I’ll get of the way here quickly but I would like to be clear on a couple of points.

First, me writing this initially was borne out of several recent visits to our poorest schools filled with students with high needs. So it’s not about privileged kids but I think all kids.

Second, I have a hard time attributed these perspectives to “ed-tech evangelists”. To me, the discussion has very little to do with technology. I’ve had many similar discussion with people who are far removed from technology. I don’t see that connection.

Third, I have no doubt what you do is great way. Why else would I spend time here? It’s not as much about teachers to me but attitudes that presume everyone should learn the same things at the same time and then be measured according to those narrow parameters using questionable methods and then telling teachers and schools to “shape up and stop focusing on creativity”.

That scares me.

As I said, I’ll get out the way now.

“I mean teachers that have time, expertise and passion to help them function as human beings, never mind reading.”

This is the one I can’t get past. How exactly do you function in a literate world if you can’t read? I submit from my point of view (my classroom) that many of my student’s problems in 8th grade stem from the fact that they can barely read at a 3rd grade level. Reading is not optional but fundamental. I am all for art appreciation and self-expression, but those do not happen without literacy.

And also, you know what? The fact that these issues are even being discussed on a math teacher’s blog suggests that creativity, the arts, literacy, math, and what-have-you are far more tightly connected than I, and probably you, previously thought.

Dan, your request for elaboration opens a whole new can of worms and fodder for an even larger debate. It really depends on how you define art. I use that term broadly and can encompass many things. Of course there are the generally assumed definition of the term such as paintings, drawings, sculptures, film, photography, music, etc. but art is not simply a category. To be taken broadly art is really something that touches on all aspects of human thought. It informs possibly more of our everyday decisions than does the written word alone. Art really is about human interpretation and manipulation of the world around us including both the real such as mentioned above and abstract such as thought itself. On a more concrete level creative writing and literature are both considered part of the arts and are easily seen as promoting literacy but the high stakes testing environment places more emphasis on grammar and mechanics than content. While great teachers know that teaching to the test is counter productive not all teachers are great. The result is the average teacher and the average school teaching to the test which means more time on grammar and mechanics and less time on the aspects of reading that provide motivation for students to learn. The arts provide this motivation whether it is in literature, creative writing, drawing and painting, music, or computer programming (which many programmers do consider an art form). To become literate you have to know how to read and how to write. To learn how to read you have to have something you find worthwhile to write about and to learn to write you have to have something personally meaningful to write about. Art provides this. List some forms of writing that don’t rely on art in some sense either for it’s production or its consumption. I am sure I can either find some way that form of writing relies on art or I debunk it as being either ineffective or inappropriate for motivating students to learn how to read.

This aside, doesn’t eve take into account the calls from business and industry for a creative class of workers as famously described by Daniel Pink.

Dan, I believe Dean was simply paraphrasing Rhee when he wrote “shape up and stop focusing on creativity”.

The main presumption that bothers me about all these discussions is the assumption teaching is a zero-sum game. (I don’t know if Rhee assumes this, her comment could be read either way.) Lifting the standards in one area does not automatically reduce the standards in another. Creativity and rigor augment each other.

If all your students did in geometry all year was fold origami, then you are doing something wrong.

If all you did during the year was drill to the test, then you are doing something wrong.

Neither teacher should be praised nor accepted.

I don’t think “greatness” is required to get past either condition, just professionalism.

(I incidentally also agree reading tests are a distortion of what should go on in an English class; with Math I don’t have as much a problem. I believe this is a problem with the tests rather than the very notion of assessment, however.)

Boy, we opened up a can a worms with arts vs. literacty thing.

On another note, it would be lovely to have a debate such as this on the purpose of education. See, I am a broken record!

Debating the merits of “arts” vs. “literacy” assumes that arts and literacy are on the same level, so to speak. This – not the statement that literacy is more important, or that art is more important – is what irks me.

The danger of Rhee’s position is that it values literacy and numeracy as an end for education. That’s all we do. Read, write, arithmetic. That’s our goal, and that’s what we’ll measure.

But they aren’t goals in their own right. Literacy is valuable insofar as it is applied to a further goal – for example the arts. It could also be applied to business, to politics, to publishing, to sports. It’s a skill that provides a means to an end.

Without this purpose, why learn to read and write? Is there some intrinsic value in being able to put pen to paper? Should I spend my formative years in school so that I can sit alone and add numbers in my head?

I don’t think so.

There’s no sense, then, in teaching and testing the skill isolated from its purpose. Assess a student based on how he can apply those skills in an authentic way. Portfolio assessments could be much more rigorous and meaningful than a standardized test.

There should be no direct competition between arts and literacy. The competition should be between arts, sciences, politics, what have you. The competition should be between the ends – the goals towards which the students are working.

Carl Anderson says:
December 2nd, 2008 at 8:24 am
If it were not for the arts what would we read or write about

How about science- the marriage and application of reading, writing, AND math?

The Time article about Michelle Rhee didn’t say to me “oh she hates art and wants us to drill math facts all day”. I much more took away the impression that – argue all you like about the nature of the assessments – but she’s going to decide whether or not her teachers are getting the job done. And if the kids can’t read, that definitely means they are not. I thought she was talking about the value of “creativity and love of learning” as qualities of teachers, not students.

(I don’t happen to agree with her solution – “fire em all and let God sort em out”, or something along those lines, and replace them with some *hand waving* maaaaagical pool of more effective teachers. The Time article actually used the phrase “scorched earth”. I think that’s a cop out for the hard and necessary work that needs to be done fixing the horrific state of inservice professional development.)

@Dan
“[A]rt, as it is defined by our schools, is not a wide-reaching multi-disciplinary study.”
Huh? By far the most widely employed type of art program in our schools is Harry Broady’s “Discipline Based Art Education (DBAE).” DBAE by definition is interdisciplinary. Your statement, “It is, for example, an hour of organized band practice daily, which makes it very easy for a school to determine the return on its investment,” is troublesome to me because it does not reflect the philosophy put forth by the National Association of Art Educators nor employed in most of our nation’s schools. Your description sounds more like what is done in art class is the teacher simply giving the kids paper and crayons and saying “have at it.” This view is why so many arts programs are constantly cut from our schools. This view also directly addresses what Michelle Rhee means when she links creativity and “touchy-feely” in such a disdainful way. I see no straw man here. No one here is disputing the importance of literacy. On that point I think we all agree. It is the value of arts programs in our schools that is at issue here. When I say that literacy and the arts are interdependent and therefore equally important it does not dispute the importance of literacy. To illustrate my point another way, when I was in school the reason I woke up every morning and went was I looked forward to going to art, band, and creative writing classes. These classes added value to my life and provided me with motivation to learn in other subjects as well. Had they not existed I probably would have dropped out. Sure I would have been physically present due to parental influence but I would be physically present but absent. When we cut from our schools that which adds value to our student’s lives we see more and more students present but absent and it shows in our test scores. So yes, art is just as important as reading.

I’m a science teacher in East San Jose. Our state rank and similar schools rank was a 3 out of 10 I believe. So yes, low achieving school.

But I am one of those Ken Robinson types who also believes that we’ve wrongly created a hierarchy of subjects. As posters have said, the problem comes when you think of math as multiplication, art as crayons and paper, or PE as running around throwing balls.

Can we just read about art and call it a day?

Dan — What if the tests don’t measure what we think they do? There’s starting to be more and more data that suggests that these tests are not measuring competency the way people think they are. Daniel Koretz’s work and Richard Rothstein’s work both suggest that our current methodology of standardized testing isn’t measuring learning. I don’t care that Canada is blaming business, but what I do care is that Canada’s test scores have plateaued, but he’s still doing amazing work for kids, and he’s starting to have more and more trouble justifying it. Even you… why were the test scores your kids got on the state test a better judge of how well the students learned Geometry than what you saw, day in and day out, with your own eyes?

One of my biggest issues with Michelle Rhee and Katy Haycock is that they seem so convinced that they are right that there is no space for debate or discussion. What if they are wrong? What if we learn that standardized test scores don’t tell us what we think? What if we are doing damage? Or what if testing measures / prioritizes one kind of intelligence or education over another? I worry all the time… I question all the time… where is the notion that education answers aren’t easy, aren’t cut and dried? Where is the humility that we just might not have all the answers?

@MrTeach

A conflict of interest? The work of Willam and Black, Stiggins, et al clearly and I mean clearly, states that classroom assessment, not standardized testing is the most powerful impact on student learning.

Teachers who do this well know exactly where there kids are at using a variety of assessment methods, providing feedback loops and opportunities to learn.

I’m not suggesting that some teachers in our current system might show bias, but if the powers that be really knew the research they’d be working towards supporting teachers to be effective assessors of student work.

I think most good teachers would be insulted to think some test written by some outsider will do a better job of measuring student learning than they would. That’s how I would feel.

Dean,

The standardized tests are not designed to “impact learning.” They are designed to measure the extent of it. Of course classroom assessments have a more powerful and direct role in driving future instruction.

Chris,

What if the tests don’t…? But they do. And the Rothsteins of the world tell us to improve teaching and learning, but only after we give every kid glasses, only after we make sure every kid from a single parent family has a mentor, only after we create sustainable community-based nutrition centers in every centrally located urban school, only after we’ve mediated the disastrous effects of cronyism-capitalism, only after, only after, only after. I’m unwilling to wait. And I’m unwilling, too, to shy away from the fact that the single greatest lever we have to remedy the debilitating effects of poverty that Rothstein wrings his hands over is, simply, a better education for those most impacted by poverty.

Carl,

Your model of arts across content areas is admirable, just, and ideal. I don’t know which schools you referred to when you said “our schools,” but to claim that the DABE model is how art is done, systematically, in schools, rather than the 45-minutes of bassoon model that Dan outlined is patently absurd. Especially in the low-income urban schools Dan orginally focused this post on.

The argument isn’t about whether or not kids should be exposed to the arts in all their forms — they should. The argument isn’t about whether there should be pre-existing hierarchies of knowledge — there shouldn’t, so long as we acknowledge the absurdity of putting lipstick on an illiterate pig. This is about what do we do with limited resources, limited time, and kids who don’t read well or do math well. I don’t think they should be building canoes, at least not until well after 3 o’clock, and the creeping paternalism that suggests we should offer them different content, rather than offer content differently frankly turns my stomach.

Hi Tom,

I haven’t read Koretz, so I have no critique. I have read “Class and Schools” and every single page, not to mention the folks who carry its water, is essentially what I attributed to Rothstein above. Rothstein claims we cannot close the racial achievement gap solely by improving the functioning of districts and schools, a silly argument I fundamentally reject, and one that is disproven by countless schools and teachers across the country.

I taught at a school that quadrupled proficiency rates in both ELA and Math during a three-year time period where there were no art classes.

Rothstein DOES NOT say “only after…” should we improve schools, he argues that schools alone will not on the whole close the achievement gap. That is not an argument against school reform.

The SATs and PSATs measure test-taking ability almost exclusively. Their roots as tests designed to prove the superiority of well-off WASP males still show fairly often. But hopefully the state tests that measure proficiency for NCLB purposes do not show those biases.

I certainly don’t think it’s impossible to design standardized tests that measure the reasoning and basic skills we want all of our students to have before they go out and attempt to get a job and not get scammed too often. I definitely don’t think that finding out that your students got a question wrong because they didn’t know that “upstream” meant “against the current” (as my honors students recently did) means we ought to toss out the tests and suggest that schools can be doing their jobs when students leave middle school unable to read or multiply single digit numbers.

That said, why is teaching your students to break down a problem into smaller steps and then use the results to pick an answer from choices such a horrible thing? If they freeze when they see a complex problem, how are they going to handle simple physics problems much less politics?

Stop the assumption that reading and writing and math are the most important things everyone needs to learn. Anyone who suggests reading is more important than art scares me.

This I think depends on what institution we are thinking about. Many forms of art, like dance, music, painting, sculpture, can be accessed and enjoyed by anyone with a working brain and the relevant sensory organs. Perhaps we enjoy them more greatly if properly taught, but we can appreciate them, and it is quite possible to acquire an informal education of considerable scope in these areas. But literature and mathematics are forms of art that require, for most of us, some formal teaching to be able to appreciate. So from a school’s point of view, where they can really make the difference is in teaching reading and mathematics. And of course those skills are valuable in a practical sense too.

There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not?

Several reasons come to mind:
– children learn to dance outside the classroom far more often than they learn to do mathematics. Therefore if a child isn’t exposed to mathematics in the classroom you are far more likely to be limiting their future appreciation of the arts.
– mathematics is a skill that opens doorways to a great many subjects. I have had friends who have had to drop out of their desired courses at university because they didn’t have the necessary mathematical background. Children often change their minds about what they want to do as an adult, it is the role of schools to open as many doors for their students as possible.
– mathematics is useful if you expect your children, as adults, will have something to do with money.

I don’t deny the value of teaching children dance. But I think it is secondary in importance to teaching mathematics for those reasons.

These are teacher that in addition to experts in pedagogy and content, understand how to design customized learning and have the resources to find out who is best able to help every student. Fire those that can’t or won’t figure this out.

I don’t like this, this is very harsh. Why not get your good teachers to provide the resources necessary for the not-so-good teachers? Can we really find enough teachers who are experts in pedagogy and content and understand how to design customised learning to fill every single classroom in the country? I have my doubts – the number of people who have those range of skills is limited, and some of them are likely to be just uninterested in teaching.

Yes, schooling is compulsory but where that schooling occurs is not limited to our public schools. Families have choices. Charter schools, online schools, other public schools through open enrollment, and homeschooling are all options available to most families.

As for separating reading and math from the arts, I do believe that all of these subjects are tightly linked and interdependent but our school system has erected concrete boundaries around these subjects through devices such as scheduling and teacher licensing. To a certain degree you have to work with the environment and conditions you are presented with. If this is the game we are playing I will continue to fight for the arts.