Steve Barr used bare-knuckle political tactics to take over a Los Angeles school. Illustration by Mark Ulriksen

Steve Barr stood in the breezeway at Alain Leroy Locke High School, at the edge of the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, on a February morning. He’s more than six feet tall, with white-gray hair that’s perpetually unkempt, and the bulk of an ex-jock. Beside him was Ramon Cortines—neat, in a trim suit—the Los Angeles Unified School District’s new superintendent. Cortines had to be thinking about last May, when, as a senior deputy superintendent, he had visited under very different circumstances. That was when a tangle between two rival cliques near an outdoor vending machine turned into a fight that spread to every corner of the schoolyard. Police sent more than a dozen squad cars and surged across the campus in riot gear, as teachers grabbed kids on the margins and whisked them into locked classrooms.

The school’s test scores had been among the worst in the state. In recent years, seventy-five per cent of incoming freshmen had dropped out. Only about three per cent graduated with enough credits to apply to a California state university. Two years ago, Barr had asked L.A.U.S.D. to give his charter-school-management organization, Green Dot Public Schools, control of Locke, and let him help the district turn it around. When the district refused, Green Dot became the first charter group in the country to seize a high school in a hostile takeover. (“He’s a revolutionary,” Nelson Smith, the president and C.E.O. of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said.) Locke reopened in September, four months after the riot, as a half-dozen Green Dot schools.

“Last year, there was graffiti everywhere,” Barr said. “You’d see kids everywhere—they’d be out here gambling. You’d smell weed.” He recalled hearing movies playing in classroom after classroom: “People called it ghetto cineplex.” Barr and Cortines walked to the quad, where the riot had started. The cracked pavement had been replaced by a lawn of thick green grass, lined with newly planted olive trees.

“It’s night and day,” Cortines said.

In the past decade, Barr has opened seventeen charter high schools—small, locally managed institutions that aim for a high degree of teacher autonomy and parent involvement—in some of the poorest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, as well as one in the Bronx. His charter-school group is now California’s largest, by enrollment, and one of its most successful. Green Dot schools take kids who, in most cases, test far below grade level and send nearly eighty per cent of them to college. (Only forty-seven per cent of L.A.U.S.D. students graduate with a high-school diploma.) As of 2006, Green Dot’s standardized-test scores were almost twenty per cent higher than L.A. Unified’s average, and, adjusting for student demographics, the state Department of Education grades their performance a nine on a scale of one to ten; L.A.U.S.D. schools rate only a five.

Barr himself has a colorful reputation. He drives a decommissioned police car, a Crown Victoria with floodlights, which he bought from a friend, the former Fox executive who launched the network’s reality show “Cops.” (“It’s faster than anything on the road,” he told me, and when he wants to change lanes “people move out of the way.”) He met his wife, an Alaskan radio reporter twenty years his junior, at a Burning Man festival seven years ago, and married her in Las Vegas three weeks later. And this is how he talks about working with what is arguably the country’s most troubled big-city school system: “You ever see that movie ‘Man on Fire,’ with Denzel Washington? There’s a scene in the movie where the police chief of Mexico City gets kidnapped by Denzel Washington. He wakes up, he’s on the hood of his car under the underpass, in his boxers, his hands tied. Denzel Washington starts asking him questions, he’s not getting the answers he wants, so he walks away from him, and leaves a bomb stuck up his ass.” Barr laughed. “I don’t want to blow up L.A.U.S.D.’s ass. But what will it take to get this system to serve who they need to serve? It’s going to take that kind of aggressiveness.”

Green Dot’s ascent stems mostly from Barr’s skill as an instigator and an organizer. Outrageous rhetoric is a big part of that, and it’s not uncalculated. “It takes a certain amount of panache to call the head of the union a pig fucker,” Ted Mitchell, the president of the California State Board of Education, said. (Those weren’t Barr’s words exactly.) “Steve has this ‘Oh, shucks, you know me—I can’t control my mouth’ persona. It allows him to get away with murder.” But, Mitchell points out, “he’s a public curmudgeon and a private negotiator.” And he has built Green Dot to be a political force unlike anything else in the world of education. For instance, Barr runs the only large charter organization in the country that has embraced unionized teachers and a collectively bargained contract—an unnecessary hassle, if his aim was to run a few schools, but a source of leverage for Green Dot’s main purpose, which is to push for citywide change. “I don’t see how you tip a system with a hundred per cent unionized labor without unionized labor,” he said.

First period at Locke was ending. Kids swarmed the halls, shoving and laughing and posturing and flirting for every last second of their five minutes of freedom. Barr was quiet with Cortines, almost solicitous. Cortines, for his part, seemed eager for peace. After years of failed attempts to fix Locke, nobody could ignore how much Green Dot had accomplished in a matter of months.

Another fight between Barr and L.A.U.S.D. seemed inevitable, though. After Cortines left, Barr said, “Ray and I have had conversations about Fremont High School,” another large troubled school, in South Los Angeles. But Cortines, he knew, was hesitant. “I’ve been clear that we can talk,” Cortines told me later. “I can’t necessarily deliver. I still think we have to look at the evidence from Locke.” Data like test scores, graduation rates, and student retention won’t be available until later this year.

Barr doesn’t want to hear it. “Nobody can tell me that a small, autonomous, well-funded school, where the parents are involved, where accountability is put on that staff, is not the right way to go,” he said. “We get along really well, but I get fucking impatient.”

Cortines didn’t know that Barr was already planning his next assault on the district, one he described to me as “Armageddon.” He planned to target five to ten of the largest, worst-performing schools in Los Angeles, and then submit a hundred charters for new schools to be clustered around them. Then he would give the district a choice: it could either dissolve most of the central bureaucracy, and turn over hiring, firing, and spending decisions to neighborhood schools, or surrender leadership of the schools to Green Dot. If the district refused both options, Barr would open his new schools and begin stealing thousands of students, and the millions of dollars in funding that follow them. “If I take ten Locke High Schools, they can’t survive,” he said.

But, just weeks after Cortines’s visit to Locke, Barr got a call from the new Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. He flew to Washington, D.C., at the end of March, for what he expected to be a social visit. At the meeting, Duncan revealed that he was interested in committing several billion dollars of the education stimulus package to a Locke-style takeover and transformation of the lowest-performing one per cent of schools across the country, at least four thousand of them, in the next several years. The Department of Education would favor districts that agreed to partner with an outside group, like Green Dot. “You seem to have cracked the code,” Duncan told Barr.