My Third Bottom Line

Remembering Bernie, I’m remembering the learning that he inspired. This is the third in this year’s memorial reflections.

Maybe the big step is from a single bottom line to the “double bottom line.” It loosens us up to realize that there’s more than one way to measure success, more than one measure that to take into account. Bernie loosened me. Having opened to the importance of profit, opening to the third bottom line was undoubtedly easier. Still, it was hard. As we wrote our first charter, we’d come across a second startling factoid: 60% of the young people entering teaching left the field within five years. The message was clear: American public schools were not a good place to work. No wonder there was a national teacher shortage.

We knew it from the start that our schools had to be a special place to work. We were competing with the regular public schools for teachers, an increasingly scarce commodity, and we needed the best-trained, those with certifications in teaching “special needs students” as well as certifications in their content areas. The New York City public schools offered top salaries and pensions. We budgeted to beat those salaries, but we couldn’t afford the pensions. We had win our teachers with quality of work life.

My background in sociology helped me see a path. NYU, when I was there, was a stronghold for the sociology of professions, so I could readily see so many of the ways in which American teachers were treated more as factory workers than as professionals. We empowered our young teachers, even though most were inexperienced, to collectively organize their own work within the framework of the charter. We provided supports and, perhaps most importantly, we celebrated the challenges of learning to teach. We didn’t expect anyone to get it right the first time. Our young teachers thrived. Almost no one left teaching, even if they left us – and we had a very low turn-over rate – for another school.

We went further. We treated our teachers as individuals, not as interchangeable cogs in a machine. Everyone was different. One size doesn’t fit all. We had a young staff. Parental leave was a regular occurrence. Some people need six months leave, some need less, some need more. Everyone goes through life crises including illnesses and deaths. If we worked together long enough, we would go through all these life changes together and differently. We would take care of each other. That’s what families do.

We recognized this and talked about it internally for years before we screwed up the courage to go public with the slogan, “Great schools for students and teachers.” There are no great schools for students which are not also great schools for teachers.  What were we afraid of, that we’d be accused of being un-American? How can you put the well-being of staff on a plain with the well-being of the students? How can either be equated with fiscal health? Adding a bottom line can seem like sacrilege, but we did it and thrived. In the process, we stumbled on what I call “my legacy koan.” We’ll come to that next time.