There’s an article in today’s Washington Post that is a must read for a number of reasons. First, you’ve got a mayor and schools superintendent who have made a public commitment backed by dollars (really!), to place music, art, and physical education teachers in every DC public school.

A study comes out saying that this is going to result in “teacher shortages, large class sizes and per-pupil funding gaps between some schools in low- and high-income areas of the city.” What the study is saying is that in order to make this mandate possible, a “rigid” funding formula has been put in place that will cause these and other consequences.

For the moment, it appears to be a reverse of the usual, with the district pushing for the arts and physical education and a coalition questioning what it will take to make it happen. It’s a sort of “bizarro world” of education.

There’s one other, very, very intersting tidbit here: DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee was quoted as saying that in the past, “the system gave too much power to principals who sometimes made questionable staffing decisions.”

There’s been a movement a foot, well situated in New York public schools and threading into other districts, to “empower” principals by giving them singular power to make decisions in their schools, including budget, staffing, and capital. It’s the worldview of principal as CEO, amped up even further in places like New York where there is no practical oversight for principals–they’re basically unsupervised, as they’ve been “empowered.” CEO’s of publicly traded corporations have boards of directors, same as non-profits. Even charter schools have boards directors. There are many supporters of this principal empowerment, more than you can imagine. So, a comment like this from Michelle Rhee, is indeed a very interesting development.

There will be much more to come, I am sure, about how current and future budget crunches are going to affect arts education, which has historically been among the very first to be cut.