"Government ought to be all outside and no inside. . . . Everybody knows that corruption thrives in secret places, and avoids public places, and we believe it a fair presumption that secrecy means impropriety."
-- - Woodrow Wilson
Dr. Hattie Mitchell, Founder and Principal of Crete Academy
(Image by Future Is Now Schools - Los Angeles) Details DMCA
State law requires the LAUSD Board to hold a public hearing before it can consider approving Barr's proposed charter. This was fulfilled at the same December 10, 2024, meeting that included hearings for the Crete Academy, Ivy Bound Academy, Watts Learning Center, four KIPP franchises, and three other publicly funded private schools requesting to renew their charters.
This opportunity for the public to participate in the process rang hollow as they were not given enough information to contribute to the conversation. At the very least, copies of the proposed charter should have been provided so that Barr's proposal could be understood and critiqued, but it was not. The school was only mentioned three times in the agenda and its supporting materials:
Approval of the charter will be considered at the February 11th Board Meeting and more extensive information has only now been released. The public now has a few days to review hundreds of pages of documentation and then bring their concerns to the Board during public comment. Assuming the Board bothers to listen, any questions raised will be meaningless unless they can be answered on the spot by Barr or Charter School Division Director Jose' Cole-Gutie'rrez. By law, the District has a set amount of time to respond to the charter request limiting the ability to table the vote until questions can be answered.
While information about the proposed charter had not been provided at the time of the hearing, plenty was already known about Barr and his past failures at "reforming" education. He has long favored privatizing public education and founded the Green Dot chain of charter schools in 1999 to help accomplish this task. He stayed with this organization until 2009."
Not content with using public funds to start his private schools, Barr used his political connections to take control of Locke High School. According to the "Future Is Now Schools-- Los Angeles" website, Barr's new charter school will be "built on the successful secondary Green Dot Public Schools model" established during this takeover. This alone should be grounds for rejecting the proposed charter as Green Dot's efforts to turn Locke's performance around have been widely recognized as a failure. Even the California Charter School Association (CCSA) gave the school a Statewide Rank of one out of ten in 2015 and 2016.
Barr says that one of the strategies employed by Green Dot was to restructure Locke "into eight small public schools." Four of these were so successful that they were eventually shut down by Green Dot, Animo Locke II, Animo Locke III, and Animo Locke Tech after they failed the 2012 WASC accreditation.
Proving how good Barr is at failure, his previous attempt to open a Future Is Now Charter School, the school closed before it could open. The Charter School is shown on the State's school directory as opening and closing on the same day. Its charter was revoked by its authorizer, LACOE, when it failed to enroll the 50 students promised in its charter, jeopardizing its financial health. It was clear to the same authorizer who allowed NVMI to operate for years despite well-documented operational deficiencies, that the school's financial position made it unlikely to meet its educational goals.
Closing failed charter schools costs taxpayers money as Betsy DeVos Republicans and their Democratic enablers have provided financial incentives for charter school operators to open new campuses. Since these grants are not tied to any measures of accountability, the investment vaporizes when a charter school closes its doors. Any Board Member who votes to approve a charter to be operated by someone with a proven track record of failure is not fulfilling their fiduciary duties to the taxpayers.
Carl Petersen is a parent advocate for public education, particularly for students with special education needs, who serves as the Education Chair for the Northridge East Neighborhood Council. As a Green Party candidate in LAUSD's District 2 School Board race, he was endorsed by Network for Public Education (NPE) Action. Dr. Diane Ravitch has called him "a valiant fighter for public schools in Los Angeles." For links to his blogs, please visit www.ChangeTheLAUSD.com. Opinions are his own.
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