Risk-taking charter school operator Steve Barr is launching an effort through which parents would wrest political control of the L.A. school system from unions, school bureaucrats and other entrenched interests.
The plan is for parents to form chapters all over town and improve schools, one by one, using the growing leverage of the charter school movement. The goal is to unite a city of overworked and isolated parents with a brash promise:
If more than half of the parents at a school sign up, Barr's organizers say they will guarantee an excellent campus within three years. They call it the Parent Revolution.
With parents, they predict, they'll have the clout to pressure the Los Angeles Unified School District to improve schools. They'll also have petitions, which Barr and his allies will keep at the ready, to start charter schools. If the district doesn't deliver, targeted neighborhoods could be flooded with charters, which aren't run by the school district. L.A. Unified would lose enrollment, and the funding would go to the charters instead of to the district.
Based on past performance, the school district would be challenged to meet parents' heightened expectations, Barr said. "We're not trying to prove the district is doing things wrong. But our kids are at stake."
The initiative is the latest envelope-pushing project for the publicity-savvy Barr and his Green Dot Public Schools. The Los Angeles-based nonprofit operates 10 local charters as well as Locke High, the district's first traditional high school to be taken over by a private operator.
Despite this milestone, Barr and his lieutenants have expressed frustration with what Green Dot can accomplish on its own. They also wanted to make more of the fledgling Parents Union, a Green Dot spinoff that Barr envisioned as an independent, assertive alternative to the PTA.
"You can't just have meetings," Barr said. "Unless you're driving a tangible outcome, you're just setting people up."
The three-year pledge was conceived by Marco Petruzzi, a business consultant who was a Green Dot board member and now is Barr's chief executive. "What was really missing was a value proposition for parents," Petruzzi said. "If you do this, you get this."
The initiative is directed by attorney Ben Austin, a longtime political consultant who has reshaped the Parents Union, which has a mailing list of thousands but a much smaller active core. So far, the Parents Union has been a useful but limited political vehicle for causes Barr supported, such as Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's unsuccessful attempt to win control of the school district.
