Archives for category: Arts Education
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Los Angeles: Deasy Refuses to Restore Arts Funding

By dianeravitch
January 17, 2014 //
33

Despite a board resolution in 2012 calling for a restoration of arts funding in Los Angeles, Superintendent John Deasy has refused to prepare a budget complying with the resolution.

“In 2012, the Los Angeles Unified School District board voted to make arts education a core subject in its curriculum.

“Four months ago, the board gave district officials a Dec. 3 deadline to produce a budget for the school district’s Arts Education and Creative Cultural Network Plan, which aims to prepare students for work in creative and technology-based fields by increasing arts-related course offerings and increased faculty support.

“That deadline, however, came and went without so much as a “the check’s in the mail”— leaving public school officials and parents to wonder whether music and arts funding is coming at all.

“I see this as an absolute conflict between two opposing views on what public education should look like: Those who want to see arts as a core subject, and those who are only concerned about test scores and offering students a limited education,” said Karen Wolfe, a Venice Neighborhood Council Education Committee member whose daughter attends Marina Del Rey Middle School.

“Last year the school hired a ballet teacher and began requiring all of its students to take dance classes, said Marina Del Rey Middle School Performing Arts Coordinator Nancy Pierandozzi.

“Venice High School, Mark Twain Middle School and Grand View Boulevard and Broadway elementary schools have also begun integrating performing arts content into English/language arts classes.

“That combination has for some students resulted in a drastic turnaround in attendance and academic achievement, said LAUSD board member Steve Zimmer, whose district includes schools in Mar Vista, Westchester, Del Rey and Venice.

“Author of the September resolution calling for an arts budget, Zimmer has pledged to push Supt. John Deasy for answers when school is back in session later this month.

“Deasy could not be reached.”

The district has committed to spend $1 billion to give an iPad to every student and staff member, to prepare for Common Core testing.

Categories Arts Education, Common Core, Los Angeles

A Season to Be Grateful to Teachers of Music and Art

By dianeravitch
December 24, 2013 //
11

David Gamberg, superintendent of schools in both Southold and Greenport, New York, is an educator who cares about the whole child. He knows what matters most. He knows that test scores are not what matter most in the development of a healthy child.

In this post, he describes the music classes in second grade in Southold. He sees the joy that the teachers and students share.

And he can’t help but reflect on teachers and schools and districts that have been hurt by budget cuts; on schools that have lost their teachers of the arts; on teachers who are testing their students–not teaching them to sing or dance–so as to be evaluated themselves.

In this reflection, we are briefly reminded of what education is about and how lost our national and state policymakers are.

Let us all hope they find their way. And if they can’t, let’s hope they listen to David Gamberg and educators like him.

Categories Arts Education, Testing

Leonie Haimson: The Woman Who Stopped Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, and the Ed Profiteers

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2013 //
19

Below is a letter from Leonie Haimson, who was previously added to the honor roll of this blog for fighting for students, parents, and public education.

Leonie almost singlehandedly stopped the effort to mine student data, whose sponsors wanted confidential and identifiable information about every child “for the children’s sake.” Leonie saw through that ruse and raised a national ruckus to fight for student privacy. Privacy of student records is supposedly protected by federal law (FERPA), but Arne Duncan weakened the regulations so that parents could not opt out of the data mining.

It is not over. The Gates Foundation and Carnegie Corporation put up $100 million to start inBloom, and Rupert Murdoch’s Wireless Generation got the contract to develop the software, and amazon.com plans to put it on a “cloud.” They will be back. We count on Haimson and the many parents she has inspired to remain vigilant on behalf of our children. As a grandparent of a child in second grade in a Brooklyn public school, I have a personal interest in keeping his information private.

Here is Leonie’s letter, written 12/20/13:

Dear folks,

I have good news to report! Yesterday, Sheldon Silver, Speaker of the NYS Assembly, along with Education Chair Cathy Nolan and fifty Democratic Assemblymembers sent a letter to Commissioner King, urging him to put a halt to inBloom.

“It is our job to protect New York’s children. In this case, that means protecting their personally identifiable information from falling into the wrong hands,” said Silver. “Until we are confident that this information can remain protected, the plan to share student data with InBloom must be put on hold.”

Why is this important? Because Speaker Silver and the Democrats in the Assembly appoint the Board of Regents, as the Daily News noted. The Regents control education policy in New York, and appoint the commissioner.

We have begun to make real headway in the past year against inBloom, but we need your support so we can continue the fight for student privacy and smaller classes in the public schools.

We count on donations from individuals like you as our main source of funding. If you appreciate our work and want it to continue and grow stronger, please give a tax-deductible contribution right now by clicking here: http://www.nycharities.org/donate/c_donate.asp?CharityCode=1757 or sending a check to the address below.

I am proud to have been called “the nation’s foremost parent expert on inBloom and the current threat to student data privacy.” We were the first advocacy group in the nation to sound the alarm about inBloom’s plan to create a multi-state database to be stored on a vulnerable data cloud run by Amazon.com with an operating system built by Rupert Murdoch’s Amplify. The explicit goal of inBloom was to package this information in an easily digestible form and offer it up to data-mining vendors without parental consent.

In February, inBloom formally launched as a separate corporation, and nine states were listed as “partners.” We worked hard to get the word out through blogging, personal outreach to parent activists and the mainstream media. After protests erupted in states throughout the country, inBloom’s “partners” pulled out. Now, eight out of these states have severed all ties with inBloom or put their data sharing plans on indefinite hold.

Sadly, as of yesterday, New York education officials were still intent on sharing with inBloom a complete statewide set of personal data for all public school students– including names, addresses, phone numbers, test scores and grades, disabilities, health conditions, disciplinary records and more. To stop this, we helped to organize a lawsuit on behalf of NYC parents which will be heard in state court on January 10 in Albany (note the new date), asking for an immediate injunction to block the state’s plan. (The state has delayed the hearing in order to gain more time to respond to our legal briefs.)

In addition, we will continue our work on the critical issue of class size. As a result of our reports, testimonies and public outreach, we have been able to shine a bright light on what many consider to be the most shameful aspect of Mayor Bloomberg’s education legacy: the fact that class sizes in NYC have increased sharply over the last six years and are now the largest in the early grades since 1998. More on this issue is in my Indypendent article just published, called Grading the Education Mayor

Class sizes have increased every year, despite the fact that the Campaign for Fiscal Equity case was supposedly “settled” by a state law in 2007 that required NYC to reduce class sizes in all grades. As a result, 86% of NYC principals say they are unable to provide a quality education because classes are too large. Parents say that smaller classes are their top priority according to the Department of Education’s own surveys. There is no more critical need than smaller classes if the city’s children are to have an equitable chance to learn.

But class size is not just a critical issue in NYC public schools. Because of budget cuts, class sizes have risen sharply throughout the state and the nation as a whole. In more than half of all states, per-pupil funding is lower than in 2008 and school districts have cut 324,000 jobs.

At the same time, more and more money is being spent by billionaires and venture philanthropists on bogus “studies” to try to convince states and districts that class size doesn’t matter and public funds should be spent instead on outsourcing education into private hands – despite much rigorous research showing the opposite to be true.

With vendors trying to grab your child’s data in the name of providing “personalized” instruction – a euphemism that really means instruction delivered via computers and data-mining software in place of real-life teachers giving meaningful feedback in a class small enough to make this possible — our efforts are more crucial than ever before.

Please make a donation so that our work can continue and be even more effective in 2014.

Thanks for your support and Happy New Year,

Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters
124 Waverly Pl.
New York, NY 10011
212-674-7320

Categories Arts Education, Class Size Matters Org, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Privacy and Privacy Rights

What Makes Us Human?

By dianeravitch
November 29, 2013 //
53

Agree or disagree?

What makes us human?

This article in the British New Statesman says that what makes us human is playfulness.

Humans do silly, pointless things.

I am not so sure.

Animals don’t make machines.

Animals don’t give each other standardized tests.

Animals don’t have calendars and watches and anxiety attacks and drugs.

Animals don’t have Black Fridays.

Who says humans are smarter than animals?

Categories Arts Education, Testing

A New Perspective in Los Angeles

By dianeravitch
October 6, 2013 //
27

Up until now, Eli Broad and his minions have dominated education discussion in Los Angeles. But something pretty terrific happened over the last few days. New voices are being heard. The public is getting the word that “corporate reform” is not working and will not improve their children’s education.

As educators, our job is to educate the public. We don’t have access to the mainstream media, but bit by bit the story is getting out. Americans have heard the negative propaganda for many years, yet they think their own public school is terrific.

The Los Angeles Times is taking a more critical look at the problems created by corporate reform as well as the lack of any results. The corporate reformers are on the defensive.

Let’s keep up our job: Organize, inform, educate, build coalitions with parents and educators. We don’t need more testing. We don’t need more merit pay. We don’t need more test-based evaluations. We need to make sure all kids get a high-quality education with the resources they need. All schools should have arts education and daily physical education. Children should have health clinics and after-school programs. Children who are struggling to learn need smaller classes. The children of Los Angeles need what the children in affluent districts have, only more of it.

Categories Arts Education, Los Angeles

A Music Teacher Remembers Her Kids

By dianeravitch
September 1, 2013 //
13

A reader writes:

“I retired from teaching music K-5 two
years ago. Still cannot read the children’s goodbye letters and
artwork. When the children heard (from a snarky colleague) that I
as leaving they cried and protested for 2 weeks. I remember a 3rd
grade boy in his music class who spontaneously dropped to his knees
and said, “You can’t leave! You are our only hope!” The person
hired after me phoned to ask questions about the position said she
thought they were hiring my assistant. As a graduate student she’d
read my articles and research on teaching children music… Since
leaving my wonderful students, I turned again to writing. The
manuscript is under review. Thank you, Diane Ravitch for your
advocacy.”

Categories Arts Education, Teachers and Teaching

A Hero Educator Who Heads a Private School in Manhattan

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2013 //
24

What does it take to be a hero educator? It takes brains, courage, integrity, and a deep understanding of education and children.

Steve Nelson, headmaster of the Calhoun School in Manhattan, is a hero educator because he has all these qualities. He wrote a brilliant article about why the Common Core won’t work.

He knows that David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core, now heads the College Board. He knows that Coleman wants to align the SAT to the Common Core, so no one can escape his handiwork, not even students in prestigious private schools.

Here is a sample of Nelson’s article.

“Actual children, as opposed to the abstraction of children as seen in policy debate, are not “standard.” Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of child development knows that children learn in different ways and different times. Some children “read” (meaning a very limited ability to recognize symbols) at age 3 or 4. I have known many students who did not read well until 8, 9 or, rarely, later. The potential (or ultimate achievement levels) of these children does not correlate with the date of reading onset.

“It is rather like walking. Children who walk at 9 months do not become better runners than children who walk at 15 months. “Standardizing” the expectation of reading, and setting curricula and tests around this expectation, is like expecting a child to walk on her first birthday. If she doesn’t, shall we get our national knickers in a knot, develop a set of walking tests, prescribe walking remediation, and, perhaps inadvertently, make her feel desperately inadequate? In the current climate, Pearson is ready to design walking curriculum and its companion tests. The Gates and Broad Foundations will create complementary instructional videos.”

And he also writes:

“If policy makers and test writers had even rudimentary knowledge of rich individual differences, they would know that any standard test is unfair and, ultimately, useless. Just as children learn in very different ways, they express mastery in many different ways. The Common Core tests (and I’ve suffered the experience of wading through the many samples provided in the media) assume that all its takers process information in the same way, have the identical mix of cognitive and sensory abilities, and can, therefore, “compete” on level ground. This is nonsensical and damaging. Some of the most brilliant people I know would grind to a suffocating halt after trying to parse the arcane nonsense in a small handful of these questions. Even the math questions assume a homogeneous ability to understand the questions and a precisely common capacity for reasoning and concluding.

“I could go on: Stress inhibits learning, so we design stressful expectations; dopamine (from pleasurable activities) enhances learning, so we remove joy from schools; homework has very limited usefulness with negative returns after an hour or so (for elementary age kids), so we demand more hours of work; the importance of exercise in brain development is inarguable, so we eliminate recess and gym; the arts are central to human understanding, but we don’t have time.

“I have been accused of complaining but not offering solutions, so here’s a solution: Properly fund schools and allow good teachers to select the materials and pedagogy that serve the actual students in their care. The rest will take care of itself.

“And we can take the billions we’re wasting on NCLB, RTTT, Common Core and other nonsense and spend it to improve the lives of the shameful number of children who live in poverty in the “richest nation on Earth.”

Steve Nelson, welcome to the honor roll as a hero of American education.

Please someone, anyone: send this article to Bill Keller and Paul Krugman at the New York Times.

Categories Arts Education, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Common Core, Education Industry, Honor Roll, Students, Testing

A Gift for You This Sunday

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2013 //
26

This is a favorite of mine.

I think you will enjoy it, and the singer is gorgeous.

Would someone please tell the mayors and governors and legislators to stop laying off teachers of music and the other arts?

Categories Arts Education

An Open Letter to Tom Torlakson

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2013 //
8

A teacher in California sent this letter to State Superintendent Tom Torlakson. California recently announced that it was prepared to spend $1 billion implementing Common Core, although the state’s public schools have not recovered from the billions of dollars cut during the Schwarzenegger era.

Here is the letter:

August 1, 2013

Dear Superintendent Torlakson,

Thank you for your commitment to increasing funding for California’s six million public school students, working tirelessly to improve education in the Golden State, and for being an uncompromising advocate for teachers.

Your efforts have not gone unnoticed: last year, esteemed education historian Diane Ravitch wrote in her blog, “California has another great asset in its State Superintendent Tom Torlakson… He is one of the most enlightened–if not THE most enlightened state education chiefs in the nation. He understands that rebuilding the public system is a high priority.”

I am a high school English teacher at Edgewood High School in West Covina where I teach in our school’s International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme and serve as our IB Diploma Programme Coordinator. My involvement with the IB curriculum reinforces the core pedagogical beliefs I acquired while earning my MA at Claremont Graduate School twenty one years ago: children learn best when they are given the latitude and guidance to discuss and discover ideas and experiment via engaging learning activities. Deep learning is achieved via authentic, teacher-designed assessments.

While I admire the performance-based nature of the Common Core State Standards, and while the SBAC assessments do indeed require students to engage in performance-based tasks, I am gravely concerned by the exponential increase in high stakes testing that will no doubt accompany the SBAC assessments. I am alarmed by the developmental inappropriateness of the CCSS, particularly at the elementary level.

I suggest that you and your staff personally take the SBAC practice tests that can be accessed online. I believe that the length of the tests and their developmentally inappropriate demands will more than give you pause– you will become as fearful for our students’ wellbeing as I am.

Additionally, I am highly concerned about the significant cost of preparing for and administering the SBAC tests. Doug McRae, a retired executive in the testing field, projects the final cost of Smarter Balanced tests at close to $40 per student– triple what California is currently paying. It is no secret that many districts lack the bandwidth and hardware required to administer the SBAC assessments. As a result, cash strapped districts will be forced to divert funding that would otherwise be spent on students into upgrading their infrastructure to prepare for this next incarnation of high stakes testing.

Lastly, and most importantly, nearly one in four children in California live in poverty. It is well documented that the real crisis in education is the pernicious effects of poverty—socioeconomic status and school and test performance are inextricably entwined. The money spent on this brave new world of SBAC high stakes testing will make it impossible to provide the wraparound services that we know will improve the lives of poor children and therefore improve their educational experiences and outcomes: food security, health services, counselors, quality before and after school daycare, well-stocked and staffed libraries. The list goes on and on.

Last May, I proudly accompanied a group of my colleagues to the ceremony where you celebrated our recognition as a California Distinguished School. In your address, you fondly reminisced about your experiences as a science teacher, taking your students on field trips. At another point, you received enthusiastic cheers when you asked, “Who would like to see the arts back in California classrooms?” Unshackling our schools from the overwhelming financial burden of SBAC assessments will once again allow field trips, music and the arts to become a reality in California public schools.

In closing, I ask you to secure your legacy as a principled State Superintendent who unwaveringly advocates for that which is best for children. Please follow the lead of other State Superintendents who have chosen to withdraw from SBAC and PARCC assessments, and let’s allow the money our taxpayers opted to allocate to public schools go to those who are most deserving: our children.

Thank you for your consideration—

Warm regards,

Jeanne Berrong

Categories Arts Education, Budget Cuts, California, Common Core

Jeff Bryant: “No Excuses” for Abandoning Kids and Public Schools

By dianeravitch
July 13, 2013 //
9

Jeff Bryant of the Education Opportunity Network congratulates Arne Duncan for saying that there was “no excuse” for states that fail to fund their schools.

Jeff was quick to point out that the “no excuse” mantra is customarily used by Duncan and other corporate reformers to blame teachers for low test scores.

It is refreshing to hear the same rhetoric directed at governors and legislatures that abandon their responsibility to fund public schools.

Bryant writes:

“In his statement to the Pennsylvania officials overseeing the Philadelphia mess, Duncan urged, “We must invest in public education, not abandon it.”

“So yes, “No excuse.”

“When valued neighborhood schools are shuttered with no more justification than a press release, there’s no excuse.

“When public school administrators are forced to cut learning opportunities that keep students safe, healthy, engaged, and supported. No excuse.

“When teachers and parents have to speak out to prevent larger and larger class sizes…

“When students walk out of school because their favorite subjects and teachers are cut…

“When whole communities have to turn out into the streets to protest the plundering of the common good…

“No excuse. No excuse. No excuse!”

Categories Accountability, Arts Education, Budget Cuts, Class size, Curriculum, Pennsylvania
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