The Art of the Matter

The Roaming Roaster roamed into quite the affair last night. I had the distinct pleasure of attending a dinner party at Ambassador Swanee Hunt's house. She hosts often, and recently raised over one million dollars for arts education programs in one night. I could hear the live jazz from the courtyard, and the bar had plenty of ice. Mood: apprehensive. Attire: I'm pretty sure I was the only one wearing sneakers.

The evening was billed as a "conversation with Carol Johnson" - the new superintendent of Boston Public Schools - about arts in education. Many of the guests had been running organizations in Boston for ten or twenty years, all geared toward bringing the arts into schools and communities that are increasingly artless. They see Dr. Johnson as a ray of hope. Coupled with the Patrick administration, which someone generously described as having "a more sympathetic view" as to what "education looks like," they see this as a time when voices for creative, well-rounded education will be heard. The evening was designed to introduce Dr. Johnson to all the community organizations bringing arts into her schools, and to jump start advocacy efforts in BPS and beyond.

Immediately clear was public schools' nearly total reliance on CBOs and other outside sources for their art instruction. Or, as was the case in an example Dr. Johnson gave, science teachers who happened to play the piano bring music into the classroom on their own terms. Music and art are considered extra, and more schools (nine in Boston this year) are cutting teachers of these subjects.

While these subjects are treated as superfluous by the state, they are fundamental in the homes and schools of the very rich. What privileged child went through school without learning an instrument? Or studying classical music? Or taking dance classes? The family who can afford it would not allow a child to grow up artless, yet schools continue to cut art and music.

So...the arts are necessary for the children of the rich, but are the arts necessary to schooling? What is schooling for, anyway? Some people believe it is to get a job. One of those people, Secretary Bump, Governor Patrick's workforce maven, stood up and brought the employer's perspective to the table. Usually, I cringe when this woman talks. She represents all that I find particularly frightening about "workforce development" (read: funnel the kids in danger of being "left behind" into go nowhere jobs so they can't end up on welfare. read: tracking. read: who cares what makes you happy; get a job.) However, this evening she was far less frightening than usual, and acknowledged that employers want the soft skills that kids learn in art and music and, often, no place else. Of note was this: Bill Gates surveyed his staff at Microsoft and found that Computer Science was the SECOND most popular college major across all employees. The most common? Music.

The room made a collective "hmmm" at this point. Secretary Bump follows it with a question, "What should I tell the readiness project?"

A man across the room from me put down his Merlot and stood up to blame this artlessness on the obsession with standardized testing. I perked up and gave him a silent "bravo!" He went on to explain that schools are not publicly accountable for anything besides English and math scores. Therefore, schools funnel resources into raising those scores.

The room had an immediate response to this. Collectively, we had thousands of stories to prove the misguided nature of funneling resources so narrowly. We all knew the student who hated school, who felt disengaged, angry, unsuccessful, bored...but who found (usually by accident) that he loved the theater. And he started to get involved with the drama club. Like magic, he's coming to school early and staying late, solely for the drama club. But, while he's there, he goes to English and math. He learns to measure fabric for costumes. He learns to memorize lines. He learns to design sets. He organizes the props back stage. All of these skills TRANSFER. Why did we come to the conclusion that math skills have to come in math class? This kid aces his math test, but will tell you he hates math. He is engaged with his school, and he stops thinking about dropping out. There were so many of these stories...but federal funding doesn't get reallocated based on sweet stories. They respond to results. Fortunately, Dan from the other side of the room, had an idea.

He introduces the "Creative Challenge Index." This is a public measure just like test scores -schools are judged on the basis of how many opportunities each student has to participate in the arts or music. Schools will have to publish how many creative expression opportunities they provide right alongside test scores. Those numbers will undoubtedly prove that when kids have the opportunity to engage in art or music they ALSO do better on standardized tests. Brilliant! When can we make this idea the law of the land?

Well, it already is a law. A law in waiting. House Bill 393, recently released by the Joint Education Committee, is written and floating around.

This is exactly the sort of concrete, creative activism that we need to counteract the devastating effects of NCLB and the testing frenzy. Find out more about what you can do to help advance this Bill here.

Swanee jumps in to ask Dr. Johnson what advocacy efforts worked in Memphis. After quite a bit of pushing back and forth, Dr. Johnson offers us the following example:

Parent Groups and Advocacy Groups, but more importantly the unity of parent and advocacy groups, put enough pressure on the governor to get a clear goal accomplished: more money. They created a proposal to raise the tobacco tax and funnel the added revenue into the schools. It worked. They raised the price of a pack by 40 cents, and ended up with 50,000,000 for the schools. Fifty million. And people had to pay forty additional cents to slowly kill themselves. This was making way too much sense for a room full of the ultra-rich.

Then Dr. Johnson said: "What we need is an infrastructure. Some way to connect the different advocacy groups."

Hmm. So we have a bunch of people who want to change things for the better. We have a relatively open minded administration (term used oh so loosely). We have a room full of groups with abundant resources who don't know each other. What we need is some kind of database for all these resources and some really dedicated community organizers to bring them all into contact with one another so we can GET THIS DONE. Hmm...hmm...who could do that?

Hello! Look at us! Please please please vast readership, join our network or send us email or call us! This bill, House Bill 393, is only one example of the things people are coming up with to improve our schools. But not a one of them is going to happen without organized action.

Find out more about the Boston Public student who painted the amazing painting above here.

(Oh and you'll be happy to note that this crowd took my sneakers as creative expression, and didn't blink an eye.)

Ohhhhbama

How rarely we encounter a statesman with true courage. Rarer still, an eloquent one. Hell, at this point it's nice to encounter a literate statesman.

In Philadelphia this week, Barack Obama gave us all hope that an American president does not have to be a mindless greedmonger or a spineless moron. He also begged the distracted multitude to pay attention and avoid letting sound bytes replace genuine, difficult, meaningful discourse in yet another presidential campaign.

Our favorite part over here at Education Action!, of course, was when he actually spoke the truth about American public education. (I mean we're happy when candidates even mention education, never mind tell the truth.)

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven't fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today's black and white students.

What?! But segregation is illegal! Yeah, well, so is driving above the speed limit. Finally a candidate who uses the word SEGREGATED to describe our schools. Is that reality I smell? Foul though it is, we won't deal with it until we admit that it stinks.

Then he goes on to issue a challenge. Hey! Nobody challenges Americans! We don't have to give anything up, except the occasional son for a war. We don't have to listen to speeches that are challenging to understand. We don't have to read headlines that are more than three words long. We get a nice little bit of money back after taxes so we can buy some stuff. We don't have to cut back on using any nonrenewable resources, in fact we can drive a hummer. We don't have to really fix schools, we'll just test them repeatedly until they fix themselves. We don't have to care about other people's kids. We don't have to do much of anything... But look what happens in a classroom when you don't challenge students. They get bored. They feel disrespected. They start to hate school. They drop out. We need a challenge, and Obama issues one I like a whole lot:

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle - as we did in the OJ trial - or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news....But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, "Not this time." This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can't learn; that those kids who don't look like us are somebody else's problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids...

We need to REFUSE to accept showmanship and spectacle as our government or our justice system. We need to be stronger than the fear mongering nightly news. We need to read beneath platitudes. We need to do something really hard - actually have a difficult conversation, over and over, until we solve a problem. And the first, most essential problem Senator Obama thinks deserves our efforts? Education. Because it is fundamental.

(You should really read the whole thing, if you haven't yet. Or watch it.)

Top O' the Mornin

I read the Education section of the New York Times first thing every morning. It is a depressing habit. Between EdWeek, a host of teacher blogs, and the Boston Globe, I end up with a well-rounded diet of horrible. This teacher got fired, that superintendent is incompetent, this testing frenzy is ruining the lives of children everywhere, this that this that.

Lo and behold, this morning featured a fantastic and uplifting piece about Irish step dancing in the Bronx. It seems a young Irish lass moved to the Bronx to teach music. A long way from her River Liffey, Ms. Duggan has inspired a troupe of young girls to love (like obsessively love) Irish step dancing. The troupe is dubbed "the pride of the school." She even raised enough money to take 32 students to Ireland, where they performed on Irish television.

We're going to file that, here at Education Action!, under freaking awesome.

This positive story about appreciating one another's culture, the bonding between student and teacher, and kids feeling engaged with their school, feels tragic to me on account of its rarity. I can remember being mid-grad school and feeling like I wanted to run from the education world as rapidly as possible. It was the most depressing field in the world, near as I could tell. It was going to be nothing but an uphill battle, to no avail, forever. I spoke with a fellow student who was feeling similarly. We left the library early and watched Mr. Holland's Opus in my living room, and balled our little teacher eyeballs out. How could we ever, in a million years, choose any other profession? It took one sappy ass Richard Dreyfuss film to put us back on track.

Education is, in my fair employer's words, a beautiful profession. Of all the jobs out there, it is the most challenging, the most essential, but also the most rewarding. We stay in it because when a bunch of elementary school girls, who didn't even know where Ireland was a year ago, fall in love with learning Michael Flatley style, it makes an entire year of uphill climbing worth it, a thousand times worth it. Now they just have to read Ulysses and I'll be happy...

This is exactly the kind of stuff that makes me afraid...

Actually, I'm afraid of many things. Shark attacks. Driving. What all this diet soda is really doing to my digestion system. But nothing makes me more terrified than firing teachers for refusing to comply with oaths.

In California last month a math teacher lost her job for amending an oath all state employees must sign. The Oath of Allegiance, to be exact. (There is a terminator joke here somewhere, but I don't have the strength to find it.) Each state employee must sign a piece of paper that affirms his or her promise to, among other things, "Defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California against all enemies."

She inserted the word "non-violently" before "defend" and was fired.

Let's put this in perspective. This woman is a veteran math teacher. She teaches remedial math to struggling students, has for over a decade. She is a student at a university, studying to get a higher credential for her trade. Her life's work is making accessible the number one most hated subject on earth. She eliminates learning barriers for students having a difficult time in college. She is, in short, a freaking saint.

But, she is also a Quaker. She doesn't believe in violence. My god what a monster! The state of California is in danger!

Where are our priorities? We have students mashed into classrooms at twice the capacity. We have students taking classes in trailers two hundred yards away from the actual school building. We have students sustaining injuries when decrepit buildings fall apart literally over their heads. In Boston, we have over a thousand students leaving every year without graduating. We have students so hopeless and so angry that they meet the pervasive violence in their lives with an inured shrug. Urban school teachers leave the profession at increasingly alarming rates.

We do NOT have the luxury, California, of making sure every damn teacher signs your oath to the letter. In fact, California, the very idea of making a state employee sign an oath is kinda scary. This exact sort of myopic boneheaded idiocy plagues the entire country. If we continue to run a broken educational system, we will have a nation that cannot even read the constitution, never mind understand and defend the principals of democracy. So while teachers are fired for refusing to sign a piece of paper, a generation is being pushed through school and will face the world unprepared. Yet, the powers that be focus on the oath and not the schools. Perhaps they want an undereducated populace to control and exploit...

Oh, and California, if you're really looking to go after someone who is disparaging our constitution, pay a visit to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Your Phone's Ringing Dude

Your cell phone; it's ringing. It's the one that you got for getting good grades. I would love to stop writing about NYC public schools, but Joel Klein keeps doing stupid things about which I feel compelled to blog. His latest and greatest: buying students off. At a price of around two million dollars, high achieving NYC middleschoolers will receive cellular phones as a reward.

Hello? Are you there, Intrinsic Motivation? It's me, Margaret.

Does anyone else get a creepy feeling about this? Maybe I'm getting old. I mean, when I read twenty books and did twenty book reports one year in elementary school, I got to go see the Red Sox at Fenway as a reward. (It was cold and they lost.) Rewards for academic performance are not new. But that example is a reward for doing something extra, above and beyond what was required. And we got to choose the prize, by a vote. In NYC they are rewarding students for plain old school. They are giving them something they believe the students might want. They are trying to make "success in school cool again."

The problem is bigger than two million dollars' worth of prepaid cell phones. The problem is the way we treat school as a society. The problem is a complete disregard for our kids. The problem is that we continually try to fix severed limbs with band aids. This is not going to work and it's a waste of two million dollars. What we need are schools in which students have agency and feel invested, feel their voices are heard and of value. If students feel challenged and in charge of their own learning they won't need to be bought off. We can't BRIBE them into "success" and expect it to mean something. There are a few schools out there that get it. Apparently, New York didn't get the memo.

Bad call, Joel Klein.

(...Yeah, I made that pun. Couldn't be avoided, really.)