JUST LET CREATIVE DESTRUCTION TAKE ITS COURSE:

Hope Tempers First-Day Jitters at New South L.A. Charter Schools: Green Dot launches two of its five facilities intended to pressure nearby Jefferson High to improve. (Carla Rivera, August 29, 2006, LA Times)

The debut of Animo Jackie Robinson and Animo Jefferson public charter schools, operated by Green Dot Public Schools, is the biggest salvo yet in the bid to radically transform nearby Jefferson High School, where low achievement and racial tension made it the poster child for what is wrong with public education in Los Angeles.

Charters are publicly funded but independently run schools that are granted greater flexibility in exchange for a promise to improve student achievement. Last year, charter schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District scored 709 in Academic Performance Index base test scores compared with 683 for non-charter public schools, according to an analysis by the California Charter Schools Assn. [...]

Five of the new charters will be operated by Green Dot, whose founder, Steve Barr, mounted a failed attempt to take over Jefferson last year.

District officials have been critical of Barr's subsequent campaign to open charters and lure students, parents and teachers from Jefferson.

But the clash yielded an unusual arrangement for Green Dot in which the Jefferson and Jackie Robinson charters are located on the new campus of the district's yet-to-be-named Central New Middle School No. 4 on Hill Street just south of Jefferson Boulevard.

The new school year will be a challenge for the district and the charters: L.A. Unified will be pressed to maintain enrollment and prove that its new educational reforms at Jefferson are working. Meanwhile, the charter school mantra of smaller is better will be put to the test on a much larger scale. [...]

"The five schools near Jefferson are going to transform the area," Barr said. "But I'm also disappointed that we couldn't get the district to work with us on a greater level. We're going to be applying constant pressure to open it up to create a full partnership."

Barr recently began organizing parents to take on the education establishment, believing that they can transform individual schools — and ultimately, the district.

"I can keep building charter schools but I don't see the point of it," said Barr, whose group runs five other charters in low-income communities around Los Angeles County. "What Green Dot is about is leveraging our successes to create political will and demand to the point that school districts make changes."

When Airbus manufactures its white elephants it just means planes'll pile up on tarmac somewhere. When public schools can't manufacture what they're supposed to it means their destroying children's lives. For the state to prop up one is just silly, to maintain the other as a going concern is malicious.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 7, 2006 1:14 PM