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Sunday, May 24, 2015

Green Dot charter schools: A cautionary tale | Seattle Education

Green Dot charter schools: A cautionary tale | Seattle Education:

Green Dot charter schools: A cautionary tale

 Green Dot Founder Steve Barr, who is married to TFA Founder Wendy Kopp, created a mythology about his corporate charters that persists.
Green Dot Founder Steve Barr, who is married to TFA Founder Wendy Kopp, created a mythology about his corporate charters that persists.


 Green Dot Founder Steve Barr, who is married to TFA Founder Wendy Kopp, created a mythology about his corporate charters that persists.
Green Dot Founder Steve Barr, who is married to TFA Founder Wendy Kopp, created a mythology about his corporate charters that persists.
According to Melissa Westbrook over at the Seattle Schools Community Forum, Green Dot charter school is planning, with the help of Bill Gates, to open a charter school in West Seattle.
On the left margin of this page, you can find articles about Green Dot charter schools. Related Seattle Education posts include: Parent Trigger, Parent Revolution Ben Austin and his Parent Trigger now in Seattle The “school conversion” clause in Initiative 1240, the parent trigger and ALEC model legislation
One of the many problems with Green Dot, besides a high attrition rate that brings up their graduation rate, the way they scam low-income parents, many who are immigrants, to sign on to the school and their propensity for hiring Teach for America (TFA) recruits who are fresh out of college with unrelated degrees and given 5 weeks of training before putting them in a classroom and a lackluster academic track record, see 14 of 15 Green Dot schools are “failing,” by Parent Revolution’s definition, is their tendency of closing schools after a few years if things don’t work out for them.
See Taking on a Charter School Closing and What Happens When a Charter School Fails,
There is a particularly poignant story that Diane Ravitch published in 2013 that parents should read before signing onto Green Dot public charter school:

The Inside Story of a Green Dot Charter School
Green Dot Public Schools, Teacher Retention, and the Failure of Past Models
By Brett Wyatt
This is a story of a charter school in the Green Dot Public School system which, after four years of operation, is coming to an inglorious end. It is not an end to the system, or even to school itself, but an end in name and in so many exhausted careers used by Green Dot to experiment with failed policies in Watts, California.
The original Locke High School, like so many schools centered in poverty and neglect, had many systemic problems. Green Dot, a charter school system headed by Marco Petruzzi, requested to administer the school in 2008. The school was divided into 4 Green Dot charter schools: A cautionary tale | Seattle Education: