By Tracey
I had the pleasure of being a special guest at the Guiding Lights Weekend last Friday and Saturday. My afterschool News Broadcast Club submitted a video to their youth video contest about what it means to be a good citizen; and we won second place! The prize was to have their teacher attend the conference for free, and join a diverse group of professional, passionate people from all walks of life to ponder what it means to be a good citizen.
The conference opened on Friday with Sandra Day O’Conner speaking candidly on video about civics education in schools today, and the lack there of. She admits, “I didn’t realize this was happening.” She plugged her video games (iCivics.org) for middle school and high school students that cleverly teaches about government and civics- her response to this growing trend of swapping social studies instruction for extra doses of subjects on which our students are tested. She delivered a strong message that it’s our duty as a nation to prepare our youth for participation in a democracy.
Her statements were then followed by a live video link with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. His message was that we need a well-rounded education. In fact, he attributed our nation’s high drop out rate with the narrowing of curriculum, claiming that without the arts, social studies, sciences, and foreign languages, students haven’t found their passions. He also announced a $1 billion competitive grant for high-needs districts to implement a more “well-rounded” education. I went to the Department of Education’s website to learn more about this. It’s not available yet, but I found this document.
If you read it, you’ll find these words:
To help more students in high-need schools receive a well- rounded education, the proposal will provide competitive grants to states, high-need districts, and nonprofit partners to strengthen the teaching and learning of arts, foreign languages, history and civics, financial literacy, environmental education, and other subjects.
Every teacher across the nation knows how and why we got here. So, what will this mean for testing? Eric Liu, the host, asked Arne how we will measure students and the success of a well-rounded education. Arne’s reply was to watch student dropout rates go down. These statements give me hope. But, honestly, I also feel broken and defeated. I never stopped the mantra and the stealth attempt of slipping in a “well-rounded” education for my students. But this didn’t come without costs, particularly in instructional effectiveness.
As I look back, I see this term “well-rounded” appearing in documents and blog posts over a year ago. Why, then, does it seem to be getting harder for me to sneak in learning in content areas outside of math and literacy? Are my administrators and education leaders just not paying attention to departmental swings and the new buzzwords of the times? No, nothing will change if we don’t change the law as it stands. As long as schools can be labeled as “failing,” closed down, and principals and teachers fired based on reading and math scores, we won’t see any change in what we teach our students. And once we do, what will our participatory democracy look like? Perhaps, no different from how it’s always looked. We have a long history of excluding poor and minority groups from participating in our democracy; this time, I just helped.
“Eric Liu, the host, asked Arne how we will measure students and the success of a well-rounded education. Arne’s reply was to watch student dropout rates go down.”
The legislature has delayed the requirement for the classes of 2013 and 2014 to pass end-of-course exams in both Algebra and Geometry; they will only have to pass one of the tests. It looks like they will have to pass a science test too. The class of 2015 and beyond will have to pass 5 high-stakes tests to graduate from high school. I think the dropout rate will skyrocket in the next two years, and the hope for a well rounded education will become an even more distant dream.
It looks to me like the schools most effected by NCLB are the schools most out of balance; the schools with the least-rounded curriculum. And they’re probably the schools which need the roundest curriculum.
Maybe the Obama administration finally gets it. If so, great. It would have been nice had they gotten two years ago, but better late than never.
What I see here, alas, is Arne once again telling a crowd what he thinks they want to hear. Find teachers who advocate for arts and other avenues in elementary, and of course he’s going to say what they want to hear.
I also find it ironic that, in my district for example, the graduation requirements for history/social-studies have now been reduced, and it is not uncommon to find many struggling students with two periods of math in their daily schedule. I don’t blame the board or my building for doing this: they are responding to overwhelming pressure from above…my building is in year one of improvement, after all, due to low math scores in one cell of our state report card. Those seven kids (in that particular demographic cell) who did not pass the HSPE in math this past year, along with the seven the year before who struggled on the WASL (thus putting us in “improvement status”), have sure made a huge impact on the course offerings and opportunities for the 1750 students in my school. It’s sad what fear of punishment will do to a school.