“If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.”
Joseph Campbell
Another idea that germinated during my times up in the fields was a hypothesis about how Gaia had grown over hundreds of millions of years. If a species somehow finds a way to increase possibilities for all life, then the surrounding life will evolve ways to help that species continue with its work. If, on the other hand, a species emerges that somehow decreases possibilities for all other life, then the surrounding life will evolve ways to diminish that species. What would happen if I dedicated my life energy to being in service to creating possibilities for all life? Would Gaia somehow assist me along my way? This sounded nice and sweet and offered something hopeful to believe in. But was it true? It’s easy to suggest it for others to collectively try but the only legitimate way to test it would be to try it on myself. What would happen if I tried, as much as possible, to direct my life towards giving to life rather than getting, trusting that I would somehow receive from the world what I needed? In a way, the rest of this book is a report on that experiment.
Alysia became pregnant during my third year at the Farm School. At the beginning of my fourth school year, we brought Zephyr home to fifty students who were enthusiastically eager to play with her. But we didn’t want to raise our children in L.A. and I knew I had to write my book. The vision of it kept growing more palpable with every walk in the fields. It had acquired a name, Shifting. E. F. Schumacher (author of Small is Beautiful, among other books and essays) once wrote that if you know something, really know it, and don’t do anything about it, it will fester inside you. Shifting was beginning to fester inside me. So we decided it was time to leave the Farm School. Our eventual plan (we generated many) was to go live in northern California. We had saved enough money to give us two Bohemian Writing Years with our toddler daughter. I would write my book and earn my teaching credential. At the end of two years, I would get a teaching job. Since there was a shortage of science and math teachers, we knew I would be able to get a job once I had my credential.
This going off, out of LA, away from a job, coasting for two years in order to write Shifting was a trusting, a testing of those ideas that had been nourished during rain walks. Do the work. Allies will emerge. Upward spirals will happen. This chapter is a report on the ten years that resulted from that test. It’s not an exciting chapter; daily life is filled with washing diapers and all the other things that young families go through. This chapter might feel like a checklist of seemingly random, inconsequential events. However, these small events formed the steps by which our roaming led us onto an unforeseen path. Therefore, the extended sequence is a real-life, specific example of roaming in the sense of a dance between oneself and the world as one moves within it. Each small example will eventually fit into the larger narrative of this chapter.
One afternoon I took a break from writing. Stacked in a pile were large, cardboard toy blocks like I used to play with. Zephyr, still crawling, lacked the strength and coordination to do anything interesting with them so they sat in the corner awaiting their time (eventually to become stalls for toy horses). I started playing with them. Zephyr came crawling over and knocked one of the upright ones down. She smiled. A game developed where I would stand the blocks up on their tallest end and she would knock them down. She laughed as she tried knocking them down as fast as I could stand them up. Her laughter grew almost fiendish with its delight in destruction. I was growing a little dismayed by this monster emerging within my daughter when I suddenly had a cosmic insight.
Zephyr had never played with these blocks before. She could not yet place one block on top of another. But by setting the blocks up on their end, I had put them in a position where she, in her clumsy way, could achieve something interesting – make them fall over with a satisfying whack against the floor. Because the blocks were now interesting, Zephyr began interacting with them. As she plays with them, she will develop the dexterity, build the strength, and cultivate the patience to stack them and build higher.
We humans are like a two-year old. We find ourselves in a world full of things like those standing blocks: deep soil, magnificent runs of salmon, wind-baffling trees, and 27″ of recycled rain. In our toddler-like explorations, we knock these things down and make all sorts of interesting thwacking things happen. So fun is it that we delight in knocking them down faster than they can be stacked back up. This is a cause for despair but it can also be a cause for hope.
Hope because we are discovering that we have the power to change our world. We discover this power by knocking The Commons down. Not because we are mean or evil but because thermodynamically, it’s far easier to knock things down than build them up. Therefore, our first discoveries of our power to change something will come from clumsily knocking it down. We knock the blocks down first which makes them interesting so we start playing with them. Over time, we develop the strength and dexterity to build up rather than knock down.
If previous generations had been asked whether humans had the power to change the climate, they would have said “no” (if they could even understand what the question meant). But we now know we have that power. True, we discovered this by degrading environments all around us. But once we know that we have that power, we can start wondering “do we have the power to build things back up? What would ‘building up’ look like? How do we do it and what would it feel like to be part of such a world?” We can begin developing the patience, the dexterity, the strength, the understanding to ally ourselves with all the other lives that have been building and stacking for hundreds of millions of years. Surely, if bacteria, earthworms, and beaver can do it, we can do it too. Now we start the real work.
At the end of the two years, I had fulfilled our two-year plan of earning two teaching credentials but I had not yet finished Shifting. Alysia had become a part-time GATE (Gifted and Talented Education) teacher at the small local school but was now five months pregnant with our second daughter. It was time for me to go back to earning money so Alysia could stay home with our young ones. I applied for all the teaching jobs in the area. I got called in for many interviews but I was always a runner-up, never the one hired. Gradually I learned that the schools tended to hire candidates with local references and experience. It was very hard for an outsider to get in. The next school year started and I did not yet have a job; baby Dawn was due in November. We needed money. I was looking through the want ads and came upon a minimum-wage, part-time job that was so perfectly written for me that I knew I could at least get that job. A small natural science museum wanted someone to run the cash register and handle snakes with the visitors. I had operated cash registers throughout my park service experience and at Big Bend, I had given afternoon reptile talks that included holding live snakes and lizards (and tarantulas). So this job, at least, would be a slam-dunk. I applied and got called in for the interview. Only two people applied and they hired the other person. I couldn’t believe it! Would I ever be able to find a job in this region? A week later, however, the museum called back and offered me a job as their education coordinator.
When I first walked into the back offices of the museum, it felt like a rebel ship in Star Wars, a few small rooms with desks and computers crammed together as an underpaid, idealistic crew kept the tiny ship flying. I had never heard of Carter House Natural Science Museum before that want ad. Most local people would probably describe it as a small building in a city park where you could take children to see injured native animals that couldn’t be returned to the wild. But it did so much more with such limited resources that it had earned amazing local support. Most businesses had a “We Support Our Science Museum” decal on their front window. I was given an impressively large rolodex of telephone numbers of people who were willing to help in so many ways, especially natural resource agency people.
Teachers brought their classes for programs throughout the school year. We organized, with support from the local community college, a Science Olympiad for the middle and high schools throughout our rural area and a science fair for the elementary and middle schools. (One day Alysia overheard our four-year-old daughter on her toy telephone pretend calling over and over again, saying “Hello, would you like to be a science fair judge?”) We converted donated refrigerators into refrigerated aquariums so teachers could hatch and rear salmon in their classrooms. We offered hands-on science classes during school vacations. During summer vacation, we had a Museum Volunteer program for middle school students that gave them their first job experience. Because the commitment of the staff was so pure, Carter House was known as “the little museum that could.” Marcia Howe, the director, told me to never let liability fears keep me from doing what I knew was a good idea. The museum felt very much like going high into the drainage where you could find a place within your power to shift relative balances. So there I worked for nine years.
Alysia resigned from her part-time GATE teaching position the week before Dawn’s birth. For a year her life was filled with the magic and hard work of raising two young daughters. She was happy to be home with them, but she is an energetic educator who loves learning and making things happen, so she couldn’t just “be home” for long. Therefore we created a museum job for her working at home during nap times: developing curriculum for local teachers that would go with each new exhibit.
Alysia revived the museum’s Saturday morning Bigfoot/Littlefoot science program for mothers and their pre-school children. Her programs developed a group of enthusiastic loyal families with preschoolers.
During my first year at Carter House, I finally finished Shifting and self-published 500 copies for about $6 a copy. To hold down costs, the cover was simple black and white. The book culminated with the following words.
“Each time I watch grass growing in a channel or see soil rising over rocks, I seem to hear Gaia whisper:
“Begin the work even though you cannot see the path by
which this work can lead to your goal. Do not block your power with your
current understanding. Evolution is the process by which the impossible becomes
possible through small, accumulating changes.
“Concentrate on the direction, not the size of the change.
Begin the work with actions that seem tinier than necessary but that are small
enough to maintain. The rate of change is slow at first, but do not prematurely
judge your efforts. Change happens through spirals; the work grows upon itself.
As little changes accumulate, they will reinforce one another and make larger
changes possible. Gradually, balances will shift. Enemies that block the way will
become allies that lead the way. Where and how this happens cannot be
predicted.
“You do not work alone. Billions of other living things are
doing the work. You are part of an invisible power. As it grows, the erosive
power will fade. Begin the work.”
At the end of the book, I wrote:
“Faith that allies will emerge, for example, has led me to self-publish this book even though I have no way to distribute it. I am trusting in the power of readers to help it reach other readers. If this book has helped you see your world in delightful, uplifting ways, then please help the book by passing this copy onto a friend with your recommendation.”
I sent free copies to about forty people who I thought would respond to the book. Thanks to them and to those they contacted, I sold all of those books and ordered a second printing of a thousand copies and gradually sold those, all through word of mouth. Allies emerged. A few professors used Shifting as one of their textbooks. Opportunities to speak arose. Barbara Damrosch, a published author, read Shifting and recommended it to her publisher, Chelsea Green, who contacted me and re-published the book as Seeing Nature. I bought a thousand copies from them at author’s price and over several years sold them all.
So book sales easily covered printing and postage costs with a few thousand dollars profit left over. If you figure in the three years of writing the book and the time required to ship each order, I probably earned a couple of pennies an hour. But money wasn’t why I had done it. I had had this vision festering within of how the world might be. According to that vision, writing the book and distributing it in this way might create an upward spiral. But the vision might be wrong and this would all be an embarrassing waste of time. I didn’t know. That’s what had caused the internal anguish. Maybe my vision was really important; maybe my rain walks didn’t really apply to any other part of the world. Not knowing – that’s what had festered inside of me. Writing the book, putting this vision to a test and having the world respond in an affirmative way, released me from the unknowing limbo of doubt, allowing me to move on – with new allies.
Over the years I’ve been delighted many times by the diversity of people out there who credit Shifting or Seeing Nature with helping them in their work. Thanks to the internet, I learn of a community garden in New Jersey. I’ve been sent a link to a short documentary about a region in China demonstrating Gaia work on a much larger scale.
< http://eempc.org/hope-in-a-changing_climate/> also at < https://vimeo.com/19661805>
https://community.waterstories.com/share/Bu8NTZ0EuumvlRkD?utm_source=manual Water Stories have become a recent valued resource for me. You have to join but it’s free and people are from all around the world.
I came to think of my book as cattail seeds floating in the wind – so tiny and light they can travel around the world – landing in a variety of places. Every now and then, one takes root and a new possibility germinates. I will be trying a similar distribution with this free, online book. (After this book had been on-line for a year, a man in France emailed me asking for permission to translate the book into French and put it on-line – which he has. Who knows what is possible?)
Much of my writing was trying to describe processes that are best understood by seeing them. So I decided to make a DVD that would cover some of the same area as Shifting but with images. I bought an inexpensive camcorder and a small microphone, and created an hour-long movie that I edited in iMovie. I struggled with how to tell “the story.” So I finally created a story about a person struggling with how to tell the story. I distributed The Upward Spiral in a way similar to Shifting. Allies emerged who helped make it available on the internet.
During this time, there was a strong push both nationally and in California to make science education more hands-on and less textbook-driven. The National Science Foundation funded a multi-year grant called SIRC (Science Inservices in Rural California) that each year brought a new group of fifty northeastern California teachers together with UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science professors for science workshops, both in the summer and throughout the school year. Because of the curriculums we had created, Carter House was invited to participate as a local resource for the teachers. Each year, we developed relationships with another group of fifty “open to new opportunities, can do” teachers; the museum and Alysia and I became better known in the wider regional educational community.
One consequence of spending time with teachers was hearing frustrations of how school administration kept hindering or eliminating teacher-initiated projects. I had been hearing stories like this ever since I started working with teachers at Carter House. At first I thought they were gripers and complainers but the more stories I heard, the more they sounded like dedicated, innovative people being suppressed into a mold. I started thinking there might be a systems problem within the public school system.
The one frustration of my job was museum politics centered on combining several organizations into one with enough political and financial clout to secure a fantastic site along the Sacramento River on which to create one large museum. This effort coincided with the controversy over spotted owls and logging of old growth forests. Most of the identifiable money for building a new museum came from the locally powerful forestry industry, while Carter House was perceived as an environmental education organization, so there was some mistrust on both sides. Though Carter House could not bring money to the negotiations, we brought our positive reputation within the community and the demonstrated ability to be far more than just a building.
The politics were endlessly frustrating. Because of the tension between groups, far too much time and money was consumed with high-paid consultants coming in to do strategic planning. They would facilitate the drafting of mission statements. I got sick of mission statements. They were big back then. (Maybe they still are.) We kept being told that the right mission statement could focus and galvanize an organization. But the process always went the other way. A diverse group of people (the “stakeholders”) were gathered together for a day or two to basically craft a PR statement. The purported mission was always education but to Alysia and I, it felt like the real mission for most “stakeholders” was to attract tourist money off the freeway into the community. The mission statement never felt real. Time and again we watched the high-paid consultant work gradually wither because of this disconnect. More and more of Carter House’s energy and idealistic heart were being consumed by politics.
(Years later I came upon an article that captured our experience.
“While certainly not dead, strategic planning has long since fallen from its pedestal. But even now, few people fully understand the reason: strategic planning is not strategic thinking. Indeed, strategic planning often spoils strategic thinking, causing managers to confuse real vision with the manipulation of numbers. And this confusion lies at the heart of the issue: the most successful strategies are visions, not plans…. Such strategies often cannot be developed on schedule and immaculately conceived. They must be free to appear at any time and at any place in the organization, typically through messy processes of informal learning that must necessarily be carried out by people at various levels who are deeply involved with the specific issues at hand.”
Henry Mintzberg, professor of management at McGill University, adapted from his book, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning (Free Press and Prentice Hall International, 1994)
We went to Zephyr’s school’s Christmas program. She got up with her kindergarten class and sang “Up on the Housetop.” It was very cute; I was delighted and proud. Then another class got up and sang another Santa Claus song. Another class got up and sang a song about getting presents. So it went, up through the grade levels, a whole evening of songs about Santa Claus and getting presents. It felt wrong. I can understand why there were no Christian songs – separation of church and state and all that. But the program was a spiritual sell-out to a materialistic consumerist default value. There is religion and then there are cultural values. Though the two are not the same, they should overlap. Surely a religiously diverse culture can still share a common moral foundation – though, perhaps, the “give me, give me” underlying all those songs had become our common moral foundation. That program got us thinking: Can a public school be non-sectarian in the purest public school sense but still have a strong, visibly spiritual, moral foundation encompassing the entire community?
One of the mothers Alysia had met through Bigfoot/Littlefoot had been hired to be the home school coordinator for one of the many small school districts in our county. Many home-schoolers were comfortable with teaching reading and history but not with teaching science or math, so Alysia created a program where her friend’s school district contracted with Carter House for a hands-on science class that Alysia would deliver. Thanks to both the SIRC training and the curriculums we had written, she could offer a powerful series of learning activities. Alysia became introduced to the extensive homeschooling community (mostly mothers) within our county.
As I hiked and explored my new northern California territory, a goal formed of snowshoeing all the way around Mt. Lassen in the late winter. The first time I tried in 1995 (it took me four times), I only made it halfway around. On the way back down, I got to thinking about how, having completed Shifting, I had stopped writing. As I strode along through a glistening forest buried under twenty feet of snow, I realized that writing had kept me mindful of my thoughts that, through a feedback spiral, encouraged them to keep forming and deepening. Not writing allowed my thinking to go slack. I should keep writing for my own sake and also to keep in touch with the larger world that Shifting had connected me to. I decided to start a quarterly newsletter with the discipline of a deadline. I would send it free to those who wanted to receive it. I named the newsletter Cairns of Hope. Initially, Many of the stories and thoughts in this book appeared in rough form in Cairns. You can click on this link to access selections from twenty-five years of Cairns.
That same year, Carter House, the little museum that could, established the first building on the proposed site of the large museum, helping politically lock that site up for a future museum. A used modular building became a classroom for Carter House’s education programs. This allowed the museum to contract with another school district to have Alysia deliver their GATE program in this classroom. On the other days of the week, she expanded her support programs for homeschoolers to include the children of several museum employees, including ours. She began offering twice-a-week classes for homeschoolers in math and science.
Thanks to our curriculums and the connections that SIRC had given us with teachers throughout the region, I was able to write and receive for Carter House a five year grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to create curriculums that got elementary students doing hands-on biology investigations using local, common schoolyard species. Part of the Hughes grant involved going out into our rural areas and field testing our biology investigations in a variety of settings.
One day at a school, I was field-testing an activity where students found and picked ten samples of Erodium flowers at different stages in their visually-dramatic development from bud into flower into mature seeds and then tape their ten examples in sequence on paper.
One boy was able to find several examples at the flowering part of the sequence and several examples at the mature fruit end of the sequence, but he was unable to find any examples from the middle. He sat by his paper frustrated. There was a huge gap in the middle and he knew it. Whatever the point of this activity was supposed to be, he knew he wasn’t getting it. I offered to find an example in the middle of that gap. When I brought it back to him, he placed it in the gap and suddenly his entire face lit up. With a spontaneous whoop of joy, he got it.*
* Not only did he get it, his spontaneous whoop made me “get” something else. Dr. Seamons, a professor of architecture who liked Shifting, had sent me an essay (“Counterfeit and Authentic Wholes,” by Henri Bortoft) that seemed full of academese, but the boy’s whoop allowed me to understand a section of Bortoft’s essay that has stayed with me ever since as an important guiding star for education:
“The primal phenomenon is not to be thought of as a generalization from observations, produced by abstracting from different instances something that is common to them. If this result were the case, one would arrive at an abstracted unity with the dead quality of a lowest common factor… In a moment of intuitive perception, the particular instance is seen as a living manifestation of the universal [my bold]…. As an authentic discovery, this moment can only be experienced directly; it cannot be ‘translated’ adequately into the verbal language of secondhand description.”
Multiple experiences like this got Alysia and me wondering what it would be like if kids could be out in the field, having experiences like this, not just for the week of our visit, but throughout their entire time in school. One day in 1993, we were sharing these thoughts with Helen Hawk, a retired but still very involved teacher who was a board member of our museum. Helen suggested that we start a charter school. “We can’t do that. We’re a museum. We’re not public school teachers.” But Helen said that didn’t matter; anybody could create a charter. She thought the Carter House board would support a museum charter school if we could find a school district that would sponsor us. We started to think about what such a school would be like.
We already knew what its name would be, Chrysalis, because we had talked about a possible school after we left the Farm School. A chrysalis is the protective structure within which a larval butterfly transforms into the beautiful young adult butterfly. It seemed the perfect image for a nature-centered, K-8 school. Alysia and I started writing down characteristics that would be important to such a school: time out in nature because the human mind thrives on complex interactions with the natural world, the Farm School’s insistence on teaching for understanding, and Alysia’s deep personal commitment to creating a school culture of kindness where children could be emotionally supported by their school experience.
As we explored the idea of a charter school, we would hear objections that we had to consider. The two main objections (that continue to this day) required us to ethically wrestle with our intent. The first objection was that charter schools would disproportionately enroll families that were involved in their children’s education because enrollment in a charter school had to be voluntary, unlike enrollment in your neighborhood school. Choosing a charter school required research, a choice, and probably less convenient transportation on a daily basis. Therefore, the students attending charter schools would be children of families that cared enough about their education and had the resources to go through that effort. (This does not imply that families of students who chose to attend the traditional schools did not care or lacked resources). One of the most consistent findings in all of educational research is that students whose families are involved in their education tend to do significantly better than students whose families are not involved. Therefore, charter schools would “skim” some of the “better” students which would make the charter school appear to be doing a better job, attracting more students to the charter in a feedback spiral, leaving the traditional school with a greater proportion of struggling students who would make the traditional school look worse by comparison, leading to more students leaving in a downward spiral for that neighborhood school. There was merit to that argument and I wrestled with that objection. On what grounds could I justify Chrysalis against that objection? Would our efforts be in support of public education or would they be undermining it?
I had witnessed several school reforms while working with teachers. There are two ways to implement school reform. One way is to impose it on all students and teachers within a jurisdiction. The reforms I had witnessed had been imposed from above (whole language instruction, hands-on science, hands-on math, and now Common Core) and because of that, they encountered resistance from the many families (and teachers) who wanted things the way they had been. The reforms faltered against this resistance. Part of the resistance, I’m sure, was resentment that “my children” were being made guinea pigs in some experiment and would suffer the consequences if the reform was misguided.
The other way to introduce a reform was to give teachers and students/families the option of participating in an experimental approach while the existing approach continued alongside as the default option. That was the appeal of the charter school concept. It was voluntary. It provided a better testing ground (from the very beginning) for winnowing good ideas from bad ideas because it did not create immediate resistance from those not wanting something different tried on their children. Therefore, yes, Chrysalis might attract families more involved in their child’s education, but … so what? How else are you going to test models that diverge from the mainstream model?
The ethical challenge for a charter school is to realize that a charter school probably will be “skimming” some of the more involved families. Therefore, it would be dishonest, if something like the school’s test scores came out higher, to tout the charter school as being “better” than the traditional model. One should assume that the charter school will have higher test scores for reasons that have nothing to do with the charter school itself. Therefore, one would need to look deeper if one wanted to determine whether the reform attempted by that charter school was worthy of replication by others.
The second qualm I had to deal with was the fact that Chrysalis would be non-union because we were coming from a museum outside the public school system. The teachers’ unions strongly opposed charter schools. I was brought up pro-union so I had to wrestle with this for some time.
In the meantime, Alysia explored sponsorship with contacts developed through SIRC. One superintendent expressed his interest, but the teachers’ union at that school prevented us from even coming on campus to talk with the teachers. We met resistance in another district because charter schools were so new that many issues were still unresolved, undefined. Administrators didn’t want to have to deal with that ambiguity. The deadline came for getting sponsorship for the 1994-95 school year and we had gotten nowhere. Alysia and I had to decide whether we should keep pushing another year against the resistance (possibly wasting another year of our lives) or just give it up and continue with our museum work. We were outsiders with very little public school experience. I had none; Alysia had taught GATE classes, part-time. Why would anyone sponsor us?
We talked about this night after night until we came back to “Begin the work even though you cannot see the path by which this work can lead to your goal. Do not block your power with your current understanding.” So we decided to simply start Chrysalis the next school year. It was not a charter school; it was more of a formal, museum-based homeschool support program that Alysia taught for free. She started the program in 1994 with four students, including Zephyr. Over the year, she picked up other families from some of the other programs she was teaching.
During that school year, Don and Celeste Kleinfelder invited us to dinner in the Bay Area to thank me for writing Shifting. I was uncomfortable with receiving thanks; I had long practiced brushing it off with a casual remark. But this time I opened myself to the gratitude and simply accepted; it was a wonderful dinner. No ego, just an appropriate completing of one turn in an upward spiral of giving between author and reader. In the course of the evening, Don gifted me a book that he thought I would enjoy.
The book was Complexity by Michael Waldrop. It told the many stories by which various researchers came to converge on the development of complexity theory which is systems thinking for systems that are shaped by so many feedback spirals that their path of development is complexly non-linear and difficult to predict.
One researcher had studied a growing pile of sand and how its growth develops around its angle of repose. Angle of repose is a delightful example of dynamic equilibrium in nature, as my Discovery Hikers discovered on that scree slope. If the slope of sand or scree is too shallow, it builds up to a steeper angle. If it becomes too steep, it slumps in unpredictable ways down into a shallower angle. So slopes come to a balance between these two opposite tendencies. The central theme of Waldrop’s book was an exploration of how life comes to a balance between two opposite tendencies, dancing on the shimmering edge between order and chaos. Life richly integrates the two so that processes carry on predictably but not too predictably.
I liked this perspective because it matched my experiences as a naturalist with systems thinking and dynamic equilibriums, and matched the experience of my roaming life path following the siren call of the Edge – beyond which might lie undiscovered opportunity or death. You’re not sure; that’s what draws you to the Edge. There was something that kept living systems oscillating within that tension between opportunity and death. The book led me to articles by Dee Hock, the creator of VISA, who had coined the term “chaordic” to describe non-hierarchical organizational structures that oscillate on this edge between chaos and order in dynamic interplay.
One chapter in Complexity described the work of John Holland studying adaptation in systems. That chapter gave insight into the systems problems I was sensing in public education. I highlighted three sections of the chapter.
“The control of a complex adaptive system tends to be highly dispersed. There is no master neuron in the brain, for example, nor is there any master cell within a developing embryo. If there is to be any coherent behavior in the system, it has to arise from competition and cooperation among the agents themselves.”
“Since it’s effectively impossible to cover every conceivable situation, top-down systems are forever running into combinations of events they don’t know how to handle. They tend to be touchy and fragile, and they all too often grind to a halt in a dither of indecision.”
“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. As Holland loved to point out, living systems never really settle down.”
That last one really resonated with me. “Let the behavior emerge from the bottom up, instead of being specified from the top down.” That fit both with my “invisible power” sense of working high in the drainage as well as with the frustrations I kept hearing from teachers with top-down chains of command. What if the school’s administration was in service to the teachers instead of being their boss? What would a school be like where teachers were freed from a top-down structure and allowed to teach as they wanted while, at the same time, receiving the continuous feedback of their paycheck being proportional to their class enrollment? If families pulled their child out, the salary went down unless there were more families wanting in. A structure like that would make Chrysalis more than a school for us; it would make it an interestingly radical experiment in using a nature model for creating change within the public school system.
This possibility allowed me to resolve my concerns about unions. I was interested in empowering teachers to run the school. That seemed to be the appropriate direction for the union to also navigate towards. But, instead, the union had allowed itself to get defined by its position in collective bargaining, being the negotiator within a somewhat adversarial relationship between the teachers and the administration. This role made the union indispensable within the school but at the cost of making the administration equally indispensable. The union needed the administration to exist in order to justify its role in collective bargaining. In my mind, this was a conflict of interest that had allowed the unions to settle into a status quo that limited the potential of unions to empower their workers.
What was needed was to push beyond collective bargaining all the way to where the teachers ran the schools. That is what the union should be working towards. I included the Complexity quotes above in the preamble to the Chrysalis charter and built a deliberately chaordic structure around the empowerment of teachers. Now that we had an exciting charter proposal, we just needed to find a school where the teachers would sign on and the school board would sponsor us.
The 1995-96 school year was the last year of SIRC. We had worked for several years with Steve Essig, the second director of SIRC. We shared with him our vision of a school where teachers would have autonomy. He had been a school principal at a local school district before he became the second director of SIRC and he was wondering how he would fit back in after his leave of absence. Chrysalis intrigued him. Together we figured out how we could squeeze two classes into the museum classroom by creating a hybrid program of homeschool and classroom.
By mid-year, Alysia’s home school-support program had grown to around eighteen students (including Dawn) and had been covered by local TV news. Steve talked with Lee Jenkins, the innovative superintendent of Enterprise Elementary School District. Lee could see the potential of offering a new option that would attract homeschooling families throughout the county. Being already inside of his school district and respected by the teachers, Steve was able to get the required number of teachers to sign our charter petition and the district school board approved our charter.
The last step was the State Board of Education approving our charter. Steve and I went down to Sacramento to their board meeting. Our advisor from the California Department of Education looked at the agenda and lamented that the agenda item before ours would take a long time. I looked at the item description and I couldn’t understand why. The legislature had passed a law that would pay a school district $5 for every enrolled student if all of their students participated in the state’s standardized testing. That seemed simple enough. The State Board of Education was delegated to come up with the regulations for putting this law into effect.
Our rural county has many districts of around 300-400 students. Five dollars per student would be only $2000, hardly worth the fuss. But Los Angeles Unified School District was at that meeting. Five dollars per student meant three million dollars for them if every student took the standardized test. But what about students who had never shown up? Technically they were on the roll, but they had never shown up, so the district was not receiving any funding for them. The schools had tried to find these students and couldn’t, so they did not even know if the students were in the state. They were just disembodied names on a list. Should the district lose three million dollars because of those students? The legislative aide was there to advise the state board. He said the legislative intent was that 100% of the students take the test and that’s all he would say. What about exchange students who were studying abroad during the time of the tests? The legislative intent was that 100% of students take the test. What about students whose families had left the state in the month before the test? The legislative intent was that 100% of students take the test. What about students who had just enrolled the week of the test and knew no English? The legislative intent was that 100% of students take the test. Our advisor was right; the agenda item took two hours. This reminded me of the Complexity quotation: “Since it’s effectively impossible to cover every conceivable situation, top-down systems are forever running into combinations of events they don’t know how to handle. They tend to be touchy and fragile, and they all too often grind to a halt in a dither of indecision.”
Our item, when it finally came up, took only a few minutes. Our charter was approved and in August, 1996, Chrysalis began as the first chartered public school in our region.
The next section is stories from Chrysalis, very different from this first section of roaming, mainly within nature. Some who have read the next section think it should be a separate book. Though the two sections feel different, that difference is part of the story. Chrysalis was an experiment in taking the lessons from nature and applying them within our culture, working with organizations rather than with a trowel, but nevertheless changing the flows of energy. For me, roaming in nature and my time with Chrysalis form the two parts of a massive “3D” experience; a “depth perception” emerges from the two different perspectives.
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