Kelly did well on her report card from PS 207 last year, scoring Level 4 on the state math exam.

She passed the reading test with a Level 3, which her teacher's comment characterized as "Meeting grade standards."

Department of Education spokesman William Havemann characterized the younger Kelly as scoring "a low level 3" on reading and said the school was "ensuring that all students have the extra help they need."

It is an inescapable reality that students learn at different rates in different ways.That creates the need for a schedule of sensitivity that not only teachers close to the particular student can devise - not some theory-driven, central office, computer-managed schedule.

'We parade adolescents before snippets of time. Any one teacher will usually see more than 10 students and often more than a 100 a day. Such a system denies teachers the chance to know many students well, to learn how a particular student's mind works.

Only by examining the existing compromises in schools, however painful that may be, and moving beyond them, can one form more thoughtful schools.  And only in thoughtful schools can thoughtful students be hatched.  And this requires thoughtful leaders.

Schools are complicated places.  Attitudes - those of teachers, students and others - must change as well as the structures of the schools in which they work. This takes time, political protection and patience.

When the students forget the explicit contents of today's lesson - and we know that they will - what is left? Anything? What happens after they forget the difference between atomic number and atomic mass? What is left after they forget the difference between the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? After they forget the rhyme and scheme and meter of a Shakespearean Sonnet or between sin, cos and tan?

Respect for students starts with respect for teachers, for them as individuals, for their work, and for their workplace.

Two out of five of America's 4 million K-12 teachers appear disheartened and disappointed about their jobs, while others express a variety of reasons for contentment with teaching and their current school environments, new research by Public Agenda and Learning Point Associates shows.

School culture is the behind-the-scenes context that reflects the values, beliefs, norms, traditions, and rituals that build up over time as people in a school work together. It influences not only the actions of the school population, but also its motivations and spirit (Peterson, 1999).

One of the ironies is that union activism and collegial school cultures are an inverse function. A highly effective school with a totally collaborative culture has a school secretary as the chapter leader, whose sole role is to post union notices on the bulletin board. Another school that uses lead teachers instead of assistant principals, a school in which teachers design and run the professional development, elects a chapter leader with little actual function. Schools with vibrant active chapters are frequently schools with toxic school cultures.

Learning, Arts, and the Brain

Since the industrialist and legislator Charles A. Dana launched his foundation nearly sixty years ago, education has been an active area of its support. At first, construction of auditoriums at colleges was our primary contribution. This was followed by grants from providing fellowships and scholarships to helping disadvantaged students meet the daunting challenge of college calculus. In the past eight years, we have focused on a field of great need: the revitalization of the teaching of the performing arts in our public schools. Whenever local school budgets tighten--in good times and in today's harder times--one of the first activities to be curtailed has been children's education in music, dance, and drama. That's a big mistake, not just because study of the arts attracts young people to remain in school, and not just because an appreciation of our cultural heritage enriches their lives during and long after school.  We see other reasons as well: arts study encourages creativity, the precursor to economic productivity; it stimulates the imagination, opening new vistas for scholastic achievement and interesting careers.

Five years ago, a light bulb went on in our heads: Since we were so deeply involved in spreading the gospel of brain science, might there not be a way to determine whether there is a connection between the study of the arts and the development of the brain's ability to learn? To perceive through the senses, to store memory in areas like the hippocampus, to quickly retrieve that information through the neural circuits--aren't those arts-related functions of the organ inside the skull? And could it be shown that the study of the arts has a direct effect on the ability to concentrate, to focus, so as more easily to learn math, science, and the humanities?

Wishful thinking, said skeptics who preferred more easily measureable academic subjects. Art for art's sake, said some purist critics who disdained any "practical" benefit from studying and performing in their fields. And yet some cognitive neuroscientists, newly equipped with technology to see what was going on in the living and learning human brain, wondered: Why did so many musicians excel at math? Why did children who eagerly performed dance and welcomed its difficult training shine in the seemingly unrelated world of spatial relationships? Why did so many actors have such good memories?

Under the guiding hand of "the father of cognitive neuroscience", Michael Gazzaniga, Ph.D., of the University of California, Santa Barbara, Dana put up $2 million to undertake a three-year study, drawing on the top cognitive talent in the faculties of seven leading universities taking a serious look at the subject so central to cognition and to early education. Their March 2008 report, titled "Learning, Arts, and the Brain" (available in full on our Web site, along with media commentary), was careful not to use the word "causation"--not enough evidence yet to make such a sweeping claim--but found "tight correlation" between facility in an art form and achievement in other domains. "In children, there appear to be specific links between the practice of music and skills in geometrical representation," and in grown-ups, "Adult self-reported interest in aesthetics is related to a temperamental factor of openness, which in turn is influenced by dopamine-related genes." The scientists of the Dana Consortium on Arts and Cognition concluded: "An interest in a performing art leads to a high state of motivation that produces the sustained attention necessary to improve performance and the training of attention that leads to improvement in other domains of cognition." 

 In June 2008, Dana awarded a grant to a member of the consortium, Harvard's Elizabeth Spelke, Ph.D., to follow up the music-geometry connection with a larger sample, and to investigate whether a musical tone is represented as space in the brain.

Throughout our study and its aftermath, we were hopeful that other educators and neuroscientists would join us in moving this important field of study ahead. Sure enough, in the fall of 2008 the Johns Hopkins University School of Education asked us to join its Neuro-Education Initiative to plan a conference on "Learning, Arts and the Brain." That was the title of the Dana Consortium's report; in a fair exchange, we plan to adopt the Hopkins use of the neologism neuro-education. (An aside: As a combining prefix, neuro- is hot, now including neuro-economics; I thought I had coined the term neuroethics in 2001, but it turns out that the Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Dr. Anneliese Pontius used it in a published paper on child-rearing in 1993. Ah, well.)

The Hopkins gathering is now set for May 6, 2009, at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. Its purpose, in their words, is "to discuss what is known about arts and cognition, explore research priorities and opportunities, and develop methods of effective communication of findings to educators and stakeholders." Guy McKhann, M.D., professor of neurology and neuroscience at Hopkins and Dana's senior scientific consultant, and I will be among the speakers, along with Dr. Spelke and two other members of our original Consortium: Michael Posner, Ph.D., of the University of Oregon and Brian Wandell, Ph.D., of Stanford. Dana support in addition to Dr. McKhann will include Barbara Rich, Ed.D., head of our News and Internet Office, and Janet Eilber, our director of Arts Education. Dana Press reporters directed by Jane Nevins and Nicky Penttila will cover the proceedings on our Website and in our publications Brainwork, Brain in the News, and Arts Education in the News. 

The next day, in nearby Washington D.C., a "Learning, Arts, and the Brain Summit and Roundtable" will take place, part of a two-day Learning & the Brain conference.  For the past five years, we have worked with the dedicated educators of Learning & the Brain on these semi-annual gatherings, which often draw up to 1,000 teachers, administrators and scientists; Dana Alliance members, and Dana staff and consultants often participate in their panels.

There's nothing like a group of fired up, crazy-passionate moms to get something done, and when it comes to our kids' education in particular, there's no shortage of work to be done. Mom Congress, a Parenting initiative with Georgetown University -- our education provider -- is here to help you make the changes you want in your local schools, and for kids nationwide.

"...Gonzalez (MS 223 principal) goes against current practice and eliminates periods of math, English language arts, and other subjects on a rotating basis to make room for 12-week blocks of visual arts, drama, dance, and both instrumental and digital music. "The academics haven't suffered," says Gonzalez. "Instead, the whole school has improved."

David Wallace improvising variations on the Dowland song devised on the spot by children in Incheon

Some will find ways to establish a network of new schools or develop models that turn around low performing schools. Others will find new ways to use technology. Others might explore how to engage children in the arts to help them improve. We want the best ideas to move us forward. We will be investing in great work to scale up existing programs that have already shown success, can validate ones that need to establish evidence of their success or to develop new ideas to determine their potential.

Individual school districts or groups of districts can apply for the i3 grants, and entrepreneurial nonprofits can join with school districts to submit applications. Colleges and universities, companies and other stakeholders can be supporters of the projects.

Applicants must demonstrate their previous success in closing achievement gaps, improving student progress toward proficiency, increasing graduation rates, or recruiting and retaining high-quality teachers and principals.

Under the proposed priorities, grants would be awarded in three categories:

• Scale-up Grants: The largest possible grant category is focused on programs and practices with the potential to reach hundreds of thousands of students. Applicants must have a strong base of evidence that their program has had a significant effect on improving student achievement.

• Validation Grants: Existing, promising programs that have good evidence of their impact and are ready to improve their evidence base while expanding in their own and other communities.

• Development Grants: The smallest grant level designed to support new and high-potential practices whose impact should be studied further.