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Guest Blog, Bruce Taylor: What is the Future Role for Arts In Public Education?
What is the Future Role for the Arts In Public Education? by Bruce Taylor The increasingly contentious debate about school reform juxtaposes two contrasting realities about the arts: one, that their place in our schools has been steadily and seriously eroded; the other, that the skills inherent in artistic practice are rapidly becoming essential to…
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Federal K-12 Arts Ed Funding on the Chopping Block Again
In case you missed it, on September 29th, in Ed Week’s Curriculum Matters blog was this article: STEM Ed. Among Cuts Sought in Draft House Budget Plan. The House is at it again, proposing the zeroing out of K-12 arts education at the USDOE, as well as a host of other vital programs, including the…
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Guest Blog, Jane Remer: A Paradox, A Paradox, A Most Ingenious Paradox –The Common Core of State Standards and The Untamable Core of the American Class System
Jane Remer’s CliffNotes: September 29, 2011 “A Paradox, A Paradox, a Most Ingenious Paradox” (Pirates of Penzance/Gilbert and Sullivan), The Common Core of (Voluntary) State Standards and the Untamable Core of the American Class System. The 21st Century is young, but it’s clearly becoming a paradox. The now developing Common Core meticulously charts the paths and…
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Batuta — Columbia’s El Sistema. An Essay by Eric Booth and Tricia Tunstall
As I write, I am staring out the window on the 7:00 Acela heading to DC from New York Penn Station. I have a board meeting of Common Core, for which I am board treasurer. What was a sunny day in New York, has turned into a deep fog. The train moves through the fog…
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Is A Liberal Arts Education Dead Meat?
There are a lot of folks who are taking aim at the liberal arts. Lately, there’s been quite a lot of attention paid to a recent speech by Bill Gates at the National Governors Association, where he questioned funding liberal arts programs because the area did not produce enough jobs. For me, this is just…
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Register for Grantmakers in Arts Webinar on The Common Core Standards
Arts Education: Common Core What Are the Possibilities for the Arts? Tuesday, June 21, 2:00 EDT/ 11:00 PDT Julie Fry, Program Officer, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Richard Kessler, Executive Director, The Center for Arts Education More than two-thirds of the states have adopted the Common Core Standards in English language arts, and math,…
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A Pretty Good Primer on Arts Education Advocacy
GothamSchools is a sort of Artsjournal for education issues. Historically, it has been focused on New York City, but has expanded its coverage in the past couple of years. GS published a through report on yesterday’s press conference, protest, and report release concerning proposed budget cuts that will lead to a reduction in certified arts…
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Arts Education in New York City Schools: Doing More with Much Less????
From today’s City Room, by Anna Phillips: Even Before Layoffs, Schools Lost 135 Arts Teachers And, before that, there was successive years of steep declines in funding for arts supplies and cultural partnerships. New York City spends $2 per student on arts supplies. I know suburban districts on Long Island and Westchester that spend about…
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A Living Mural At McKinley Middle School: Sustaining the Arts Across Years
Classes Come and Go, But the Mural Grows and Grows, by Fernanda Santos, The New York Times, May 18th, 2011 The mural occupies the walls and steel doors along two floors of a middle school in Brooklyn. If turned into pavement, it would extend more than two city blocks. It’s a terrific story about a…
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Guest Blogger, Jane Remer: The Law of Unintended Consequences: How “Reform” Became the Language of Defeat in 1983
Jane Remer’s CliffNotes: Recently to my chagrin and discomfort, many scholars and practitioners in favor of improving public education through democratic means refer to current events and efforts in harsh terms. What we used to call “positive school change, development or improvement” has been cast aside as “soft and wimpy” and replaced with a lexicon…