Steve Barr Tries to Bridge Union-Reformer Divide in Reboot of California's 'Democrats for Education Reform' - On California - Education Week

Steve Barr Tries to Bridge Union-Reformer Divide in Reboot of California's 'Democrats for Education Reform' - On California - Education Week:

Steve Barr Tries to Bridge Union-Reformer Divide in Reboot of California's 'Democrats for Education Reform'

By Charles Taylor Kerchner on August 12, 2014 11:15 AM | 1 Comment

By David Menefee-Libey and Charles Taylor Kerchner

Steve Barr has organizing in his DNA.  The first time we saw him decades ago, he was standing in front of a school with a big container of Starbucks chatting up parents as he poured coffee.  As a college student he started "Rock the Vote."  While he is best known for starting Green Dot charter schools, he's returning to his organizer roots as he looks to revive and reinvent the controversial California branch of Democrats for Education Reform.

In its last incarnation, California DFER was led by former state senator Gloria Romero, who ran for superintendent of public instruction in 2010.  The teachers unions loathed her, supported her opposition, and she didn't make it into the runoff against Tom Torlakson, the current

superintendent.  In 2012, she endorsed Proposition 32, the business-sponsored initiative that would have sharply limited union power in the state's politics.  In response, Barr, a strongly pro-union Democrat, resigned from the organization's advisory committee.  Romero left DFER shortly afterwards, and the California chapter went dormant.

Barr is not a prototypical DFER state leader.  The organization is aggressively pro-charter, as Barr is, but DFER often demonizes unions.  In both Southern California and New York City, the schools Barr has started are unionized.  The California Green Dot schools are affiliated with the California Teachers Association (CTA), and the charter he started in the Bronx was undertaken in cooperation with AFT president Randi Weingarten.

In the rebooted Cal-DFER, Barr is partnering with Joe Boyd, the retired executive director of the Teacher Association of Long Beach, a CTA/National Education Association affiliate. "I wanted to get into the space where people can work together about things they agree on," he told us in an interview.  "This is about the politics of collaboration."

Boyd said he retired early from the CTA to take on this new effort.  While stopping well short of saying that the state teachers union endorses his association with DFER, he noted, "I have an open line of communication with Joe Nuñez (the CTA executive director.)"

Union leaders have always been suspicious of DFER, and most recently AFT president Weingarten expressly challenged it, launching Democrats for Public Education.  Given their past association, it will be interesting to see how she responds to Barr's and Boyd's new Steve Barr Tries to Bridge Union-Reformer Divide in Reboot of California's 'Democrats for Education Reform' - On California - Education Week: