STEVE Barr may not be a household name, but he is doing more these days to shake up public education in Los Angeles than anyone but Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
Barr is pushy, ambitious and determined to draw attention to his 10 charter high schools, publicly financed campuses that, in exchange for boosting student achievement, are given broad freedom to design their curriculum and to avoid many other restrictions set by school districts.
He believes they should be the model for transforming the nation's second-largest school district, saving a couple hundred thousand minority students and enticing middle-class families back to city schools along the way.
Critics counter that Barr's early success is unsustainable and exaggerated. Barr, they say, is a politician in educator's clothing.
They might not be all wrong: Barr wants to be mayor too.
"My mission is systemic change," Barr said. "I don't want to be building charter school No. 49."
If there is a center to the fast-expanding charter universe, it is the Los Angeles Unified School District, which is home to more charters than any other district in the country. And in the midst of it all is the 47-year-old Barr, who in 1999 founded Green Dot Public Schools.
It would be easy to dismiss Barr as just a brash salesman, except that people keep listening to him. Philanthropist Eli Broad recently gave Green Dot $10.5 million to help the $34-million-a-year operation triple in size. (By 2010, Barr says, he can have one of every 10 high school students in the district enrolled in Green Dot.) About 1,000 parents, meanwhile, have joined a parents group he created to push his reform ideas in schools from Venice to East L.A. And Villaraigosa is using Green Dot ideas as part of his push to overhaul city schools.
"Steve Barr is a believer that one person can change the world," Villaraigosa said. "He is absolutely passionate about transforming our schools, and has put in the blood, sweat and tears to make it happen."
Barr has never worked as a principal or a teacher. Indeed, compared to the professional educators who typically start charter schools, he doesn't know much about teaching kids. Nevertheless, Green Dot high schools have posted some promising early results.
Located in some of the region's toughest, poorest Latino and black neighborhoods, Barr's schools are rooted in a common-sense assumption: All students can learn if they are held to high expectations and taught by capable, empowered teachers in small schools.
