LAUSD is moving forward!

 This is just a quicky, but I’ll write more about all of this soon.

I am so excited by what is happening in the Los Angeles United School District.  At a time when there are plenty of news stories to get our ire up, the LAUSD is taking steps to ensure that their students leave school more prepared for college than students in years past.  They are doing so by brining to the forefront a curriculum that, for years, has been seen as unnecessary at best. 

            On October 9^th, 2012, LAUSD school board member Nury Martinez presented, and the board passed unanimously, a resolution to raise the arts to an essential “core” subject.  This resolution not only creates a space for the arts to stand on equal footing with all other curricular areas, but also restores $60 million in budget cuts over the next five years and calls for the development of a plan to integrate the arts across the curriculum.  This is particularly well timed, as the state is readying to implement the Common Core and now the arts will be forever linked with the idea of a complete curriculum.  Even more appropriately timed is the passing of Proposition 30 by the state of California, which calls for a sales tax hike which will allow schools across the state to breathe a little easier, reinstate furlough days and restore the school calendar to 180 days.  This also gives space for the planning of the integrated curriculum in Los Angeles. 

            It is impossible to write quickly the impact that the passing of this resolution could have on the nation’s view of arts education.  Yet, it will only have that impact if the effects are tracked and documented and people are given something to which they can pay attention.  I can only hope that at some point this resolution and its lasting effects will get more space in Education Week than two column inches at the bottom of page 4.

Reflections on Julia Steiny’s "Dreary American Education Goals Yield Dreary Results"

While reading Julia Steiny’s October 18^th, 2012 article titled, Dreary Education Goals Yield Dreary Results, (http://www.educationnews.org/education-policy-and-politics/julia-steiny-dreary-american-education-goals-yield-dreary-results) I found myself frequently wanting to yell at the computer. “Of course we should look at Finland!” (Which is what Steiny is trying to say.)  “Why wouldn’t we look at countries more successful in educating their children and try to emulate them?” 

Steiny compares at the education goals set forth by a collaboration of Australian states to those set forth by the United States of America.  Australia’s goals are student-centered in the truest form of the term.  They take the student as a whole person into account.  For instance, Goals #2 is that, “All young Australians become: successful learners; confident and creative individuals; active and informed citizens.”  The United States performance goals are full of words like, “progress”, “outcomes”, and “improve(d) instruction”.  Not once does an outcome mention creativity, citizenship or confidence – all indicators that the education of the whole child has taken place. 

Yet, Australia, even with all its hippy-dippy creativity-loving and successful learning, continues to out-rank the USA in every study I could find.  Could it be that those in charge of education in Australia are on to something?  Could be!  So why are the leaders of education in the US not doing anything about it? They seem to feel that, rather than teaching children and then finding a assessment framework that authentically measures their learning, teaching the test is the answer.  And I understand that there is an inherent hypocrisy in my making the argument that Australia may have a better education system than ours when the metric used to rank the students in both countries is a standardized test.  I am not against standardized tests.  Only against the assumption that a score on a standardized test is the best way to determine whether a child or a group of children is absorbing the information deemed important.

I was horrified to finally grasp that what a friend teaches in the first grade at Broad Street is ELA and math.  No science.  No history.  And that she is not free to deviate from the script written in her book when the students aren’t engaged.  This is because it has been determined that the best way to increase test scores is to teach the information on the test and nothing but.  I have to admit to not having yet researched the national curriculum of Australia and whether or not there are schools like Broad Street in operation there and I would tend to say that there probably are.  However, the focus on educating the whole child obviously makes a difference!  And obvious also is that there is more going on in Australian classrooms that basic ELA and math skills acquisition.  You don’t teach children creativity by reading a script out of a book.

Steiny comments, “We’re not supporting the innate curiosity, creativity and love of learning that will produce the innovators our economists and parents say we need.” This continues to boggle my mind.  We know what we need.  Passion, creativity, innovation, depth and breadth of knowledge.  Yet, at more and more schools in our country, studies that are core to the development of these traits – science, history, civics, art and more– are being marginalized or straight-out cut.  It’s appalling and demoralizing.  How can we hope to get ahead as a society if we ignore what we all know to be true and focus on the data children produce rather than the children themselves?

Note:  I hope that the language in this piece does not in any way imply that I think that my friend is less of a teacher because she does not teach in a classroom that I believe meets the needs of a developing child.  She is a caring human being and a passionate advocate for her students who does all she can to meet their needs within the confines that she has been handed.  I could not do what she does.