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Cash for the classrooms : Green Dot Public Schools has been able to reduce class sizes by watching the pennies and going after grants and state funding. It raises the question of whether L.A. was shortchanging the students. (September 28, 2009, LA Times)

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. But almost without exception, the students now wear those uniforms without complaint, unlike last year when they would shrug off the shirts as soon as they thought no one was looking. And instead of huddling on the quad with a few friends in clumps, a large group plays pickup soccer on the grass.

The teachers are still mostly young -- well, one tough year older -- and passionate about the mission of teaching disadvantaged students. The big difference: There are 43 more of them than last year, a 25% increase. And a tour of classrooms -- English, math, chemistry -- shows fewer students in each. Average class sizes, which had hovered in the low 30s last year, are now in the mid-20s.

This isn't just a change from the year before; it stands in marked contrast to the Los Angeles Unified School District and many other public school systems that have laid off teachers and increased class sizes because of miserable education funding. At the same time, Green Dot maintains order on what was a traditionally unruly campus by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars more on security than most schools.

Many charters use private donations to enhance educational offerings, but Green Dot leaders say they use only public funding for the day-to-day operation of their schools. Part of the Green Dot mission from its inception was to show that charters could offer a superior education with the same resources as public schools. And although Locke has a pool of private grants, it is using that money solely to make the five-year transition from an urban high school of 2,600 students to a series of small academies. Green Dot brought on several of the academies' principals a year before the takeover, for example, to plan the transition. Money is currently being spent on shop equipment for the new school of architecture, construction and engineering -- a vocational program that will nonetheless put its students through all the courses required for entrance to four-year colleges.

So it is instructive to study the ways in which Green Dot managed to lower class sizes to levels that would be the envy of many more affluent California public schools. Such an examination reveals the years of neglect and mismanagement by L.A. Unified; it also sheds light on the historically inefficient use of revenue in the district that has kept money out of classrooms.