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.

Yolie Flores Aguilar email colluding with charter school executives

“PLEASE don’t forward this email. simply state it in your own words.”—Yolie Flores Aguilar

This email was addressed to some 60 individuals, including myself, on February 4, 2017. While its authenticity is not absolutely certain, I have researched the email addresses in the email body and they all seem legitimate. The content is consistent with the language that these charter school executives use both in public and internal conversations.

Yolie Flores Aguilar was an employee of the infamous Gates Foundation (of ALEC and Discovery Institute donation fame) while she sat on the LAUSD Board. She brought a resolution to give away new schools built with taxpayer dollars to privately managed charter school corporations.

Here Flores colludes with several well paid charter executives to avoid public mention that her resolution (inappropriately named Public [sic] School Choice) was essentially a real estate bonanza for the lucrative charter school sector. Marco Petruzzi and Ben Austin of Green Dot/Parent Revolution, Judy Burton of Alliance, Mike Piscal of ICEF are the big names in this secret missive. The lot of them have been plagued by scandals, but most of them are still profiting mightily from the charter industry.

Flores is currently running for U.S. Congress. If she's capable of this sort of duplicity and malfeasance while on a school board, imagine her in another position of power to further serve her corporate masters. Arch-reactionary Betsy DeVos would love to have more neoliberal Democrats that support her school privatization agenda of charters-vouchers. DeVos already has corporatists like Corey Booker in her thrall, Yolie Flores would be no different.

The second document should help authenticate this email chain. It's an email from Dr. Danny Weil with Yolie Flores Aguilar's <itsyolie@sbcglobal.net> email address in the to field. I recall she had a blog by the same name (i.e. "itsyolie"), and remember seeing emails from her from that address back in that era.

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Yolie Flores Aguilar email colluding with charter school executives by Robert D. Skeels on Scribd

Dr. Danny Weil email with Yolie Flores Aguilar's <itsyolie@sbcglobal.net> email address by Robert D. Skeels on Scribd

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)

Open letter to Ellie Herman, or how Green Dot's Marco Petruzzi's special education policies hurt everyone including their own administrators

"It is not legally or morally acceptable that these so-called "schools of choice" that are concentrated in urban communities and supported with public funds, should be permitted to operate as segregated learning environments where students are more isolated by race, socioeconomic class, disability, and language than the public school district from which they were drawn." — COPAA

Wall Street privatization darling Marco Petruzzi (above) led a beleaguered Green Dot through charges of racism, embezzlement, poor performance, and even cheating. He has claimed that his lucrative charter chain doesn't receive money from rich guys, meanwhile foundations give them millions. He has gone beyond denying that Green Dot discriminates against special needs students, he takes pride in it.

July 11, 2014

Ms. Herman:

I occasionally read your posts with skepticism. Typically, even when you seem to almost reach the correct conclusion about an education topic, you find a way to ignore your own evidence. In the end nearly all your pieces cheerlead for the lucrative charter industry, and provide cover for the biggest enemies of public education.

My interest was piqued today with a piece you wrote on a Green Dot Corporate Charter principal stepping down from one of the schools they seized from the public system. Here is the passage that caught my eye:

Nat was taken aback to find that 18% of the students were in Special Ed. "We thought they were overidentified. Turns out they were underidentified." When I ask why there were so many kids with special needs, he's not sure. Part of it, he thinks, is that the number of kids in foster care may be a factor, because foster kids are often moved from school to school, not staying long enough for their issues to be identified. "It's just conjecture, but kids in foster care, they're often in foster care because their parents were on drugs or couldn't take care of them, well, are you more likely to be unable to take care of a kid with special needs and behavior problems?"

For years those of us engaged in social justice activism have criticized the corporate charter chains—Green Dot Corporation has always been a particularly egregious example—for under-identifying special needs children. I've spent years advocating for families struggling for Special Education (SPED) equity, working closely with the former chairperson of the LAUSD SPED Community Advisory Committee. Marco Petruzzi, the erstwhile hedge fund manager running Green Dot Corporation, has gone as far as to attack those of us that have brought up this issue. He has called us liars (among other things), and gone on to say that Green Dot's SPED percentage are low because LAUSD somehow over-identifies SPED. The mendacious corporate executive stated that the entities' outside of Green Dot "over identifying" SPED children is—this will be hard to comprehend for any reasonable person—is a "civil rights" issue. That's right, the wealthy CEO of Green Dot is on record saying just that. Here's one instance of Petruzzi's convoluted corporate thoughts on the matter [1]:

our track record serving kids speaks for itself for those who want to look at the real numbers, but is a very technical issue and this is not the forum for it. For example, the special Ed issue is fraught with misunderstanding and manipulation of data. LAUSD has high numbers because it over identifies African American and Latino boys relative to many other urban Districts, a civil rights issue, not something to be proud. It also has high numbers because it doesn't serve kids well and thus exits them from special Ed in the typologies of special Ed that can be addressed. It serves special Ed kids in over restrictive environments. Anyway, I realize we will never agree with certain folks, particularly those employed by the current system and that view us as a job threat.

Ms. Herman, I appreciate your post as it bears testament to what many of us have always said about Green Dot and other corporate charter chains. Public schools also under-identify SPED as well, but unlike the well heeled executive quoted above, nobody boasts about underserving them. Petruzzi seemingly makes it a point of pride that Green Dot SPED IEPs are significantly lower than that of public schools. Green Dot has a long record of avoiding obligations to SPED students [2]. Moreover Petruzzi has a long record making outrageous statements, like when he told the families of Animo Justice that Green Dot Corporation doesn't get any money from "rich guy[s]". [3] Must have been all those years he worked for Mitt Romney's sister company, Bain & Company, Inc.

I agree with you and Mr. Pickering on the SPED issue. Since Green Dot Corporation, like all corporate charters, is about bottom lines rather than education, that will never change. Ironically Petruzzi is right to frame the issue in terms of students' civil rights, but he and his fellow six-figure profiteers are the ones violating them.

Advocating Public Education and Social Justice

Robert D. Skeels ****@ucla.edu

"Problem posing education does not and cannot serve the interests of the oppressor" — Paulo Freire

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[1] http://venice.patch.com/groups/schools/p/space-for-a-new-building-at-walgrove-elementary-likel839b5a4cd8
[2] http://www.scribd.com/doc/100558792/Green-Dot-SPED-Binder
[3] http://rdsathene.blogspot.com/2010/04/advocating-public-education-roundup.html the video in which Petruzzi claims Green Dot gets no outside funding is here: http://youtu.be/kbtUUBS3eO0 the transcribed quote is "We have no money. We're a nonprofit. We don't have a rich guy that gives us extra."

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.