dictated to our community by billionaire philanthropists [who]...are funding...Inner City Struggle, Parent Revolution, Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles Learning Collaboratives to push their corporate agenda onto the schools."