I have issues with a few portions of the article. Here are my questions on one portion. I question some of the reporter's depictions of before and after. For example: he describes in the "before" scenario "layer upon layer of bureaucracy. Locke had two full-time employees who painted over graffiti.” [Note from Caroline: This doesn't clarify whether that was ALL they did, though it is clearly intended to imply that -- slippery wording or not? Are maintenance staff layers of bureaucracy? How does that compare to the Green-Dotted Locke's maintenance staffing?] “Bathroom monitors were contractually limited to bathroom-related supervision. [Note from Caroline: We don't know whether this was to ensure that the bathrooms were covered steadily or to protect the workers from being sent out on hardcore riot-squad duty. Neither seems outrageous. In a large rough school, bathrooms are notoriously dangerous as well as disgusting and subject to especially destructive vandalism -- so it’s open to debate whether that “layer of bureaucracy” qualifies as wasteful or frivolous. It’s not uncommon for children’s advocates to campaign for safe, clean, well-maintained school restrooms, so to those activists, this would be a valuable expenditure.] “Locke often came in well under budget, yet students still shared textbooks, because the surplus was locked up in some unnecessary line item. [Note from Caroline: If I were editing this story, I would ask the writer to back up the claim that this school “came in well under budget,” which is basically unheard-of in California public schools. And the wording "locked up in some unnecessary line item" describes categorical funding – money designated only for particular purposes – which is the way the state of California allocates a lot of our education funding. The way to compensate for that, short of making the needed reforms to the funding system, is to have more money, as lucky Green Dot does.] The one area in which I actually challenge the veracity is the claim that pre-Green-Dot Locke came in "under budget." The other areas I mention are worded ni a misleading way to create a certain image that is actually subject to debate, in my opinion. And there's the old classic "lack of context." How do the number of maintenance people at the new Locke compare to the number at the old Locke? How does the bathroom monitoring situation compare? The apparent lack of comprehension of the categorical-funding issue -- or at least the failure to explain it so that it creates a particular view, that of rigid LAUSD bureaucracy -- is a serious lapse. I'm also curious about the blithe mention of Barr's paying a school board member to disclose what went on in closed sessions of school board meetings. A member of my local Board of Education (I'm in San Francisco) tells me that's a serious violation of California's Brown Act, which, by the way, is an open-meetings law that was created in response to advocacy by the California press. So for a journalist to implicitly shrug off a flamboyant Brown Act violation is topsy-turvy.