Green Dot Public Schools Chairman Steve Barr steps down

Kris Krüg/Flickr

Green Dot Public Schools Chairman Steve Barr at Pop!Tech 2009 in Camden, ME (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 license)

Nov. 20, 2009 | Adolfo Guzman-Lopez | KPCC

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Steve Barr, the founder and chairman of the influential charter school company Green Dot Public Schools, is stepping down from day to day activities and his position as chair. A spokeswoman said today Barr is leaving Green Dot to work on “national education issues.” She gave no other details about his departure.

Steve Barr wanted smaller schools with young, motivated teachers willing to experiment with lesson plans. He opened his first Green Dot campus nine years ago with only 140 high school students.

Barr’s view was that his charter schools – independent from school district control - could outperform traditional schools, especially in low-income neighborhoods.

Education researchers point out that charter schools like Green Dot attract motivated students with parents active in their children’s education. Green Dot says 80 percent of its ninth graders graduate – and the vast majority of those graduates get into four year colleges.


Parent involvement is up in area schools, UCLA education researcher John Rogers said, while L.A. Unified and other school districts now talk about a school's guiding principles not whether it should be run by the district or as a charter.

“All these changes, to some extent, were initiated because Steve Barr really pushed on the system and sought to open it up by establishing his group of charter schools,” Rogers said.

Rogers remembers Barr talking to him about opening a school in the mid 1990s. At the time Barr had a slew of Democratic party experience under his belt. In 1990 he co-founded the non-partisan "Rock The Vote" outreach campaign and hosted an inaugural ball for President Bill Clinton.

Barr used some of the political tactics he’d learned to successful effect as leader of Green Dot.

He’d often organize parent rallies outside L.A. Unified board meetings on the days of key policy votes. UCLA’s John Rogers says that was something new in L.A. education.

“Steve is a somewhat larger than life person and I think he brought a certain style of political mobilization into the educational sector," Rogers said. "I think some of the strengths of that was that it brought a lot of attention to education reform. At the same time it didn’t always highlight issues of teaching and learning perhaps as much as would have been important.”

Loyola Marymount University School of Education Dean Shane Martin, a Green Dot board member, will assume Barr’s role as chairman.


Comments

Jay Rehak

9 months, 2 weeks ago

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is there independent data available on all of the success of the "Green Dot" initiatives? Mr. Barr stepping down strikes me as odd. Why is he stepping down if his program is so successful unless he wants to "reap the benefits" of his great (not independently verified) successes?

K.Garner

9 months, 2 weeks ago

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for J Rehak---check out Standford University's study on Charters. Research is mixed at best. Eventually charters will be hit with all the lawsuits that assured equity in education in public schools. (Charters turn back the clock on those gains.) Currently, Special Education students and English Language learners are under-represented at charters. And when they do attend charters, these children perform worse on standardized tests than they do when attending traditional public schools.

KL

9 months, 2 weeks ago

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Although this is probably unrelated to his departure, Barr was found to have misused or insufficiently documented the use of $50,866 between January of 2004 and September of 2007 (check the corporation's 990 tax form, available at guidestar.com).
There's no official word on how this money was spent (Green Dot is a private corporation), but Alexander Russo reports Barr used this money "wining and dine teachers and funders." The report is clear that Barr did not use the money to enrich himself (ie embezzle), but the lack of transparency is certainly concerning.
Barr is required to repay Green Dot for the questionable spending. The due date for repaying this loan is December 31st, 2009 - coincidence?

Robert D. Skeels

9 months, 1 week ago

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To be sure, Steve Barr lost his position because of the missing $51K scandal, his embarrassing falling out with Michele Rhee during Green Dot's negotiations in D.C., and his constant wrangling with the one man at Green Dot who is greedier than he is -- Marco Petruzzi. The money grubbing Green Dot Public [sic] Schools machine would have discarded the Silverlake snake oil salesman completely, except their decade long public relations campaign portraying Steve Barr as the "friendly face" of the neoliberal dismantling of public education by corporate interests has been so successful, it would have harmed the corporate charter-voucher establishment in the long run. In the interest of "market share" Green Dot kept Barr on to serve as the corporate spokesperson for the sycophantic right wing business press and other corporate sociopaths to dote on him while they eliminate the last vestiges of the public commons, and give themselves bailout financed bonuses.

Steve Barr's corporate charter-voucher establishment in Los Angeles, like all EMO/CMO factory schools with their unelected and unaccountable boards, have been a paradigm of parent and community disenfranchisement. The recent definitive studies demonstrating both charter school racism http://bit.ly/8RRuaZ and CMO charter-voucher school discrimination and exclusivity toward children with special needs http://bit.ly/5LHf2j are further proof that the decades long failed experiment of the corporate CMO supporters must end.

Steve Barr's astro-turf parental "involvement," mentioned above, is highly suspect as well. Aside from unsavory incidents of class oppression and racism http://bit.ly/4e78Sm the Green Dot/LAPU/PR tactic of organizing parents in front of the Beaudry building was typified in that he allowed parents to count it against their contractual "community services" clause they signed to get their children into Barr's factory schools. In addition to paying massive salaries to executives like Ben Austin http://bit.ly/hjX2N Green Dot and its marketing division LAPU/PR http://bit.ly/2dYLLG is funded by nefarious billionaires like the Waltons, Gates, Milkens, and Broads, who dump millions into corporate CMO/EMO charters since it furthers their extreme right wing agenda and fuels their Milton Friedman cum Ayn Rand fantasies.

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