How Will Obama Change Education Priorities?

Getting together with friends and family over the holidays, talk turns to education as it almost always does with us. We come from an education family -- going back generations. My ancestors were Pilgrims, who valued education and reading and invented "public" school. Another walked from his home in Ohio to California to make his fortune in the Gold Rush. He was one of the fortunate who returned with at least some meager earnings, and then put his daughters through teacher college -- pretty unheard of in those days for farm kids of the 1850s. Since my husband is a school administrator, and I still teach art to kids whenever there's an opportunity, we live and breath education issues. When I had my radio show "Making the Grade" I got to yak about it on the air with everybody from teachers to governors.

So, the chatter this Thanksgiving centered around the severe budget meltdown facing LA Unified and the possible ramifications, art teachers with no supplies, the enormous frustration with No Child Left Behind, the sometimes ridiculous hoops that teachers have to jump through to stay certified...oh what fun! Truly, only conversations that educators would love. (That's why I had to become a teacher after art school, just so I could join in.)

If Obama is interested, teachers have plenty of advice gained from some crazy real-life experiences. I have my share of war stories, too -- and moments of shining brilliance. After teaching in 21 schools in three states off and on over three decades (started teaching 3rd grade in 1978!!!), I've seen kids change, society change, and education change innumerable times. But I think the verdict is universal -- education has got to change direction now. The testing has reached absurd proportions, teachers and kids are exhausted, vast sums have been spent on testing materials, and though everybody has given it 110 percent, not a lot has changed fundamentally.

What's the 21st century outlook? Are we still educating for the past century? Or even the one before that? If we could start over completely, what would education look like? Tinkering around the edges isn't the change we need.

We haven't heard any rumors about Obama's Secretary of Education yet. But if you've got a solid "how-to" plan, send it to Change.gov. I think we can bag this Texas model that we've all labored under. Having taught in Texas, I finally understood it. But I think a new vision -- along with the capital to fund it -- can be transformative. Maybe the new vision is funding all those mandates! That would be a change.

But maybe we should be like England, Singapore, Finland, and even China -- who are now changing the focus from testing being the primary goal and function of education to teaching students how to think creativity, with the focus on innovation. We kind of got into this testing thing to keep up with the rest of the world. But guess what? They've concluded the way to beat the USA is in the area of innovation -- and that is not achieved through high-stakes, find-the-right-answer type of testing and education.

I've been in a unique position as an art teacher, especially when I traveled between schools in the same district. Not only did I see all the kids in a school from Kindergarten on up, I got to see how policies played out across a district between at-risk and upper-end schools. I knew first-hand how much harder we all worked at schools serving the most challenging neighborhoods and the attitudes towards us from our own colleagues in the comfortable middle class suburbs. Like other specialists who serve an entire school, I knew who the good teachers were and those who were struggling.I've had the opportunity to work under a variety of principals and the effect they have on staff. Basically, I have to say that teachers are amazing. They are one of the few adults who willingly work with other peoples' children, towards the betterment of our country. I salute everyone of you!

President-elect Obama, bring in teachers -- not those who've been out of the classroom for years or holed up in ivory towers. Those who have been in the trenches know what the real scoop is. I can recommend some truly awesome, but unsung heroes. They could really turn things around if we quit hamstringing them!

Is Art Academic?

As I was finishing up teaching an art lesson to a class of school kids, their teacher admonished them to, "Hurry up -- fun and games are over. Time to get back to real learning."

Ouch!

We were just finishing a lively session where 100 percent of the kids were 100 percent engaged for the entire period. Since this was said right in front of the kids, I piped up, "Actually, they have been learning the whole time. This was a right-brain activity. "

The teacher corrected me, "Real education is reading and math and that's what we do in my classroom."

Me: "This is educational also. It was open-ended to promote critical thinking and doing. Art is hands-on. The kids made choices and fixed problems along the way to end up with a finished project that they created."

Teacher: "Like I said, real education is what goes on in my classroom."

What do you think?

Here's my condensed version of why art and teaching creativity is academic and educational.

For those of you who haven't had formal teacher's training, there's a 50-year-old academic model that we've all been taught and supposedly use when planning lessons. It's called Bloom's Taxonomy. Essentially, it identifies how learning takes place on any topic.

There are seven levels of Bloom's Taxonomy:
The first four levels are learned in the "left-brain" modality

Knowledge: Remember - learn the basic facts
Comprehension: Understand
Application: Practice
Analysis: Examine
...........................................
Creative thinking begins here once students have mastered the subject. The highest levels of learning occur in the "right-brain" modality

Synthesis: Create
Evaluation: Assess

Creativity is "connectivity." It's the ability to take what you've learned and do something new with it. It's the realization that there are many ways to solve problems. And it's the ability to make choices from all the possibilities. That takes practice. What do you hear when kids haven't had practice at this? "I don't know what to do!" Creativity = doing!

If teachers don't extend lessons to get to the top two levels of Bloom's taxonomy, students remain stuck in analytical, "left-brain" thinking -- learning the rules of how to find the one correct answer. That is how they spend a good deal of their school day.

But creative thinking is exactly the opposite! The rules of "right-brain" thinking are expansive. To activate these, kids have to DO. What is art? DOING.

Filling out mounds of boring white worksheets is not academic.

Remember When School Looked Fun?

I guess I haven't finished addressing my concerns about the lack of children's art and original projects being displayed on the walls of some school hallways and classrooms. This noticeable, sterile trend has been bothering me. Not simply because it devalues the very thing that children actually value, but it devalues creativity in education as being at least nominally acknowledged.
It's very uneducated, in my opinion.

A comment by a kindergarten teacher not too long ago is what concerned me. She had mentioned that a supervisor had told kindergarten teachers she didn't want to see artsy type of work on the walls - only "real" work like writing and numbers. But the real work of five-year-olds is cutting and pasting and drawing in preparation for doing writing and numbers!

What would these supervisors who dictate what's going up on classroom walls think of the Texas elementary principal who didn't allow ANY pre-made imagery to be put up in place of teacher or student-made. Teachers didn't run to the teacher supply store when it came time to change the the bulletin boards. Every classroom and hallway display was handmade -- created from scratch to be visually stimulating and appealing.

Sure it was demanding, but the students and teachers were cocooned in an environment that celebrated creativity as an integral part of academic life. They saw the thought-process made evident. I only wish I could have seen the distinct visual impact of this building. I heard about it from a teacher who taught there when I complimented her very cool bulletin board. Of course, she'd saved all the pieces to pull out when needed year after year.

My belief is those children were far more engaged than the kids spending their days gazing at slick posters they could never hope to reproduce, never seeing peer-created art work to learn from, ignoring walls of never-ending word lists, or trying to jumpstart their bored brains to find something new and interesting to contemplate in the steady diet of bland adult-generated worksheets they're given to consume -- color or fill in the blanks. Again, the lowest level of learning and engagement. A definite creative disconnect.

Children learn a great deal from seeing child-produced artwork and projects.

Elementary Classrooms Devoid of Childrens' Presence

As often happens in education, we veer from one extreme to another when forced to follow the pressures of current demands while making honest efforts to increase student learning. Since I first began teaching third grade in 1978, and covered education on local public radio for close to five years, you bet I've seen a lot of pendulum-swinging. With the opportunity to spend time in various classrooms and watch trends develop and then be interpreted over time, I've now seen the next extreme. It has wiped out the presence of the child altogether on the walls and bulletin boards of more and more classrooms in one district.

There simply is no original or student-generated work on display anywhere in some of these rooms! Hallway bulletin boards are sterile. It feels like the child's presence has been obliterated. I think sometimes I might as well be in a community college setting, as these buildings don't feel like elementary schools which should be brimming with lively, vibrant, creative, authentic work that only young children can produce. Instead it's adult computer-produced, adult-directed, and boringly similar. It's "instructional."

When I first began noticing this, at first I thought I was only seeing evidence of lazy or tired or disinterested teachers. Okay, that definitely exists and has for years -- as evidenced on many high school classroom bulletin boards! But not so much in elementary schools. Now it seems to have come down from the top not to display student work that isn't "educational." The interpretation seems to be expressed only as writing and endless word strip banks, and homogeneous look-alike prepacked projects.

Now, I have nothing against word banks. I thought they were a great idea when they first appeared and still do. I used them myself in the art room with art vocabulary or when listing the big variety of art-related jobs, etc. However, it's become the all-consuming and only "decoration" in too many classrooms.

The brain continually needs new visual stimuli to connect all those synapses. It needs interesting imagery to contemplate. But these classroom walls and white boards covered with sterile word strips have become visual deserts, void of intellectual life! It's definitely visual clutter. The words aren't even printed by the children. There's nothing of the child.

I know the intention is to make it look like education is going on. To make it uniform. To ensure teacher compliance. But once it's registered with a child, these word lists are ignored - maybe referred to now and then with the teacher's guidance. But those that don't change them are doing nothing to stimulate the growing brain. The brain's smart - it got it the first time and skips over what it's already learned. And so nothing is being offered on those classroom walls to provide new, exciting stimulus.

I think it's become a crutch for some -- see, I've put up everything in the reading kit and there's no room for anything else. It's easy to staple up the district-purchased materials -- and in a teacher's best interest to do so. As one teacher told me, "I'd never teach this way. But I'm forced to." What can we say of a system where teachers trained in child development are reluctant to put up child-generated projects because their supervisors will criticize them -- or worse, affect their evaluations negatively!

Although I am a trained teacher evaluator, in my capacity as an art consultant I don't advise teachers to go against directives issued by their district supervisors. However, if it was up to me, I'd be cutting out much of this basic knowledge clutter once it was learned. I'd be looking for student-generated projects as direct evidence that the highest levels of instruction was taking place in that classroom. Only then is real learning taking place. The student must take the basic knowledge and use it or transform it in some way. That's what creativity and divergent thinking are all about. Unless teachers take the kids to that point, they're just pursuing a round and round loop at the lowest levels of the learning cycle.

Gaining the facts is only the beginning of the learning process. It's not the be all and end all. But getting beyond that these days seems to be a very fearful proposition. I understand the reasons why. It will take some strong leadership at the top to make the transition and give assurances that it's vital to provide creativity in education if our US economy is to remain on top this century. Other countries are getting that message and spending mucho $$$ to revamp their education systems to embrace the teaching of creativity.

Are Some Students More Deserving of Art Education Than Others?

I recently had a conversation with a teacher at an at-risk school in a low-income area about their lack of art education. She voiced an opinion that I've heard in similar locales over the years. She assumed elementary kids in the well-to-do areas of the city had art -- that those parents would insist on art teaching at their schools or pay for it themselves.

It's sad that we've come to expect/accept that kids in our poorer neighborhoods don't "deserve" to have art for one reason or another, the same as the other district students. The excuses can range from financial, lack of parental push, or most usually the notion that the kids have to spend all their time preparing for the tests and couldn't possibly spare a moment for such stuff. Isn't it sad that the teacher serving the at-risk students believes/accepts that she and her school receive second-rate treatment because of who they are?

This is not idle opinion. I was pretty shocked while serving on the board of an alternative high school to hear it voiced publicly in the mid 1990's by a city representative, from the mayor's office no less. No joke. At a large group gathering, we were discussing the possibility of going for a bond to remodel the ancient building housing the school. Over the past few meetings we'd already come to the conclusion that we could perhaps halt the drop-out rate if we installed an art track at the school. We were pretty excited about it. It was going to be first-class.

However, at this meeting to discuss the bond idea, the city rep stated frankly, "Why should the icky kids deserve this?" I was stunned, and embarrassed for her. I've never forgotten that. Because these were the "icky" kids (her exact word, not mine), she didn't feel they should have equal -- or perhaps better than -- the "good" kids at the districts' three regular high schools, who already had art programs. The implication was that the alternative school should be a punishment center without decent facilities or "fun" programs, I guess.

The good news was, we went forward with the bond, the school was beautifully remodeled, an exciting art program (including glass blowing) installed, and attendance rocketed. The alternative school truly became an alternative school -- kids from around the district voluntarily asked to attend so they could enjoy an alternative school experience outside the typical big high school experience. Very gratifying.

I've had the blessed experience to work in three school districts that really did right by their low-end schools. I chose to teach art at the lowest-scoring schools in those districts because I believe art can really make a difference in many ways for those particular students. The districts also believed that it was important to include art, and built beautiful schools in those neighborhoods, not subjecting those students and teachers to substandard buildings. Plus, they (we) enjoyed well-funded art programs.

Those schools were populated by kids facing huge odds. But they were really vibrant places to teach. I should add, they were exhausting, too. But the staffs were incredibly talented and dedicated, as they often are in such schools. Many of our students won art contests, and I made sure student artwork was continuously displayed. When taught creativity, you couldn't tell the difference between our kids' work and the very affluent ones living at the opposite ends of the districts. They proved themselves to be just as talented and creative when given the same opportunity!

Send Obama Congrats and Urge Support of the Arts

While the election of Barack Obama is still reverberating, now is a great time to send him and his team a note about the arts. They are formulating their agenda. Obama has expressed support for the arts. Join an online movement over at American for the Arts. They are sponsoring the "Congratulations letter" campaign.

Add your signature here:

http://www.capwiz.com/artsusa/issues/alert/?alertid=12162316&type=CU

Cast Your Vote For the Arts

This article from the LA Times is a little old, but insightful if you're an arts supporter.
http://http//articles.latimes.com/2008/mar/04/entertainment/et-polartists4

Archive for Tuesday, March 04, 2008

The arts of the campaign trail

March 04, 2008

When it comes to campaign themes, the arts can’t compete with healthcare reform, national security, the sluggish economy – just about anything you might name.

But this presidential primary season, people who work at the crossroads of politics and culture say the arts have attained a higher profile than usual – and the push for an arts agenda has established a foothold in the campaign landscape.

Linda Frye Burnham, well known in Los Angeles arts circles for starting High Performance magazine and co-founding Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, began hearing in January about Barack Obama’s support for the arts.

Along with thousands of other arts figures, she received an e-mail detailing how Obama would increase support for the National Endowment for the Arts, embrace arts education, strengthen cultural diplomacy, advocate an artist-friendly tax law and propose an Artist Corps to send young artists to teach in low-income areas.

In Ohio, meanwhile, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign worked to arrange a gathering at which her advisors hoped to win arts-interested voters with her commitment to the same ideas. Mike Huckabee has promised that should he be elected, he’d follow through on his devotion to arts education, especially. And last March, John McCain answered a New Hampshire theater manager who said he hoped the senator would support the arts by sending the man a personal check for $500.

The statements and promises, as it turns out, reflect an initiative called ArtsVote2008 mounted by the political arm of a group called Americans for the Arts, or AFTA.

In advance of the Iowa caucuses, ArtsVote gave all the candidates then running a 10-point plan for the arts in public life. No. 1 stresses NEA grants to the sorts of local arts agencies and groups that AFTA represents. No. 6 urges candidates to enhance healthcare coverage for arts groups and artists. (The complete text is available at http://www.americansforarts.org/.) ArtsVote then urged the candidates to address these points in public.

Such political pressure “is pretty common among other advocacy centers, but for the arts it is somewhat new,” says Rindy O’Brien, director of the American Arts Alliance, which represents opera, ballet and orchestra groups in Washington. “I come out of the environmental realm, and they would do a lot of that electoral work – and Planned Parenthood does – but, for the arts, you haven’t seen it.”

One reason it’s visible now is a matter of resources. In 2002, AFTA received a $127-million gift from Ruth Lilly, heiress to the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical fortune.

The money, given in annual installments and spread across the group’s political, educational and service activities, lifted its yearly budget to $14 million from about $8 million. And those extra millions helped give clout to ArtsVote, a part of AFTA’s political arm, the Arts Action Fund.

With its 10-point plan in place, ArtsVote tracked candidates’ responses by giving a $40,000 grant to a group called New Hampshire Citizens for the Arts so it could hire Suzanne Delle Harrison, who runs a theater in the state. She, in turn, put candidates and their staffs on the record by asking them about their views before the state’s primaries. On the ArtsVote website are both the campaigns’ arts statements and a diary of Harrison’s lobbying adventure:

The diary alludes, for example, to a lecture Huckabee gave ArtsVote volunteers that Harrison described in an interview as a “fascinating” evangelistic interpretation of human creativity as a conduit for the creative role of God.

Beyond his $500 gift, McCain doesn’t appear in the log. His silence, arts advocates say, is already framing a clear difference on public financing for the arts between whichever Democrat runs and the Republican front-runner. “It would be a stark contrast, especially since Sen. McCain hasn’t responded in any way about supporting the arts,” says Narric Rome, director of federal affairs for the Arts Action Fund.

An issue of particular interest on the ArtsVote agenda is arts education, which, arts advocates say, became a casualty of the test-driven No Child Left Behind Act.

Obama, Clinton and Huckabee all extol exposing students to the arts. Speaking before the Virginia primary, Obama declared: “I want our students learning art and music and science and poetry and all the things that make education worthwhile.”

Pollsters have not attempted to measure the power of a national arts vote, and it’s hard to know how such stands will sway the public.

But the Arts Education Partnership, a coalition of 140 organizations, recently commissioned a poll of 1,000 likely voters from Lake Research, a Democratic polling firm. It showed that 57% of the respondents would more likely vote for a candidate who supported the development of the imagination in schools.

The poll, which had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, also found that 57% of voters would be less likely to pick a candidate who voted to cut funding for arts education.

Current and former Clinton and Obama campaign staffers speak of the candidates’ self-driven support for the arts. But they also credit former Americans for the Arts officials and members of other arts organizations for helping AFTA develop its 10-point plan. O’Brien of the American Arts Alliance says it was consulted. And Rachel Lyons, the Clinton campaign’s deputy political director in New Hampshire, is a former director of the American Arts Alliance, which ArtsVote’s Harrison believes won her a particularly “open and knowledgeable” hearing with the campaign.

Last spring, a key Arts Action Fund official gave an extensive briefing calling for more funding for arts education and its other priorities to the Obama campaign’s Arts Policy Committee, a growing volunteer group of arts professionals, researchers and artists that both considers arts policy and works politically.

In addition, novelist Michael Chabon has written a statement of principles for the campaign called “Thoughts on the Importance of the Arts to Our Society”.

Clinton advisors, for their part, speak of the ArtsVote proposals as one of several influences. The Clinton campaign exchanged e-mails with Rome about arranging the arts gathering in Ohio.

According to Clinton officials, the campaign has no arts policy committee but instead has opted for what domestic policy advisor Catherine Brown calls “a more organic approach” of reaching out to “Hillary Clinton’s many friends who know about her passion for the arts.”

Overall, the Democrats’ formal responses to ArtsVote are similar in how they parallel the ArtsVote priorities.

The Clinton campaign has outlined nothing comparable to Obama’s Artist Corps, but it has proposed a Putting Arts in Reach initiative, which would “offset the cost of musical instruments, art supplies, drama equipment, and other things used in arts education for children from low-income communities.”

Will such words actually produce programs?

Says Burnham: “I’ve lived long enough to know that platforms mean relatively little when people get in there and find out what is going on. They give a sense of whether the candidate gets it or not – the value of the arts to the American public. I know that Americans for the Arts will keep rattling their cage for change, whether it is Obama or Hillary.

“What I wonder is what would happen if McCain got in and Huckabee were vice president. What would happen to the arts then? I think about that a lot.”

Save/Share:

Listen to an Expert on Teaching Creativity in the Schools

I felt very vindicated when I first stumbled upon Sir Ken Robinson's talks about creativity and education and human development. He's now living in Santa Monica, and has done consulting work with the Getty. You'd think I'd have plenty of opportunity to hear him in person. My guess is, he'll probably become more prominent on the US education stage with an administration change.

Robinson's thrust is that creativity and the arts were shunted aside due to the education system's hierarchy of math, science, and literacy teaching as the main ingredients of the industrial revolution of the 19th century. We at the bottom of the hierarchy already know that. But that old model is failing before our eyes as degrees become useless for promising job security. Robinson's definition of creativity is "original ideas that have value." Might there be room for such a concept in our children's school day?

I have had a dickens of a time trying to get the link to this talk working. This is the correct address, but in case it doesn't work, try pasting the address into your browser. Excerpts are on You Tube and TED, so you can also go through Google to find Sir Ken Robinson's talks.

It's worth hearing what Robinson has to say on the topic of creativity teaching in the schools. Not only is he quite a humorous speaker, but he's got some substantial credibility. He's responsible for helping England, Singapore, South Korea, and now China reinvent their education systems for the 21st century. He has plenty to say about the ailing US system as well.


http://www.ted.org/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html