Chrysalis is having a good year (which is great because last year was very hard-what with losing our museum classrooms). Students are happy, responsible, and treat one another kindly. Learning is strong. Parents feel and appreciate the magic of our community. The teachers team together magnificently.
Our two sites are baldly inadequate. Our salaries are too modest. But things feel very good. One of the most important reasons for this is a change we made in our governance/money flow two years ago.
We included in our founding charter twelve years ago some quotations from the book, Complexity, by Michael Waldrop including this one: “Use local control instead of global control. Let the behavior emerge from the bottom up, instead of being specified from the top down. And while you’re at it, focus on ongoing behavior instead of the final result…. [L]iving systems never really settle down.”
To capture this bottom-up nature, the school organized its finances this way: the state money we received for each student flowed directly into the classroom budget of that student’s lead teacher. A certain percentage (it worked out to around 40%) of this funding was “taxed” for school-wide expenses – rent, administrative salaries, copy machines and paper, utilities, insurance, reserves, etc. The remainder was then available for however the teacher chose to spend it, including setting his or her own salary.
That money flow seemed very bold and empowered teachers far more than the standard model in which teachers are hired, paid, and work in the conditions negotiated between the union and the administration through collective bargaining. Our system worked all right. Lots of good, creative things happened in our first ten years but there was also occasional conflict. How to resolve the situation, for example, when one teacher thought another teacher was structuring his/her classroom budget to maximize salary at the expense of the students? Did the one teacher have the right to interfere in the other teacher’s program? Governance got touchy. Teachers found themselves in conflict over fairness. So we changed this structure when we renewed our charter two years ago.
We operate now as a teachers’ co-operative. As a group we decide how much of the school’s revenue will go into salaries and then the salaries are divvied up according to an agreed upon (but changeable) formula. This change has brought the teachers strongly together. We are much more unified with more give and take flowing easily. The program is stronger and parents feel the difference. In retrospect, the main thing “wrong” with the original system, perhaps, was that our “bottom-up” attempt at having issues of money flow decided individually put it at too low a level.
To use a body image: at the cellular level one finds a certain level of organization and function, at the organ level another level or organization and function emerges, at the system level other organizations and functions emerge. The flow of blood, for example, emerges at the level of the circulatory system. Even though the goal of blood flow is the nourishing of every living cell, it is not organized at that level. Similarly, the level of individual teachers was not the appropriate level at which to organize the flow of money through the school. It needs to be at a higher level of organization that binds the individual teachers into a higher level of organization where all the teachers are working together towards a common vision of “health.” (However, our level of money flow is lower than in the typical school where teachers have limited say about the flow of money through the school.)
The lesson to be derived is that it makes a profound difference at what level within an organization a certain function is organized. A simplistic orientation of “higher” or “lower” or “bottom-up” won’t do. But when it happens at the right level, it can bind the smaller systems together into a more dynamic, vital whole.
(Reminds me of something I read about Napoleon. One of the reasons his army was the terror of European royalty is that his soldiers wanted to fight for his cause (unlike the conscripted serfs used as cannon fodder for centuries by kings in petty land disputes with one another). That willingness to fight allowed a level of initiative to emerge far lower in the ranks, creating a flexibility and swiftness that outflanked the stodgy, slow top-down military movements of the royal armies.)
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