main: July 2008 Archives

I am a little bit behind in my posts, as I am on vacation this week. Actually, it's a "stay-cation," as I am just hanging around home, going to local beaches, etc.

There's an article in today's Washington Post that is a must read for a number of reasons. First, you've got a mayor and schools superintendent who have made a public commitment backed by dollars (really!), to place music, art, and physical education teachers in every DC public school.

A study comes out saying that this is going to result in "teacher shortages, large class sizes and per-pupil funding gaps between some schools in low- and high-income areas of the city." What the study is saying is that in order to make this mandate possible, a "rigid" funding formula has been put in place that will cause these and other consequences.

For the moment, it appears to be a reverse of the usual, with the district pushing for the arts and physical education and a coalition questioning what it will take to make it happen. It's a sort of "bizarro world" of education.

There's one other, very, very intersting tidbit here: DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee was quoted as saying that in the past, "the system gave too much power to principals who sometimes made questionable staffing decisions."

There's been a movement a foot, well situated in New York public schools and threading into other districts, to "empower" principals by giving them singular power to make decisions in their schools, including budget, staffing, and capital. It's the worldview of principal as CEO, amped up even further in places like New York where there is no practical oversight for principals--they're basically unsupervised, as they've been "empowered." CEO's of publicly traded corporations have boards of directors, same as non-profits. Even charter schools have boards directors. There are many supporters of this principal empowerment, more than you can imagine. So, a comment like this from Michelle Rhee, is indeed a very interesting development.

There will be much more to come, I am sure, about how current and future budget crunches are going to affect arts education, which has historically been among the very first to be cut.

The New York City school district is unlike any in the nation in two distinct ways: there is no real school board here (I often tell people we have a "fake school board--they laugh...), as the mayor has complete control of the schools; and the sheer number and frequency of reforms instituted by the city since 2003 would be hard to imagine anywhere else. That being said, bits and pieces of what is being tested in New York are either being done elsewhere, or have been done elsewhere, no matter what the NYCDOE might proclaim as being the first to have done it all.

The NYCDOE, known to most New Yorkers as "Tweed," named for Boss Tweed, has in fact come up with something that no other school district has thought of, or would be allowed to do, if governed by a school board: it has created the "Truth Squad."

Eduwonkette has a good blog entry and a link to some articles about it.

Big Brother (that's as in George Orwell, not the CBS series) IS watching, and it's not just FISA.

Arts education is a hybrid, it's part arts and part education. It's part teachers in schools and part teaching artists going into schools. If you were to imagine a Venn Diagram, (better yet, I have provided one for you, see below) and you had arts in one circle (A) and education in the other (B), where the circles overlapped, the sweet spot!, you would find arts education.

 

Okay, so, we've made some headway in supporting the work of the education reporters to be able to understand and appreciate the field of arts education and for it to been seen as an "education" issue.

Where does that leave the arts journalists? When we hear of an arts education story being developed by an arts journalist, my staff often becomes worried as to whether or not the story will be well reported. Will the complicated policy issues that connect to a larger world of education be understood? Will the context be right? Will the piece be accurate? Will damage be done? I know the last question may read a bit hyperbolic, but hey, if the state of need is not accurately presented, if funders, policymakers, boards, etc., get the wrong idea, well it can be damaging to the good work being done by so many.

There was a piece on music education in the New York City public schools by a music journalist in The New York Times last year that infuriated just about every single person I know. Honestly, the piece was riddled with mistakes, including factual errors, was confusing in both its central premise and lacked any real knowledge of the complex backdrop of the New York City public schools. The administrators at the New York City Department of Education, the teaching artists, the organizations, and a whole host of others were pissed off. That is no small feat, perhaps being about the best thing one could say about the article.

Naturally, I was pissed off too, for all the reasons above, but also because I kept thinking that if only this reporter had called someone with considerable knowledge, experience, and access to data and sources, well, the article could have turned out very differently.

We have from time-to-time bounced around the question of what to do about this. Should we create materials, create programs, seek to partner with programs such as the NEA Arts Journalism Institute, or the National Arts Journalism Program.

Years ago, when I was more concerned about getting ink about a good program, it wasn't such an issue. Today, in fighting to advance arts education, particularly universal access for all New York City public school students, it is clear to me that more needs to be done to ensure that all journalists who might be concerned about this issue professionally, should have a baseline knowledge about what is a fairly complex world.

What have you found? What do you really know about the schools? What should be done, if anything? And I write this knowing full well that many believe the full time arts journalist position is a sort of endangered species.

Okay, it's my very first blog, on the first and only blog on artsjournal.com devoted to arts education.

Dewey21C. I had intended to post a first blog directly associated with John Dewey. That will have to wait a bit as I have something else I want to share with you. However, before leaving John Dewey for future entries, I want to say that his writing about arts and education remains to me the bedrock, the real foundation as to what arts education is all about. While many who take issue with "progressive education" lay the blame at the feet of John Dewey, I would point out that much has been done in the name of progressive education based on a distorted view of Dewey and his philosophy. His work and inspiration remains timeless. I promise more about that in future blogs.

For my first post, which carries a title of "What We're Up Against," I want to share excerpted sections of an email from a colleague who has recently begun training work with a program that develops public school teachers through an alternative to standard teacher certification. There are over 15 of these programs around the country and you can read a bit about them on the New Teacher Project website.  It's not all that different from the gargantuan Teach for America, though a big difference is certainly that "fellows" from these programs seek to become permanent teachers, whereas TFA is a sort of Peace Corps for people who want to spend two years teaching in the high poverty urban and rural schools.

This email, which shall remain purely anonymous, has had sections deleted to ensure that this fellow could not be identified. While I do think the point being made is fairly obvious, well, you never know. There's a lot that I would like to comment on here. I will save much of those comments for a later date, allowing the email to stand on its own and to then report back a bit on the thoughts of readers.

 A few small bits of context: First, the issue of pre-service training of classroom and subject area teachers (non-arts specialists) has always been a big issue for the arts ed field. Report after report, plan after plan, hand-wringing after hand-wringing have discussed the critical importance of developing appropriate skills for classroom and subject area teachers to teach the arts. This is particularly important where the arts are integrated with other subject areas. Second, this "Fellow" does indeed have an arts education background, and is clearly peering through a lens colored by this background and interest.

So, here's a short but potent email from a brand new "fellow," who describes her first week in training. She gave permission to share this email with you. Suffice it to say, it was not written in a formal style--it's just an email to some colleagues and friends. Let me know what you think...

My First Week

Hi

Just thought I'd say hello and send you a few reflections on my first week :-)

I spent the week in class at a local college.  I take a class from 9-12 and 1-4 (same class).   Then I have seminar for the fellows program from 4:15-6:15.  The grad class is basically an intro to elementary ed teaching through social studies.  The professor is great, worked as a teacher and principal at two different high schools.  His only downside is that he really only sees art education as using a painting to teach about revolution or music to teach about attitudes about Vietnam (he understands there is more to it, but that principals don't have the money or time when trying to meet state standards).  When I asked him about the district art curricula or whether or not the arts were part of curriculum he said the curriculum principals follow is passing the test.  This brief discussion was followed by our seminar with a 3rd grade teacher (a former fellow) who taught us about different forms of assessment and then showed us the standardized tests 3rd graders had to take.  She said her job is teaching the test from Sept until they are over in March.  She showed us a Math state test for 3rd graders.  It consisted of 5 large reading sections, followed by 25 multiple choice questions, all of which had to be completed in 45 minutes...and this is MATH.  One of her students who was great in math, but not good in reading, got so nervous about all the reading in the math test, that she simply filled out C for every answer and passed the test (I'm sure you've heard this before).

It's friday and I'm not being that articulate, sorry about that.  To sum up, though, having a great time, depressed about the state of arts education...