Archives for category: Arts Education
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Phony “Revival” of Arts Education in Los Angeles

By dianeravitch
July 12, 2013 //
34

The Los Angeles Times reports that the Los Angeles Fund for Public Education (co-founded by Superintendent John Deasy and some of the city’s wealthiest citizens) will contribute $750,000 to revive arts education in that city’s public schools. Teachers will receive training to integrate arts education into math, social studies, and other areas of the curriculum.

This is a sad response to the gutting of arts education in the LA schools.

Integrating the arts into other subjects is a ruse. Children need to sing and dance and learn to play musical instruments. They won’t do that in math class or history. Eliminating arts teachers is not the way to revive arts education.

Bear in mind that the district has cut funding for the arts by 41% since 2008 and currently devotes only 2% of elementary school time to the arts.

The story makes the following points:

“After five years of brutal cuts in arts education, Los Angeles Unified is gearing up to bring more music, dance, theater and visual arts into core academic classes under a three-year, $750,000 initiative to be announced Thursday by the Los Angeles nonprofit group funding the effort.”

And this:

“In October, the L.A. school board directed the district to craft a five-year “Arts at the Core” plan that would nearly double such funding to its 2007-08 level of $32 million. Among other things, the plan aims to restore some traveling arts teachers, who spread their time among multiple elementary schools; their numbers have been slashed by half to just over 200 last year.”

And this:

“The ratio of middle school students to art teachers in the district is 413 to 1, compared with 68 to 1 in Beverly Hills Unified…”

Categories Arts Education, Los Angeles

Who Should Save the Philadelphia High School Orchestra?

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2013 //
3

A reader explains why the Philadelphia All-City High School Orchestra is being closed and who should rescue it:

“Actually, philanthropy wouldn’t help. The orchestra is endangered because classroom instrumental music instruction has been eliminated from the budget (hence, no musicians to play in it). The cut was among those made to close a $300 million budget deficit caused largely by state cuts that fell particularly hard on the poorest districts. This is precisely the kind of problem that does not have a private solution but requires a public commitment to public education. (Though I wouldn’t be surprised if there isn’t a raft of charter applications for schools specializing in instrumental music).”

Categories Arts Education, Budget Cuts, Philadelphia

Philly Student Orchestra Plays Last Concert?

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2013 //
16

Watch this video of the Philadelphia All-City High School Orchestra.

Because of the budget cuts, this might be their last performance.

The governor, the legislature, the business leaders, the foundations of Pennsylvania should hang their heads in shame.

Will this be the year the music died in Philadelphia?

Categories Arts Education, Budget Cuts, Philadelphia

Student: Why Is There Money for Testing But Not For Music?

By dianeravitch
June 22, 2013 //
27

I received the following email:

Hi, Dr. Ravitch:

I am a film teacher at a Buffalo Public School (www.cityhonors.org) and one of my students made a video on her own time about the draconian cuts that the Buffalo Public Schools is making with its instrumental music program. This is a direct effect of the per pupil funding that has been instituted in the BPS. I thought you might like to see it. It is interesting that NYS has billions to pay Pearson, but we can’t keep instrumental music programs in place.

Thanks…

Sincerely,

Melisa Holden
Librarian & IB Film teacher

Categories Arts Education, Budget Cuts, Testing

A Gift for You This Sunday

By dianeravitch
June 16, 2013 //
25

Robert D. Shepherd shared this poem by Billy Collins, who was the nation’s poet laureate from 2001-03. I think what Shepherd had in mind when he shared this was the tendency of certain thinkers and standards writers to over-intellectualize the experience of literature.

Introduction to Poetry

By Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Categories Arts Education, Personal

Memories: My Mother’s Piano

By dianeravitch
June 16, 2013 //
17

Gayle Greene, a professor of English at Scripps College in California, wrote this beautiful tribute to the meaning of the arts in her life. She reflects on her mother’s piano, the beautiful music that somehow inspired her own love of words and literature.

When you read about her mother’s piano, you will for a brief time be carried back to an era when education had nothing to do with data, metrics, test scores, and choice. Will the statisticians and economists, the standardizers and technocrats kill that era or do we have a chance to reclaim it from them?

Categories Arts Education, Curriculum

A Gift to You This Sunday from a Teacher in Ohio

By dianeravitch
June 9, 2013 //
9

Maureen Reedy, a veteran Ohio teacher and state teacher of the year, sent this gift, which I gladly share:

Song of Democracy ~ by Walt Whitman

An old man’s thoughts of school,
An old man’s gathering youthful memories and
blooms that youth itself cannot.

Now only do I know You,
O fair auroral skies – O morning dew upon the grass!

And these I see, these sparkling eyes,
These stores of mystic meaning, these young lives,
Building, equipping like a fleet of ships, immortal ships,
Soon to sail out over the measureless seas,
On the soul’s voyage.

Only a lot of boys and girls?
Only the tiresome spelling, writing, ciphering classes?
Only a public school?
Ah more, infinitely more.

And you America,
Cast you the real reckoning for your present?
The lights and shadows of your future, good or evil?
To girlhood, boyhood look, the teacher and the school.

Sail, Sail thy best, ship of Democracy,
Of value is thy freight, ’tis not the present only,
The Past is also stored in thee.
Thou holdest not the venture of thyself alone,
not of thy Western continent alone.
Earth’s resume entire floats on thy keel, O ship,
is steadied by thy spars,
With thee Time voyages in trust, the antecedent
nations sink or swim with thee.
With all their ancient struggles, martyrs, heroes,
epics, wars, thou bear’st the other continents,
Theirs, theirs as much as thine, the destination –
port triumphant;
Steer then with good strong hand and wary eye
O helmsman, thou carriest great companions,
Venerable priestly Asia sails this day with thee,
And royal feudal Europe sails with thee.
And royal feudal Europe sails with thee.

Categories Arts Education

Hope for Public School Kids in L.A.?

By dianeravitch
June 3, 2013 //
9

A letter from a reader in Los Angeles:

Hi Diane. I thought your readers would be interested to hear that the light might be shining in Los Angeles.

Could it be that there is some good news on the horizon for Los Angeles public schools? This Tuesday the school board will vote on a resolution to reduce class size. Parents throughout LA are thrilled that such a sound resolution is being proposed. Board member Bennett Kayser is sponsoring the measure with Richard Vladovic and Steve Zimmer co-sponsoring.
The resolution includes a commitment to “creating the most enriching academic environment for all students, which includes a reduction in class-size.

Class size reduction yields:

– Reduction in the achievement gap

– Early identification of learning disabilities

– Improved high school graduation rates

– Increased college entrance rates

– Improved student behavior”

They’re even proposing to bring back librarians. We hope parents, educators and advocates for public schools will contact their school board member and urge the school board to take this first step out of the dark ages of public education. Coming to the board meeting is even better. Tuesday, June 4, 9:00am at LAUSD headquarters.

Categories Arts Education, Curriculum, Los Angeles

A Gift for You: A Beautiful Poem

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2013 //
10

When Jacqueline Kennedy died, a dear friend read this poem by Constantine Cavafy at her memorial service. It is one of those wonderful pieces of literature that has remained with me. I hope you enjoy it:

Ithaca

When you set out for Ithaka
ask that your way be long,
full of adventure, full of instruction.
The Laistrygonians and the Cyclops,
angry Poseidon – do not fear them:
such as these you will never find
as long as your thought is lofty, as long as a rare
emotion touch your spirit and your body.
The Laistrygonians and the Cyclops,
angry Poseidon – you will not meet them
unless you carry them in your soul,
unless your soul raise them up before you.

Ask that your way be long.
At many a Summer dawn to enter
with what gratitude, what joy –
ports seen for the first time;
to stop at Phoenician trading centres,
and to buy good merchandise,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and sensuous perfumes of every kind,
sensuous perfumes as lavishly as you can;
to visit many Egyptian cities,
to gather stores of knowledge from the learned.

Have Ithaka always in your mind.
Your arrival there is what you are destined for.
But don’t in the least hurry the journey.
Better it last for years,
so that when you reach the island you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to give you wealth.
Ithaka gave you a splendid journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She hasn’t anything else to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka hasn’t deceived you.
So wise you have become, of such experience,
that already you’ll have understood what these Ithakas mean.

Constantine P. Cavafy
Categories Arts Education

Yes, Too Good to Be True

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2013 //
12

Earlier I posted a story about an elementary school in Massachusetts where the principal fired the security guards and expanded the arts program….and, voila! The school miraculously improved.

The title was, “Could This Be True?”

Sadly, it was not true.

According to our friends in Massachusetts, the principal fired most of the teachers and the enrollment of the school changed, raising its socioeconomic profile.

No miracle.

Here is a comment from EduShyster:

“Barack Obama visited this school just last year–although the principal’s decision to bulk up the arts budget was not the lesson that BO was there to promote. Before Principal Bott got rid of the security guards he got rid of 80% of the teachers. And unlike other schools in Massachusetts where slash-and-burn turnaround efforts have produced very little, test scores at the school have risen, making Orchard Gardens what Arne Duncan might call a SIG-sess story.”

ChemTeacher added this comment:

“Let’s ask Deborah Meier. She has some understanding of the pilot schools in Boston. According to the video, the school originally opened as an empty promise, and the art and music equipment was left in storage.

That was for the old Orchard Garden Children. After those children were replaced with higher socioeconomic children, somebody finally thought of hiring art teachers.

“The new Orchard Gardens replaced a failed, dysfunctional public housing development with a mixed income community of over 200 units of affordable family housing in an inner city neighborhood. ”
http://www.dhkinc.com/Housing/public_housing/9606A.asp

The moral might be that we need integrated, mixed income communities, or maybe we can just hire art teachers right away. I’m worried about where the old Orchard Park children are, and do they have art and music there?”

ChemTeacher added:

“This is not necessarily a heart-warming story. Please read the link I posted above. The scores rose because they moved out the old, low-scoring population. Firing teachers didn’t raise the scores. The only way corporate reformers know to dramatically raise average scores is to cheat, or to raise average socioeconomic status. Art and music will save children’s lives and souls, and eventually pay off for their community and nation, but it won’t necessarily work standardized-test-score miracles.

“My guess is that the school was prepared and equipped specifically for the new affordable housing development, and that’s why the arts and music curriculum wasn’t launched until after the old community was gutted.

“Affordable housing” doesn’t mean low-income.”

Another Massachusetts reader sent this story, of a school that got $4 million in federal grants, extended the day from 7:30 to 5:30 pm, and hired a new staff of data-driven teachers. If Arne Duncan wants to give $4 million to every low-performing school, maybe he will see big change. If they all fire 80% of their teachers, where will we find new teachers? And how destructive is that to the teaching profession? Or is that what he wants?

Categories Arts Education, Duncan, Arne
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