Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple stupid behavior.
Dee Hock
I was the school administrator, not the principal. I served the teachers, not the other way around. I was on the same pay schedule as the teachers. The only difference was that I taught half-time. The other half I did the administration for the school. As the school grew, this grew into more than a half-time job but I kept my position the same. This kept me aiming to handle situations in the most efficient way I could reasonably see. Part of my job, as I expressed it, was to sort all the items that came to me into two categories. One was all the items that I thought teachers needed to know about. They might delegate the item back to me to handle, but they at least needed to know about it. The other pile was items they wouldn’t want to know about. Bus contracts, requests from the state for information, insurance checklists, signing documents, …
Unlike with regular public schools, being the administrator of a charter school in California does not require an administrative credential. (One of the reasons I could handle the requirements of the job is because both the Shasta County Office of Education and the California Department of Education provided excellent support, not because I was an ignorant newbie but just because that was what they did. They helped all the schools and all the administrators fulfill their responsibilities, for which I was thankful.)
I started going to the county-wide meetings for principals but then I stopped. This was partly because much of the content was the county office helping principals do the things they needed to do – but that a charter school didn’t have to do. But also, the meetings usually lacked spirit; they felt so detached from the intrinsic curiosity and joy that motivates students to learn. This was not the fault of the people there. The administrators were not boring or bad. Most of them are very dedicated and do their best for kids. But systems thinking reveals how systems create their own behaviors, and a top-down system filled with forms and “best practices” and ensuring uniform compliance gradually drains individuals’ spirit out of their behavior within that system. If your initiative isn’t needed, your energy subsides. Often those meetings talked about techniques by which the principal could be the educational leader of the teachers. But the Chrysalis teachers were always talking with one another about teaching. The conversations were positive, centered on specific interactions with specific kids or on something new they tried that really worked (or didn’t) or brainstorming new things to try. It was easier for me to skip those county meetings and simply let Chrysalis teachers work together and teach the way they wanted. The school carried on without input from those administrative meetings.*
* All the Chrysalis teachers participate in the hiring of a new teacher. We review the paper applications and select a group of applicants to interview. After the interviews, we select a group of applicants to come teach a lesson to the class that we are hiring for. We teachers sit in the back, watching how the applicant interacts with the kids. From that we decide whom to hire. This process initiates a bond between all of the teachers and our new teacher. This continues developing because of the teacher co-op structure of the school; it’s in everyone’s interest to help the new teacher be successful.
Our mission helped me maintain my course through a bureaucratic creep of phrases that can suffocate public education – phrases like “research-based” or “best practices” or “grade-level standards.” State-funded curriculum should be “research-based” – which sounds good until you realize that it means that schools can buy only from the large publishers which have the funding to pay some professor to do a publishable experiment to show that the curriculum, delivered in a standardized setting, creates a measurable difference on some test score. Though the difference is “statistically significant”, it’s often not really very significant. This can get circularly twisted when the publisher also produces the tests that are used to show that the curriculum makes a difference.* The phrase “research-based” helps lock schools into the worksheet-driven mode of teaching that disengages many students.
* One time I was giving the eighth graders their state standardized Social Studies test that covered everything that was supposed to be taught from sixth through eighth grade. The only way to cover that much material was with textbooks, so I disregarded even trying to teach to the test and taught free from any standards. (As a result, our social studies standardized test results weren’t strong but the kids’ interest in history was.) In the next room, an intern teacher just happened to be teaching the sixth grade history class using a textbook publisher’s video on world religions. The standardized test the eighth graders were taking included several questions on world religion. The video included, word for word, the questions on the standardized test along with their answers, repeated several times. I couldn’t believe the identicalness. So a curriculum that repeats “The first monotheistic religion was Judaism,” along with the other test question sentences over and over again, will prove itself as research-based, worthy of state funding. It might be boring to hear the same limited sentences over and over again, but they are research-based sentences.
One year, the governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, declared that all 8th graders would take algebra. I had been teaching 8th grade algebra for several years to our mathematically-gifted students. Most of our 8th graders took a more basic math course to secure their fundamental mathematics so they would be strongly prepared for algebra in high school. We knew, from direct experience with our diversity of 8th graders, that not all 8th graders could handle or benefit from an algebra course. So, thanks to the curricular freedom within our charter, we ignored the governor’s directive and continued with two 8th grade math courses.
One requirement of our charter is to present an annual report to our sponsoring board. That year I added to my report that we would not be teaching algebra to all of our 8th graders because it was age-inappropriate for most of the students. I admit that I felt like a barbarian at the gates of Rome, a hairy, disrespectful swaggering charter barbarian coming within sight of the citified, decadent Romans gazing out from their once-unchallenged walls. The district superintendent stopped me and said this was not an appropriate conversation to be having in front of the board. He went on to say that they were sure that with the right inservicing and preparation in the lower grades, all 8th graders could be successful in algebra. I felt rebuked, probably appropriately so for my tone, but undaunted in terms of the rightness of our position. We continued not teaching algebra to most of our eighth graders. We were penalized for this on the standardized tests.
A few years later, we began hearing stories of high school freshmen piling up in remedial math, having failed algebra in 8th grade. Several years later, at a meeting, that same superintendent acknowledged that the research was showing that algebra is developmentally inappropriate for most 8th graders. With a nod in my direction, he said he had been wrong about this. I had a lot of respect for that man’s integrity before; I had even more after that.
Public education has a top-down chain of command structure. A governor declares something lofty and all the schools follow along because that is how the system works, leading many of their eighth graders over a cliff like lemmings, injuring their relationship with both math and themselves and their family. My rain walks led me to see our organizational structures as causing our individual power to run off elsewhere rather than soak in to nourish the creative possibilities within each of us. We need to explore a chaordic middle ground, a structure that nourishes a vibrant give-and-take between those doing the work and those administering the work.
Currently, teachers are placed in a certain salary range that limits how much they are paid. Therefore, if an excellent teacher wants to earn a higher salary, they need to leave teaching and enter administration. However, the lower levels of administration are the people responsible for making sure the teachers fulfill the requirements coming down from the top. If the requirement is “all 8th graders will take algebra,” then it becomes these people’s job to provide “the right teacher inservicing so that all 8th graders can succeed in algebra”. We knew as teachers that it was not age-appropriate for many 8th graders. But higher in the hierarchy, you are responsible for making the governor’s order happen, so that’s what you do. With the right teacher inservicing, all 8th graders will succeed in algebra. Doubters aren’t promoted. Salaries increase upwards. A gradient of wealth pulls good teachers away from the kids and into the service of the people higher up, further removed from the classroom.
The image of Chrysalis as the hairy outsiders, discomfiting the centers of power, was augmented by a book I read: Barriers and Bridges to the Renewal of Ecosystems and Institutions (Lance Gunderson, C. S. Holling, Stephen S. Light : Columbia University Press, ©1995). It’s about natural resource management agencies but it felt applicable to public education, also. One of the authors (Holling) concluded that resource agencies tend to manage ecosystems with goals centered on a few, economically-determined factors. Reduce forest fires or increase a fishery or increase board feet production. Such a narrow approach tends to be successful. By stabilizing this key factor at a predictably high level, the agency creates an economic environment of greater stability and productivity. This fosters investment which leads to increasing local economic reliance on that resource. This success leads the resource agency to complacently keep track of just the targeted resource measures. Therefore, it loses touch with systemic changes that are happening in the ecosystem in response to management aimed at limited outcomes.
Unfortunately, a pattern that crops up again and again is that in the long term, managing an entire ecosystem around a few factors leads to it losing its resiliency. Hollings called this becoming “brittle.” When the increasingly brittle ecosystem is suddenly perturbed in an unanticipated way that threatens havoc with the local economy, the agency is caught unawares with little room to maneuver.
I recently read about such an example involving salmon. Resource agencies have been focused on maximizing the number of salmon that people can catch sustainably. So they calculated the minimum number of salmon needed to reach the spawning streams in order to lay enough eggs so that enough juveniles would go out to sea so that enough adults would return years later so that the salmon population would remain stable. People could then harvest fish above that minimum number. Sounds fine on the face of it.
They did not know, however, that the spawning streams are not rich enough in nutrients to nourish enough young salmon. 40-60% of the biomass of juvenile salmon comes directly or indirectly from the decomposing bodies of their parents’ generation. If you limit the number of spawners to only those mathematically needed to lay enough eggs, you will gradually deplete the drainage of the nutrients needed to successfully raise those eggs. To provide enough food to feed the fry, many more salmon than those needed to spawn need to make it to the spawning streams to die.
Not only did I find Barriers and Bridges to the Renewal of Ecosystems and Institutions’s thesis intriguing in its own right, I also found it applicable to what was happening in public education. The passage of the federal law, No Child Left Behind, focused the flow of money and the opportunity for professional advancement on raising standardized test scores. I heard from parents seeking refuge at Chrysalis and from teachers at other schools how an academic “ecosystem” focused on that one narrow measure of a standardized test score was creating all sorts of unmonitored consequences that were making schools “brittle” and would eventually crash the “ecosystem.”
We started getting parents applying to Chrysalis because their children’s education was mostly test-prep. One parent told us that at their parent conference, her son’s teacher told her that the teacher’s salary was influenced by how well her class did on the tests and that the mother’s son was keeping her from getting a bonus. Another teacher reported that a Program Improvement team had come into their “low-performing” school and told them to take down all the student art on the walls because the students shouldn’t be doing art. They needed to be doing just math and language. A palpable feeling of fear filled the educational community. There was no way that any school could produce the required 100% of its students functioning proficiently at grade level.*
* I once looked at Alysia’s class as they took the standardized test. Restraining orders had been recently placed on two of her students’ fathers and another student’s brother had died the previous week. And Congress believes that all these fifth graders will have the maturity to set these traumatic events aside so that they will score proficient on this test.
100% of the schools would eventually become “failing schools.” We heard of teachers losing their joy for teaching because they could no longer teach children; they were teaching the test instead. There was less support for the relationship that lies at the heart of the influence a teacher can have with a student. The teachers were becoming “agentic” (to use a phrase Stanley Milgram, a famous experimental psychologist, coined to describe when people give up individual responsibility and instead just fulfill the role of an agent for some organization.) They, themselves, know teaching to the test is wrong and it shouldn’t be that way. They might even say to their students, “I’m sorry that we have to go this fast but I have to do it because of the tests.” However, when they say that as an explanation, they are teaching the kids that as an adult, you have to submit. You cannot be autonomous; you cannot follow your own heart; you cannot do what you know is right. You have to do what you are told to do. This is an example of what our mentor, Michael Butler, would call “the invisible lesson.” It is more powerful, goes deeper, than whatever math lesson you are teaching, because it is what you are modeling. Is this what we want, for our schools to be teaching our children to become agentic? (This agentic “acquiescence to what you know is wrong” relates back to my rain walk thoughts about how chains of command derive their power from people lower in the chain of command (or higher in the drainage from my perspective) letting their potential energy run off rather than actively helping it soak in.)
The contrast between our “encouraging the light” and the national “all students shall score proficient” made me appreciate the wisdom of that quote from Complexity: “And while you’re at it, focus on ongoing behavior instead of the final result.” “Encouraging the light” focuses on ongoing behavior while “All students shall score proficient” or “All eighth graders will take algebra” focuses on final results. The two different focuses lead to very different places.
The natural resource agency book observed that because the resource agency is monitoring only a few things related to only a few economically significant species, they lose touch with the greater ecosystem and its increasing brittleness. The authors found that the first people to detect the brittleness were what they called “maverick scientists.” These were usually university professors who were researching some species of academic interest but of no economic “value” to the resource agency. These species were “off the radar.” “Maverick scientists” noticed perturbations like frog populations declining and raised alarms. The book stressed that resource agencies needed to be more open to this outside input from people looking at the resource from a different perspective. I feel like we at Chrysalis are maverick teachers, looking from an “encouraging the light” perspective different from “the agency’s” focus on test scores. We noticed things they overlooked and overlooked things they paid close attention to.
One example of this happened when the state of California developed (for a variety of reasons) a database to track all students. Near the end of the development of the database, they gave a chance for charter schools to give feedback on how CALPADS would work for them. I looked over all the required fields that had to be filled in for each student and asked, “What if a school doesn’t give grades?” They didn’t know; they had never been asked that question before. I couldn’t believe that; in all of California, the most populous state in the country, every educator with input on CALPADS had never questioned that every course from middle school on up had to generate a grade. It was a required field in the database. If all the schools that had reviewed CALPADS before me had not even raised the question, what else is the agency not seeing?
If learning has no relationship to the light within, learners young and old will drift toward some other facet of the world that does. To hold their attention to the task at hand, grades are often used as both threat and reward. Grades often foster arrogance and entitled privilege in the academically gifted and provide a continual confirmation and reminder of mediocrity for those who are not. Both groups suffer. One of the things Chrysalis’s mission allows teachers to do is get to know students’ gifts that don’t lie in academic areas. Being appreciated for these gifts allows children’s light to shine, even when academics are hard.
Another time I was required by the top-down hierarchy to demonstrate that Chrysalis’s curriculum met “grade-level standards.” My answer was that our curriculum was “encouraging the light within each student to shine brighter.” We went back and forth on that one. How do we teach math? We teach math but in a way that encourages the light within each student to shine brighter. The light bursts forth when we understand something. Forcing students through a curriculum at a pace where they can’t experience understanding dims their light so some fourth-graders might be studying fifth grade math while some might still be working on third grade math. The whole batch processing idea of moving all kids of a certain age through a curriculum restricted to pre-ordained “grade level standards” might work for most students, but not for all.
I responded to an email several years ago that brought me into contact with Education Evolving, an education reform organization researching “teacher-powered schools.” We learned that Chrysalis was not alone. Other schools (charter and non-charter) are exploring the same issue of teacher autonomy that we are. Two of Education Evolving’s staff came to observe us as part of their research. They compiled their findings into a book, Trusting Teachers with School Success. Now they work to help this development spread, both in public awareness and in the growth of more teacher-powered schools. Research is showing that teacher-powered schools tend to be more successful academically. Alysia serves as an ambassador for teacher-powered schools, giving advice, attending conferences and helping spread the word. She sees this process as akin to moss spreading over timberline bedrock. Each appearance of life helps anchor the moss mat, helping it grow wider and taller, capable of generating more life. If you are involved in education and want to learn more about teacher-powered schools, follow the links in this paragraph.
It’s easy to slip into a barbaric tirade against top-down public education but dwelling on it would misrepresent Chrysalis and what “chaordic” means. Chaordic is the oscillations between chaos and order that maintain a vibrant dynamic equilibrium. To explore a new edge, one is always dancing back and forth between top-down and bottom-up, between individual and society, between growth and maintenance. So let me dance to a gentler note with what we call Chrysalis miracles: students transferring in with their light dimmed or snuffed out and a month or two later, their parents thanking us because “I have my child back again.”
One of my eighth-graders had come to Chrysalis from another school where she had been teased for not being smart, especially in math. (Another eighth-grade girl had transferred from the same school because she was being teased for being too smart in math.) I was helping the first girl, one on one, with a math problem she did not understand. I was doing my usual practice of asking questions rather than telling her what to do. At some point in our dialogue, I realized that almost all of her energy was going into figuring out what phrase she could say that would feel like an appropriate answer without revealing her stupidness. None of her attention was going to the actual mathematics within my question; it was all going into deflecting the question’ ability to expose her. I looked up from the paper into her eyes and I said, “Math is hard for you, isn’t it?”
Her eyes brimmed with an upwelling of tears. But before they overflowed into tears, her tear ducts clenched. The brimming stopped and gradually “soaked” away until the danger of crying was past. Her eyes started to relax which allowed the tears to again fill her eyes. Again she clenched and shut the tears just before they overflowed and again the tears subsided. I told her that I could see her tears (which made them well up again) and could see how she was trying to hold them back. When I acknowledged her tears, she no longer choked back the tears as strongly as she had before.
What followed was a beautiful dance of our eyes, an oscillation of her tear ducts letting loose and clenching back again, an oscillation of tears brimming and subsiding as my eyes, in response to her brimming tears, showed that I was seeing her tears and it was OK. I understood. There was no need to be afraid, no need to hold back her tears. And then when her tear ducts clenched, my eyes showed that this, too, was OK; she had needed to hold them back in order to survive the bullying. The oscillations became gentler, subsiding to eyes filled with tears, neither brimming over nor shutting down, eyes relaxing within a veil of tears that expressed a new equilibrium between us.
After that day, her concentration shifted from thinking of evasive replies to actual engagement with the problem and she started doing mathematics. Several times in the remainder of the year, she successfully reached the answer to a complex, hard problem before other kids in the class, and I could see her confidence and pride growing. Our last day of school, sitting in a Sharing Circle talking about the year, she shared the story of crying in front of me and how it bonded us together.
A spiritual dimension lies at the heart of teaching, connecting teacher and student through what is being taught. This spirit can’t be replaced with required techniques and “research-based curriculum.” It can’t be scaled up with computer programs. It needs to be acknowledged and nourished. It needs to be given space and air to grow. That’s why Chrysalis’s mission is so important: “to encourage the light within each student to shine brighter.”
Some might object that you can’t measure “the light.” You don’t measure it; you navigate by it. You watch the eyes. Are they shining brighter or are they starting to fade? Focus on ongoing behavior and be responsive to that. Encouraging the light will nourish growth that you can then measure.
Very last
reminder to play the Hand Game.
I will discuss it in the next chapter.
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