Are you of a particular faith?
By God’s grace, I am a follower of Jesus Christ. It is God’s love that allows an imperfect person like me to live and work to serve others, and along the way serve my own needs and the needs of my family.
You and your wife began Imagine Schools after your long and successful career as a businessman. What inspired the life shift?
After leaving AES and writing “Joy at Work,” [a 2005 book about management techniques], I was looking for another avenue to serve others and create a new joyful work place. A friend suggested that I look into charter schools. When I realized it was something I could do with my wife, Eileen, who is a lifelong educator, I jumped at the opportunity.
What is so broken within our public school system that charter schools stand a chance of fixing it?
The major problem with our government-operated public schools is best understood by comparing the government monopolies that operate public elementary and secondary schools in this nation and our public university systems. The latter are considered among the best in the world. The former are generally considered very low on the quality scale. The major difference between these two education systems is that our elementary and secondary schools are government monopolies, while our colleges and universities compete for students. Students are assigned to most public K-12 schools and there is no significant competition for these students. The national result of monopolies in the private sector and the public sector is poor performance. Without the requirement to compete for students, there is little incentive for creativity, innovation, and the hard work or the long hours required to educate students and involve parents. Unlike the monopoly government schools, which exist whether parents like the schools’ performance or not, only “good” charter schools that can attract students can survive.
In 2005, you wrote a book entitled “Joy at Work.” Where have you seen a joyful workplace, and how?
Joy at work happens when employees are allowed to control their own work and contribute to the work of the organization where they are employed. At Imagine I try to limit myself to one significant decision a year. I ask my leaders, including 74 school principals, to do the same so that many important decisions can be spread among our teachers and staff. Most teachers love working at Imagine schools, even though we seldom are able to pay as much as government-operated schools and we aren’t able to pay incentives or bonuses very often, either. Our teachers and other staff members do, however, make significant decisions, control their classrooms, and operate our schools. Imagine Schools has only 18 people in its home office out of 3,500 leaders and staff who operate our schools nationwide. Joy at work is possible when organizational leaders love the people they lead so much that they give up their own fun of decision making so that the people they lead can exercise one of the most important distinctions of a human being: The opportunity to think, reason, make a decision, take action and hold ourselves accountable for the results. That’s when joy at work happens.
At your core, what is one of your most deeply held beliefs?
I believe God gave me certain talents, leadership skills, and resources so that I could serve others with joy.
