The Green Dot Mission and Vision
Green Dot Public Schools is committed to changing the landscape of public education in Los Angeles so that every child can be successful in college, leadership, and life. Green Dot is fulfilling this mission by running high-achieving public charter schools that are focused on graduating students and fully preparing them for college. Additionally, one of Green Dot's efforts is dedicated to helping parents throughout the city organize and demand more of their neighborhood schools, the overarching goal being to encourage the Los Angeles Unified School District to implement bold reform and improve the city's public schools.
Green Dot currently operates fifteen successful charter high schools in the highest-need areas of the city, including eight as part of the rejuvenation of Locke High School in Watts. In fall 2010, we opened the doors of our very first charter middle school, Ánimo Jefferson Charter Middle School. With Green Dot's success to date, we are demonstrating that public schools can do a far better job of educating students if they are operated more effectively - and if the focus is kept on students. Green Dot envisions a public school system in Los Angeles made up of small, high-performing schools that encompass a belief in the potential of all students, foster teacher creativity, encourage parental involvement, and ultimately prepare students for college, leadership, and life.
School Model
All Green Dot schools are opened using the same school model, based on Green Dot's "Six Tenets of High Performing Schools". To learn more about the Six Tenets, click here. This model enables Green Dot schools to consistently outperform comparable schools on nearly every academic performance measure. Green Dot is achieving its results while serving similar student populations as the lowest-performing schools in LAUSD and without fundraising to pay for ongoing school operations. As Green Dot schools continue to improve, the Six Tenets school model is setting an important standard for urban public education.
School Transformations
Green Dot is focused on leading "School Transformation" projects in which it transforms large, failing schools into clusters of small, successful schools that follow the Six Tenets. Successful School Transformations will provide LAUSD with a model that the district can use to improve all of its failing schools. Additionally, School Transformations will lead to a groundswell of support from citizens, community groups and city leaders, which will put significant pressure on LAUSD to adopt the School Transformation model and implement it on a large scale. Green Dot intends to partner with LAUSD and the Mayor's Office on School Transformation projects rather than carry out the projects on its own. Green Dot launched its first School Transformation in September 2006 as it opened five new small charter schools within a two mile radius of Jefferson High School, the worst performing school in Los Angeles. Its second School Transformation is to transform Locke High School in Watts, including two schools opened in September 2007 and six more in fall 2008.
Background
Green Dot Public Schools was founded in 1999 by Steve Barr in direct response to the terrible state of public high schools in the Los Angeles area. LAUSD's high schools were not graduating over 50% of their students and those that were making it through were rarely prepared for college. The vast majority of the students falling out of the system were children from low income families. Mr. Barr started Green Dot with a vision of leveraging charter schools as a tool in order to show the school district and the public at large that there was a more effective way to provide public education to young adults in the Los Angeles area. He felt that opening small successful charter schools in which low income, high risk youth were succeeding would not only provide a quality education to the students those schools served, but would also influence LAUSD and other school districts in the Los Angeles area to adopt the successful small schools model for all of their schools.
