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NAEP Arts 2008, Part Three: The Chrome Standard?
NAEP is universally considered to be the “gold standard” for K-12 educational assessment. My good friend and colleague Lynne Munson, Executive Director of Common Core, has posted a an entry on her blog that compares the NAEP Arts Assessment 2008 with the NAEP math and reading tests. Lynne, a former deputy director of the National…
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Arts Education Cuts at New York City Public Schools: A Tale of Two Worlds
The Daily News released an article today on cuts to the arts starting to appear in the New York City Public Schools. Note the title: City Schools are Seeing Arts Programs Erased Amid Budget Cuts For those of you who don’t know this school district, basically, the principals call the shots. If they want to…
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Can the Arts be a Central Part of Urban School Improvement?
Well, of course. Unfortunately, that answer is not widely known or embraced among the policy elites. That’s part of our job as advocates. Middle School 223, once shuttered as one of the most violent middle schools in New York City, was reopened in 2003 as M.S. 223/The Laboratory School of Finance and Technology. Today, Principal…
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Continuing Problems with LA’s Arts High School
What a mess. But how often do you see someone challenging Eli Broad? At first it was to be a regular high school to help with overcrowding in the area. Then it became part of the Grand Avenue redevelopment led by Eli Broad, leading to the building of a $242 million state of the art…
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Education Secretary Lands Near Knockout Blow in First Round
Okay, maybe it’s really the second round, as the first could be viewed as the education portion of the stimulus package. I’ve read a lot about Arne Duncan being a basketball player, but hadn’t heard much about him liking to mix it up.Yesterday Duncan spoke at a press conference in Maryland where he outlined what…
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Crisis in Kindergarten: Why Children Need to Play in School
I was once asked by a charter school operator to assist them in finding some arts teachers. They showed me their instructional schedule for their all-day kindergarten and first grade classes, and I was floored, absolutely floored by the amount of time spent on drilling and test prep for reading and math.I mean, this is…
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Arts Journalism and Arts Education
A couple of years ago, when we really started focusing on securing significantly increased local media coverage about arts education and the New York City public schools, we found out pretty quickly that there was just a wee hitch: the arts journalists are not very well versed in arts education and the education beat reporters didn’t seem…