If you think it is okay to cut the arts and make more time for test prep, watch this and this.
It could change your mind.
It could change your life.
Smile.
And make sure that everyone has the chance to sing and dance!
Archives for category: Arts Education
Susan Ohanian reports what she describes as possibly the best lesson ever.
Read it for the sheer pleasure of watching a master teacher inspire his students.
Hey, Mike Petrilli and Robert Pondiscio, this is great teaching, great curriculum, and great student engagement.
The teacher is not snapping his fingers, the students are not waving their fingers, and no one is expected to do that SLANT thing about total attention. The teacher has authority because he is teaching a great lesson.
It’s no surprise to discover that the organization representing Wall Street hedge fund managers is putting big money into Rahm Emanuel’s war against the Chicago Teachers Union. The group, which calls itself Democrats for Education Reform, is a major contributor to political advocacy for charter schools. It raises money for influential candidates in local, state and national political races. Money talks.
DFER, as it is known, does not like public schools. It loves privatization. Privatization works for Wall Street. So does deregulation.
DFER and Stand for Children are working together against the interests of public school teachers in Chicago, 90% of whom voted to authorize a strike (actually 98% of all those who cast a vote).
You can bet that DFER and Stand will flood the airwaves with slick commercials to promote Mayor Emanuel’s vision of education for OPC (other people’s children): crowded classrooms; schools with no teachers of the arts; schools with no libraries; endless testing and test-prepping; big contracts for consultants and experts; longer school days with no compensation for teachers; and lots more privatization.
Here’s a thought for DFER, Stand and Mayor Emanuel: Why not support the same quality of education for the children of Chicago public schools that you want for your own?
Diane
Nancy Flanagan is one of the nation’s premier teachers and bloggers. Unlike many who opine about education (I include myself in that category), Nancy knows teaching inside and out. She was a music teacher for thirty years and was deeply involved in creating National Board Certification for teachers. Now she blogs for Education Week and she is always informative.
When a Washington, D.C., think-tank person suggested that students of the arts should be assessed by standardized, multiple-choice tests, Nancy was properly incensed. (And so were many of the teachers of the arts who commented on this blog.)
In her commentary, Nancy posed a basic question:
Why would we deliberately advance a worthless (and expensive-to-develop) mode of assessment for something as crucial to kids’ well-being and our own economic vitality as the arts? The humanities are a creative wellspring for individual and social innovation. They cannot–and should never be–reduced to rote, bubbled-in recitation of dry facts. What standardized testing in music and the arts yields is mere quantification of students’ ability to memorize. The tests tell us nothing about how students will apply artistic skill and expression to their real lives and careers. Further–they tell us nothing about the instructional quality of their teachers.
Nancy quite rightly criticizes the view that the only way to “save” the arts is to make sure that they are tested by bubble tests. I have heard the same argument from history teachers, and I think it is self-defeating. If you want to save your subject, don’t sacrifice it on the altar of standardized testing. There is no surer way to discourage students of the arts and students of history than to expect them to be judged by bubble tests. There are certainly far more rigorous and appropriate means to assess skills and knowledge than the cheap and easy computer-based and computer-scored questions.
As I read Nancy’s article, I found myself remembering a segment I saw several weeks ago on 60 Minutes. It was about a ragtag symphony orchestra in Africa. One man who loved orchestral music recruited the musicians (none of whom knew how to play anything), found or begged or made instruments, and taught them to play. The musicians left their daily work to study and practice and play together. The segment concluded with a large number of very joyful men and women–living in a desperately poor nation–playing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”
What a triumph of the human spirit!
Why would anyone give them a standardized test?
Diane
An earlier post considered whether standardized tests were necessary or useful in the arts. Several arts teachers responded to say that they are not only NOT necessary and NOT useful, but they are actually harmful. They miss the point of arts education and they distort instruction. I agree.
This comment makes the case even stronger. Students who are incessantly tested suffer a loss of their capacity for original thinking. Of course, students need knowledge; no one doubts that. But the ability to check off the right bubble should not be confused with knowledge.
And the imposition of test-driven accountability may destroy the very qualities of mind and spirit that our society–and the world–needs most: creativity, originality, ingenuity, inspiration, inquisitiveness.
| As a composer and professor of music teaching at the university level in New York City, I teach graduate students from all over the world drawn to our city for its unsurpassed artistic vitality. I have noticed that very talented, intelligent and well-educated students coming to my classes from countries with test-driven education systems often struggle with musical analysis, for one very simple reason: What I value most highly in my students’ analytical work is the capacity to have an original insight into a piece and to develop it convincingly. In other words, the student’s task is not to master what I think, but to teach me something I didn’t know before.This is a skill that can be taught – by nurturing and not stifling the natural creativity of children from an early age right through graduate school. It is also a skill that can be unlearned – by being subjected to an educational system that devalues originality and glorifies the mastery of received wisdom.Creativity without knowledge is as worthless as rote learning. What’s needed is a balance. Our national drive towards testing-based curricula in all subjects is taking education in exactly the wrong direction, towards conformity and away from innovation. I leave it to students of mass delusion to explain why we are doing this in the name of enhancing the competitiveness of our nation’s children in job markets of the future that we believe will demand high levels of flexibility and creative thinking. The major effect of the ever-increasing tendency to gear all learning towards standardized tests will be to undermine our children’s mastery of critical and creative thinking and diminish their prospects for employment — and the enjoyment of life. |
In a piece in Education Week, Sara Mead maintains that art can be assessed through multiple-choice standardized tests.
In defense of multiple-choice testing of the arts, she writes:
The point of arts education shouldn’t be to teach children to simply “enjoy art”–we are, after all free to choose which art we enjoy, or whether we enjoy it at all. Rather, it should be to give children the skills and background knowledge to experience art or music in an informed and more than superficial sense–much of which is about understanding and identifying concepts, vocabulary, and techniques in ways that can be assessed through multiple choice assessments. A major reason that high-quality education needs to include the arts is certain arts-related information–such as names and work of key artists and composers, specific musical or artistic vocabulary and meanings, and artistic movements over time and their relationship to broader historical and social trends–is key cultural knowledge that our students need to be culturally literate. But arts and music instruction in our schools has often ignored cultural literacy and key concepts in favor of performance and “creativity.”
I don’t agree.
I understand and embrace the idea of cultural literacy, but I don’t think that multiple-choice standardized tests are the best way to teach it or to assess it. If a teacher of music wants students to understand the differences between Mozart and Schoenberg, the best way to do that is to listen to their music and discuss the differences. If the teacher of the arts wants students to understand the differences between classical Greek and Roman architecture, the best way to do it is to view it and discuss it. Picking a bubble is no substitute nor is it a valuable way to learn about art.
It is easy to memorize the names and work of key artists and composers to prepare for a test, and just as easy to forget them when the test is over.
If we want our students to have important cultural knowledge as part of their cultural literacy, we should expose them to the experience that this knowledge represents. We should encourage them to see, feel, hear, and engage with the art or music of other times and places. To the extent that they experience arts as a part of life–their own as well as its creator–they will remember it and have it as part of their own experience.
There is something in a bubble test that is inherently at odds with the arts. One can indeed test for superficial recall, not only in the arts but in other subjects as well. And there are times when it is useful to know the results of large-scale assessment. NAEP is valuable, for example, in providing a snapshot of the state of reading, math, science, history and other subjects. But it is only a snapshot. And the results that are informative for a nation, a state, or a district are less informative and less valid for individual students. For the purposes of large-scale assessment, multiple-choice standardized testing is useful and cheap.
But if it is understanding and discernment that we value, there is not a good case to be made for multiple-choice standardized testing. If it is learning that we care about, there is not a good case to be made for multiple-choice, standardized testing. If it is individual children that we care about, then we want to know what they have learned and what they understand. Conceptual knowledge does not lend itself to bubble tests.
Diane
Oh, no! Dana Goldstein visited Memphis, where she found that arts teachers are using portfolio assessments.
I suppose that is a step up from online standardized tests and the old-fashioned machine-scored computerized tests, but it is still a very bad idea.
The whole premise of testing is that teachers cannot be trusted to reach responsible judgments about student work.
And the purpose of the assessment is not to help students but to devise a numerical rating so teachers of the arts may be evaluated and held “accountable” for student progress. If the student is drawing better pictures, the teacher must be a better teacher. If the student work does not get better, the teacher is a bad teacher. He or she will be rated ineffective and may lose tenure or compensation and may be fired.
If we cared about teacher professionalism, we would let teachers teach without tying their work to test scores or portfolios.
If we cared about creativity, we would let students engage wholeheartedly in the arts without measuring whether they are getting “better” at what they are doing. Almost no one learns to play a musical instrument and gets worse by the day; and if they do, it is because they didn’t practice, didn’t care, and didn’t try. If they try, they will improve. And any teacher of the arts will know that they are trying and improving without need for an assessment to prove it. To “prove it” to whom? To a supervisor? To the state commissioner of investigation?
Let’s face it. None of this assessment mania is about kids or education or teacher quality. It is about control and lack of respect for teachers.
Follow your instincts, Dana. Whether assessed by a machine or by a portfolio, the arts should be performed and experienced, not measured.
Diane
As I read Dana Goldstein’s article about the advance of standardized testing into subjects like the arts and physical education, I began to get a queasy feeling. “This isn’t right,” I mumbled to myself. I thought of my grandchildren taking standardized tests in music and gym, and I shook my head. This isn’t right.
Race to the Top has promoted this movement to test every subject. Arne Duncan brandished $5 billion to encourage states and districts to judge teachers by the rise or fall of their students’ scores. The fact that there is no evidence for this method of judging teachers doesn’t matter. Bad ideas backed by big money have a way of catching on, no matter how mindless they are.
South Carolina has developed online tests for the arts, multiple-choice, of course. Florida is building tests of music and other pervormance arts that can be scored by machine, that is, by artificial intelligence. The vendors of these tests lobby to make them permanent, regardless of their quality.
Are they doing this at Sidwell Friends or the University of Chicago Lab School or Dalton or Exeter or Deerfield Academy? Of course not.
Is this what they do in Finland? Of course not.
What is the reason for testing the arts and physical education? It’s not to help students take joy in singing or playing a musical instrument or running fast or shooting baskets.
No, the purpose of all these tests is to collect data to evaluate the teachers! Wasting the students’ time with stupid questions and pointless activities and trivial measurements is just a way of gathering information so teachers of the arts and physical education can get a value-added score, just like teachers of reading and math.
Sometimes Americans do really foolish things. Sometimes they do these things because it is so easy to follow the crowd. Sometimes it’s because no one is thinking clearly. Sometimes they get caught up in nutty fads because someone is making a profit and buying legislators. Usually it’s because the people who launched these bad ideas have no moorings. They have lost touch with their own values. They do to other people’s children what they would never do to their own. They don’t listen to teachers. They don’t listen to parents.
History is not kind to people who do foolish, nay harmful, things and fail to exercise independent judgment. That’s why it’s best to say “no” when your conscience tells you to.
Diane
When the budget cuts start, the first victim is usually the arts.
The people who make the financial decisions think that the arts don’t matter.
How wrong they are. Why do they prioritize the budget for assessment over the budget for singing, dancing, and the joyful activities associated with the arts?
Do they think that students come to school just to be tested? Don’t they understand anything about the need for expression, the need to feel joy in creating and designing and singing and acting together?
Students know. Teachers know. Parents know. Why don’t the politicians and the policymakers know? Weren’t they once children?
Life without the arts, school without the arts, is nasty, brutish and way too long.
In districts across the country, the arts are in jeopardy because of budget cuts and misguided priorities. Districts are digging deep to pay for more tests even as they axe the arts.
One district that is fighting back is Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. Upper Darby is facing massive budget cuts, and the arts are on the chopping block. Parents and community members created a video that is joyful to watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh8RNhMo4Ks
Every district should create a video to showcase the talents of its students. Kids are amazing. The bands and orchestras and string groups and jazz groups and dance groups and drama groups are better than anything you will watch on television tonight.
Can your district do what Upper Darby did? Maybe it will educate the budget cutters if we can get them to watch.
Do not let them kill the younger generation’s creative spirit, its joy in performance, the sheer exuberance that the arts unleash. We are the adults. We owe it to them to prioritize what matters most, to them and to us.
Diane
Diane Ravitch's blog 