Educators Advise Fed's Role in Well-Rounded Education
"We should be promoting collaboration among the disciplines, not competition," advised Bronx Prep Arts educator Kate Quarfordt at today's Capitol Hill briefing on consensus recommendations for how the federal government can better support all the disciplines, not just math and language arts.
Although Obama's FY11 budget request includes a $38.9 million (or 17%) increase in funding to support teaching and learning in the arts, history, civics, foreign languages, geography, and economics, the administration proposes to combine eight subject-specific grant programs into a single competitive grant program.
Disciplines would compete against each other to receive funds from the $265 million pot of money allocated under "A Well-Rounded Education" on the proposed FY11 budget.
In response to this, and opportunities to reinvent ESEA post-NCLB, more than 20 major organizations, from across disciplines have offered consensus recommendations for ensuring student access to a truly well-rounded education.
"A credible, comprehensive, well-rounded education is not only practical, but essential," said Michael Blakeslee, senior deputy executive director of MENC: The National Association for Music Education, at yesterday's Hill briefing.
The groups' recommendations highlighted some of the current policies that thwart attempts at well-roundedness and suggested how they could be improved. Well-rounded education should not be a sideline item, but a central focus of any definition of college-, career-, and citizenship-ready standards. Each subject should have its own funding stream, and any competition for funding should be within the disciplines, giving priority to programs that are scalable, collaborative, use best practices, and reach high-needs schools.
Also important, the panelists noted, are some measures for evaluating and publicly reporting the quality of funded programs. We're not talking anything draconian or AYP, ASCD Policy Director David Griffith was quick to assure. But, Blakeslee added, current law requires reporting on only math, language arts, and graduation rates.
"The problem is, if there's no public reporting on other academic subjects, they become invisible. We need to have some public measure of the quality of a music program in a state," Blakeslee said.
Educators need to be significantly involved in developing a rigorous evaluation process for federally funded programs, panelists agreed.
A comment from the audience synthesized the point: "A quality, well-rounded education is more than just a goal; it's a civil right. We know the variables that go into this. We should be able to detect and fix the situation if it doesn't exist."
Today, educators gave voice to the ways the federal government can bring balance back to public education. "NCLB was very black and white," Griffith said. "It's time we saw education in Technicolor."
