Green Dot Public Schools

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.

"Sometimes they don't see how things are." -- Handwritten student posting on a bulletin board at Locke High School, explaining why the media don't always tell the truth about inner-city schools It requires a second or even a third look at Locke High School to discern the changes this fall, one year after it was taken over by charter operator Green Dot Public Schools. The uniforms are still an ensemble of chinos and polo shirts. The teenagers still gather in the quad for lunch.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said Tuesday he will push the school district to allow outside operators to bid for control of hundreds of campuses, a move he described as the centerpiece of education reform for his second term. The proposal drew the ire of the teachers union, which has strongly criticized the mayor's own school-improvement efforts at 10 schools, including Roosevelt High in Boyle Heights. Villaraigosa, in turn, called the union "the biggest defender of the status quo."

Locke High School English teacher Katy Bridger tried to give her fifth-period seniors a test while Byron Gordon sharpened pencils noisily, Deon Crockett wandered the room complaining at full volume and a girl cursed just as loudly at Deon for being rude. Daniel Dominguez dozed in the back. Pressing on, Bridger, a 23-year-old recent political science graduate from Tennessee, told students to put away their cellphones and iPods. One student demanded to know why, muttering the F-word.

The impending transition from a traditional school to a charter school has left Locke High in a difficult purgatory, said students, parents, teachers and administrators, and may have contributed to tensions that boiled over into a campuswide melee involving about 600 students earlier this month.

Locke High School opened last week under new management, and things look strikingly different. Students are wearing uniforms. Private security guards have joined staff security aides to keep students on the Watts campus -- and gang members out. Lunch is courtesy of a private caterer. Freshly planted olive and pepper trees line the quad. Even the teachers are mostly new.

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.

A split Los Angeles Board of Education on Thursday rejected the expansion plans of one of the city's leading charter school operators -- a move that almost certainly violates state law and firmly sets back future collaboration between the charter group and the school district. The unexpected 3-3 vote by the Los Angeles Unified School District board defeated Green Dot Public Schools' application for eight new charters.

Education agitator Steve Barr's many detractors will tell you that he's a megalomaniacal publicity hound. So why don't I feel dirty standing beside him, dutifully taking notes as he rhapsodizes about a sheet-metal warehouse in Watts? The building is as ugly as the pit bull pacing behind the rusted chain-link fence that protects it, but Barr sees only potential beauty.

After rejecting plans last month by a leading charter organization to reform one of the city's worst high schools, a bitterly divided Los Angeles Board of Education reversed itself Tuesday at a chaotic and heated meeting. Board member Jon Lauritzen had joined two other board members to vote down a proposal by Green Dot Public Schools to open several new charter campuses near Locke High in South Los Angeles.