The mission of H.O.P.E. is to turn the prow of our entropyship, the Earth, back upstream so that Earth's evolving consciousness may explore the headwaters of the Universe for billions of years to come. The work of H.O.P.E. is to make visible the larger relationships we live within - relationships that inspire visions of wonder and works of hope.

This issue is a bit late because I wanted to be able to let you know that our sponsoring school board voted to renew  Chrysalisís charter for another five years. A big thank you to all of you who wrote support letters to our board. They helped, I know. That is one more load off of our minds; we can feel more and more of the staffís energy focusing more intently on where it should be - on the teaching. But also we are now starting to shift some of the institutional energy to an exciting new area - creating our own school facilities rather than renting space. Our preliminary images are of a place with gardens and orchards and animals and ìwild placesî with a facilities that is a model of sustainability. For example, a school (of all places) should be a place of solar energy generation. There is little activity at night. All through the longest days of summer, we arenít in session. We could be selling electricity into the grid. There will be, of course, some large financial challenges to overcome but weíll do it somehow. However, first there is fleshing out the dream into a realistic model. If any of you know of models or resources that could help us design a ìmodel of sustainabilityî school, please let me know. I would appreciate it.

I looked forward to sharing an Internet site with you; an archive of short essays by Donella Meadows, one of the ìeldersî I respect. She was a wonderfully grounded in the living earth systems thinker, ecologist, and activist. I know you will enjoy reading many, perhaps all, of the articles at the site. Unfortunately, I just learned that Donella died suddenly this month. A great light has gone out. I am sad. Read her words, extend your thinking and continue her vision. http://iisd1.iisd.ca/pcdf/meadows/default.htm

Massage - getting in touch
I wish to share an area of current personal spiritual growth. Itís an area of intuitive/kinesthetic sensitivity so it challenges me to put it into words but here I go. Dance and massage and body work has been an important source of feedback for me for twenty years. Twenty years ago, I experienced a powerful state of grace for a couple of months. One of the main manifestations happened while massaging people. Often times while not even touching them, I could sense hard knots of energy that the energy in my hand could somehow ìdanceî with until the knots ìmeltedî in a way that the person experienced as spiritually centering and physically relaxing. This ability passed away after several weeks. It returns in fits and starts. I try to stay sensitive to it.

Alysia and I always tuck our daughters in at night. As they grew older, there were occasional times they would go to bed angry at us. If I rubbed their shoulders, their shoulders would tense, holding onto the anger. I would do an aikido massage move. I would gently move the shoulder a certain direction until it tensed up. If I tried pushing harder, it would resist harder. So I reversed the direction, pulling in the same direction the muscle is contracting. The confused muscle relaxes. After a couple of times, the tension melts, the shoulder drops, the breathing deepens, and I can feel peace flowing back into the angry spirit.

Well, one night I had done something that had made my daughter angry. She was lying in bed, shoulders tense. I tried my massage tricks. Nothing worked. As I kept working on it, I grew aware of a tension in my neck. I tried to ignore it but it grew more noticeable. Finally, I had to deal with it so, not removing my hands from the shoulder, I shifted my focus onto my own neck and moved it until the tension melted. And the moment it melted, the tension in my daughterís shoulder also melted.

This has happened enough times since then that Iíve drawn the following lesson. The anger that created the tension in this situation lay between the two of us. We both had to change. My maintaining my rigid position was part of the dynamic creating her tension. Therefore just trying to change her could not release the tension. The mystery, however, lies in that her tension released when my tension released. There was no exchange of words. No obvious changes in hand pressure. And yet, our inner states were connected.

I am coming to believe, though I am being dragged kicking and screaming, that we are far more deeply interconnected with the world (which includes one another) than our culture teaches. I am reminded of a quote by Bateson, something to the effect of if we make Lake Erie crazy with our pollution, that we will make our culture also crazy. Or another take on it is that we can try to lie or pretend or play with a straight poker face but that the truth is always coming through and shaping the world accordingly. This is especially poignant in many interactions Iíve seen between men and women where the man pretends that the only communication from him that should be taken into account is his words and the woman is picking up a very different, clearer message from the rest of the manís being.

There is more to this than I can currently understand. Two related topics for future exploration. One, if we are more deeply interconnected with the world, can we deepen our awareness even more and if so, what happens when we do? My assumption, based on the past, is that good things will happen (though the good things might manifest as a need to confront unpleasant things). The second topic is to understand many human activities as attempts to create walls or disconnections in the world that allow harvesting for a profit. Slavery in America is an example ? an attempt to create a wall between whites and blacks so the former could, in good Christian conscience, exploit the latter for profit. But the distinction is not real and the greater system is being depleted by the action. But the depletion often occurs in around-about ways. A similar example is political campaigns. The process has become so beholden to money that though the candidate might win office and access to power, that power has been weakened. The constitutents no longer hold the office in the high regard that can summon the truly great power of a people united. The office sinks to giving tax breaks and scraping together reactions to crises rather than moving creatively forward for the greater good.

Personal Big Ideas
Birdwatching led me onto my life path as a naturalist. As I sat by the road hitchhiking up to Alaska or down to Arizona, I would study the range maps in the field guide, anticipating birds I might see. And then when I arrived in the new range, I would start walking through it. The drainages had different birds than the ridges. Hiking around the country birdwatching really pounds into one the realities expressed by the  concepts of habitat and range. Those concepts are part of my flesh and neurons, possessing so much more life than concepts Iíve learned from reading without little direct interaction. Reflecting on this got me to thinking of how different natural history studies are particularly powerful for reinforcing certain concepts. So just for the fun of it, I made the following list of Deep Knowings taught by topics.

Birwatching - Habitat and range. Learning to look much more precisely than I had before.
Track identification - Events leave tracks. By learning to read these tracks, oneís awareness of change extends further into the past.
Geology - Changed my sense of the present world from a photograph to an ongoing moving picture. Teaches me to see the ìblursî in the current frame that allows me to see how this frame fits into the larger movie.
Astronomy - The expansion of human awareness. I think the history of astronomy is one of the most wonderful stories of our species. How we went from a universe in which the Sun is a chariot riding across the sky a few miles up, from a universe only a few miles larger than our world to a universe larger than we can think. But the deep level of understanding does not come from the ìhistoryî but from learning (and replicating) the thought processes and evidence by which astronomers came up with their universe-expanding insights. Another Deep Knowing fostered by astronomy is how interconnected everything is. This comes from the amazing fact that almost the only material astronomers have to work with is light. And yet that light expresses many of the events of its origin and journey.
Botany - taxonomic relatedness. I was delighted when I visited a friend in Oxford, England and saw in his driveway Erodium, a genus I created a curriculum for in California. Same idea, somewhat different expression.

Working with Databases
 A lot of my time has been spent creating an integrated database/spreadsheet for Chrysalis. An important difference of Chrysalis is that the money flows from the bottom up, rather than the top down. Rather than an administrator portioning out the schoolís money to individual classrooms, the teachers generate the schoolís income, decide what portion needs to go to schoolwide expenses and are then free to do as they wish with their remaining revenue. Trying to enshrine this in a spreadsheet has been an interesting hack. The work has been made larger by the fact I was simultaneously learning Microsoft Office. This program is huge, bigger than a beginner really wants to deal with but the scope of the project called for it. I wrestled for months with what is the core ìunitî for organizing the personal data of students and their families. Is it the student, the family, or the home? I tried each way and discovered that each way contained unique perspectives and limitations.

One of the challenges is deciding at what level of detail to take the program. The more general the pattern, the easier it is to program. If everybody does the same thing (like have a date of birth), it is easy to program. But it is harder to create a program that can contain individual quirks. For example, I wanted to be able to generate a school-wide telephone roster from the database. If every family never got divorced and if every wife took on the last name of her husband, such a roster would be easy. It took a bit of work to accomodate the divorces and different last names. But it took even more time to create the program so that it would include the name and number of a divorced father who no longer lives with his child but who is still definitely involved in his sonís schooling. Programming the roster to include that one name took more energy than the energy required to program 95% of all the other names. Several times I was tempted to just drop that man.

That is the challenge of computer programming. Simplifications of the world are much easier to program than the actual complexity. Yet it was important to the culture of Chrysalis that the roster include that fatherís name and number. Struggling with this challenge made me realize that once I programmed my choice in, all information being entered into the program would have to conform to the choices I had made. Information that did not fit my formats simply could not be entered or worked with.

I was struggling with this at the same time we were contending with the auditor. These two challenges led me to the following reflection. We are used to people saying, ìYou canít do that; itís against the law.î (The law is set by legislation and the appeal is through the courts.) Our experience with the auditor deepened my awareness of a second such limitation. ìYou canít do that; itís against the regulations.î (The regulations are set by agencies from directives within the law set up the legislatures and the appeal is usually through the bureaucracy.) My work with the database made me aware of a third limitation. You canít do that,; it doesnít fit into the database.î  And in these cases, there is basically no appeal because the people you are dealing with have no idea of the programming underling the database they are using.

Standardized test scores
 Iím going to get wonkish on something that might be of little interest to many of you. However, it relates to something shaping up in the national political debate, the content of which has been devoid of an important experience  Chrysalis has given me. So indulge me please.

There is lots of political talk about standardized tests and school accountability and national tests. A year ago, this would have led me into the conventional tirade against standardized tests typical of educators who stress individual unfolding. And I still have several paragraphs I could add against standardized tests. The most appropriate to this newsletter is that local natural history can never, by definition, be on a standardized test. Therefore a push for a natioanal standarized test will be a push (whether conscious or not) for not nourishing a studentís rootedness with their home. But I want to go some place more wonky with this article.

Standardized tests measure a certain thing. The results of that measurement can then be expressed several ways. Somehow, in our culture, we have gotten fixated on NPR, the national percentile ranking. If a student scores 70 NPR, that means that the student scored higher than 70% of the students who took the test. The score does NOT mean that the student answered 70% of the questions right. This is an important distinction to keep in mind. Most of us are familiar with regular tests where a score of 70 means that you got 70% of the questions right and that, theoretically, if you had studied the material thoroughly, you should have gotten a 100%. In a well-constructed standardized test, only one in a thousand should correctly answer 100% of the questions. Therefore it is important to realize that if a student (or a school) records a score of 50%, that means they had an average score. Right in the middle. Half the students (or schools) scored lower; the other half higher. 50% on this test does not mean an F like it did in many of our school experiences.

The problem with fixating on the NPR score is that it focuses our attention on high scores ? as opposed to improvements in scores. Fixation on high test scores can lead schools to seeking out ìsmart kidsî and weeding out ìdumb kidsî so the school can bring up their test scores. Unfortuately a school full of brilliant students who are sliding down from the 99th percentile to the 95th percentile will look far better than a school full of 20th percentile students who are advancing to the 40th percentile. This inappropriate focus becomes culturally loaded because of the definite correlation of test scores with socioeconomic status.

However, when we were doing research this year, we learned that many statisticians were writing that NPR is the inappropriate expression to focus on. They recommended focusing on whether the test scores of individual students are increasing from year to year (gain scores). Itís like the difference between using the tests simply as photographs capturing the group average or using them as frames in a movie showing the changes in each individual student. To do this analysis, one must use a different interpretation of the test scores - scale scores and NCE (Normal Curve Equivalent). These are the only interpretations that can be compared from year to year. We tried that with our Chrysalis test scores and WOW, suddenly the standardized test scores became an accurate measure of our gut sense of what was happening for students. One student whose NPR scores were in the 20th% but who we know had a great year had high gain scores. Another smart student who easily scores high but who had coasted through the year had near zero gain scores.
 When we focus on NPR interpretation of test scores, our understanding of what is happening in the schools is limited by the inability to track individiual progress over time and gets skewed by the fact that our culture has socioeconomically segregated neighborhoods. But if the focus shifts to gain scores, then the progress of each child becomes potentially equal in an educationally profound way. Currently, schools experience students at the lower end of the test range as damaging to the schoolís public image. But if one focuses on gain scores, any student can contribute just as much as any other student to the schoolís image.

Why donít we use this better focus? I donít know the answer but I can imagine three reasons. First, the gain scores are based on comparing scores from two consecutive years. Students who are moving to different schools could, theoretically, fall through the cracks. But test scores are often included in the cum folders that accompany students so this is not a major reason.
 The second reason I can imagine is that the focus on NPR got started before there were computers that made easy the calculation and analysis of gain scores. NPR scores can easily be calculated by the big centralized testing institutions. But they canít calculate gain scores from the current yearís test because it requires comparing scores from one year to the next. And so schools got used to receiving what was available - and the NPR was the easiest score interpretation to explain to parents and the culture at large. Now with computers common in schools, the gain scores could be calculated fairly easily. But cultural inertia fixates us on NPRs

The third reason: We have found in our limited experience that gain scores can reveal the teaching effectiveness of different teachers - at least in the content area measured by the tests. Alysia, for example, is a more effective classroom teacher than I am. I knew that already but the gain scores confirmed it. Therefore, I can imagine that the teachersí union might resist the use of gain scores because it can be used to draw distinctions between individual teachers. Some are better than average; some are worse than average. NPR scores, by their nature, tend to get averaged over the grade or the school so teacher-caused variations get averaged out and become invisible. This averaging does not have to happen with gain scores and so they might be threatening to individual teachers. And the dark side of teacher-specific gain scores is they could be used to create an even more test-driven school culture than we have now.

Anyway, whenever you hear or read political debate about education and test scores, notice whether the person specifies what interpretation of test scores they are using. If they donít, then they are probably operating from cultural inertia. And if you participate in educational policy debate, start making the distinction between percentile rankings and individual gain scores.

Neat Thought
Bateson said, ìThe map is not the territory.î However, the map is part of the territory. And what an interesting part it is - in at least two ways. First, think how different a mapped territory is from an unmapped territory. A territory without a map is very different from one containing a map. The process of producing a map of the territory changes the territory in fundamental ways. A second interesting characteristic of a mapped territory is that a tiny piece of the territory (the map) is a scale model of the rest of the territory. The map is a high density, self-similar representation of the territory; itís a fractal piece of the territory.
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