Chaordic Chrysalis

The first years of the charter school movement in California have been characterized as “the wild West”. Open range. No fences. Do what you want. Which we did. But so did others, several of which used the lack of rules to cheat the system.

Because California’s original charter legislation did not provide any funding for any facilities, most of the early charter schools were homeschool programs, not classroom programs. One operator got a small, financially-strapped district to sponsor his homeschool program in return for a percentage of the revenue generated (creating a conflict of interest for the sponsor, a problem that can arise with charter schools). He then let the private schools throughout the region (many of them religious) know that if they had their students also enroll in his homeschool program, he would supply the students with whatever textbooks and other materials the private schools would have otherwise needed to supply. So it was a win-win-win situation for the three parties involved. The sponsoring district got some of the funding for students that would never have come to their school in the first place, which they could then use to provide more for “our students.” The private schools got a backdoor subsidy for their program. The charter school got the private school to do the actual teaching so it only needed a skeleton staff. The guy behind the idea got to pocket the remaining amount that was many hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. The only loser was the people of California whose tax money was mostly going to religious schools and a shady operator.

The state finally shut the school down by outlawing dual enrollment. But during the struggle before then, we were invited to an advisory meeting of homeschool charter schools to suggest regulations. That operator was at the meeting. He had the moral aura of a pile of rancid bacon grease. I felt tainted just being in his presence. He had a smug smirk of “you might not like what I am doing but I really don’t care. What I am doing might be messing up all of your idealistic dreams but I really don’t care. I was smart enough to see this angle and I’ll milk it for as long as I can.”

Because of operators like him, the legislature and the department of education kept passing laws and regulations aimed at abuses by homeschool charter schools. Year after year, these regulations came down on all homeschool charters, including our homeschool/classroom hybrid model, creating stress and consuming our energy. This amplified for me how important it was to be moral. I tried to be moral because of my personal code of conduct, but these experiences revealed the detrimental effect immoral behavior exacts on the society at large. What is ethically correct is a much higher bar than what is legal. Unethical behavior undermines trust, corrodes opportunity, and promotes cynicism throughout the larger system. It’s like a cancer cell seeking to multiply itself at the body’s expense.

The chaordic flexibility of our charter helped us maneuver in response to all these regulations. The teachers could look at the regulations and do the minimal adjustment required by the regulations while staying focused on the ethical educational aspirations of Chrysalis. Finally, however, the state passed a law that divided charter schools into “classroom-based” and “independent study-based.” It was either-or. There would be no wiggle room in between. If a charter school was classroom-based, it must comply with a certain set of regulations regarding attendance and funding. If a charter school chose to be an independent study charter school, then it needed to comply with a different set of regulations. We could no longer maintain our blended model. Because of abuse in the independent-study realm of charter schools, the state put an enormous load of paperwork for documenting attendance onto the homeschool programs. We started Chrysalis because we wanted to be teaching kids, leading them into rich, hands-on learning with their world. All of the new paperwork requirements would squeeze out this time if we choose to be independent study. So we had to transform ourselves into a classroom-based program. This required more classroom space so Chrysalis acquired a storefront two miles away from the museum classroom. Most of our homeschooling families stayed with us for their children’s last few years but gradually our student body shifted to families that wanted a classroom program.

In these early years, we had two major internal political struggles. From my point of view, both struggles swirled around possible conflict of interest stemming from our charter giving teachers the power to set their own salaries. The first struggle was very stressful and split the school in half. Chrysalis maintained itself as a bottom-up, “power to the teachers” model and the other half became a second, more top-down, charter school. Both schools still exist.

The other struggle changed Chrysalis for the better. The original idealistic model was that each teacher had almost complete freedom on how they taught and how much of their class budget went to salaries. But as the school grew from two to five and more teachers, the school started to become disjointed and creaky in several ways. Finally, the year before we renewed our charter for our third five-year term, we almost unanimously voted to alter the charter by creating a teacher co-op that had power to make school-wide decisions that could go against the wishes of an individual teacher. That change created longer staff meetings but also a stronger unity of purpose, vision and focus. I see this now as the growing organization adjusting to find a new dynamic edge between chaos and order, bringing into harmony both autonomy and cooperation. Working together cooperatively is stronger than working together autonomously.

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