Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is the mission of Green Dot Public Schools and how does the organization achieve its goals?
2. What is a charter school and how is it different from a regular public school?
3. How do you plan on fixing schools? What is a school transformation?
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1. What is the mission of Green Dot Public Schools and how does the organization achieve its goals?
Green Dot Public Schools is the leading public schools operator in Los Angeles and an important catlyst for education reform, locally and nationally. Its mission is to transform public education in Los Angeles so that all young adults receive the education they deserve to be prepared for college, leadership, and life. Green Dot's work is directly focused on influencing Los Angeles Unified School Distric (LAUSD) to transform its failing high schools and helping the district reinvent itself as one of the best school districts in the country.
Green Dot has already opened twelve successful charter high schools in some of the highest need areas of Los Angeles; in doing so it has demonstrated that public schools can do a far better job of educating students if schools are operated more effectively. Green Dot has also launched two "sister" organizations, the Small Schools Alliance and the Los Angeles Parents Union, which are both focused on organizing communities and leaders throughout Los Angeles in order to improve public education.
2. What is a charter school and how is it different from a regular public school?
A charter school is a public school. What differentiates a charter school from a typical public school is that it is run by a private organization, not the local school district. Charter schools are public- they are free to students, they are supported by tax payers, and they're operated to serve their local communities. Charter schools are freed from local school district policies, parts of the state's education code, and are governed by a board of directors. In exchange for the operating freedoms granted, charter schools are subjected to increased accountability, which they are held to by the state and their private funders.
3. How do you plan on fixing schools? What is a school transformation?
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 Green Dot's School Transformation model and implement it on a large scale.
Green Dot launched its first School Transformation in September 2005 with the Jefferson Transformation Project. And in September 2007, LAUSD made the historic decision to give Green Dot operational control of Locke High School for the Locke Transformation Project.
4. Green Dot's schools have high levels of success. Can it be that you choose students who are the "cream of the crop" to make your performance numbers more impressive?
Under law, charter schools are prohibited from pre-selecting students. If charters have more applicants than seats, each charter school must hold a lottery to randomly select students. Every year, Green Dot schools choose their incoming freshmen through a lottery process. Each school has 140 open spots. All students who are not chosen in the first 140 are added to a waitlist.
Green Dot Public Schools does extensive organizing to get a representative sample of students from the surrounding communities. In fact, Green Dot actually gets a higher proportion of students who request free and reduced lunch (an indicator of people living on or below the poverty line) than LAUSD. The majority of our parents have only completed high school- which is the same demographic of parent education as LAUSD.
5. Green Dot schools require parents to commit to contribute 35 hours of work throughout the year. What types of work are parents required to do? What about parents who don't have time- can their children still apply to your schools?
At Green Dot, we believe that parent, family, and community involvement is essential to a student's performance, as well as to creating the community that we strive for at each of our schools. Parent hours are included in our model not to punish parents, but to enable them to play a greater role their child's education. We provide numerous opportunities for parents to be involved. Parents may volunteer at the school site by serving lunch to the students or volunteering in a classroom, but they can also do things at home such as checking their child's homework, reading to their children, or spending time with their children on special projects.