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.