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.

Carl:

When the students leave who depend on Rhee’s “touchy feely” courses for motivation your test scores will go up because you are left with those students who find intrinsic motivation in Math and Reading without the arts.

I thought schooling was compulsory in the USA up to high school level? So she has somehow got around the compulsary attendance rules?

As for Rhee’s description of creativity, from my reading, it sounds like not that she devalues creativity entirely, but that she doesn’t believe that creativity should be acceptable as an excuse for bad test scores in reading and maths.

By the way, why do you separate reading and maths from the arts?

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.

The problem with Rhee’s description of “Touchy Feely” teachers is she links “touchy feely” with creativity and thus undervalues it’s importance. When that happens in our schools, programs that add value and support the work you do are cut. When those programs are cut students leave. When the students leave who depend on Rhee’s “touchy feely” courses for motivation your test scores will go up because you are left with those students who find intrinsic motivation in Math and Reading without the arts. Typically those students already have academic advantages (no disabilities, strong parental support, enough food eat, etc.). Then Rhee can claim she rose test scores but how many children did she leave behind in the process. Perhaps a better prop than the broom on the cover of Time would have been a flute.

Now, there are many things about Rhee I applaud. I strongly admire her focus first on the students. I agree with her that the tenure system is a major hindrance to school reform and progress. I agree that teachers should be paid according to their performance. I agree that ineffective teachers should be let go. I agree that charter schools and school choice are good for our profession. I agree that school boards by nature prevent swift reform. I agree that teachers and administrators need to be held accountable. I see no acceptable system for measuring accountability though. I also strongly disagree with her categorization of creativity.

What you have, here, are ed-technologists whose learning modality comprises a rabbit’s warren of links, which they follow one-to-the-next, cataloging them in Delicious, blogging them, tweeting them, Skyping them among colleagues, with an electric charge building all the while. This is fantastic, and addicting, and I know this personally, but I can see clearly the high-level literacy this kind of learning requires and the particular disciplines to which this kind learning lends itself best.

Tools and modalities which thrill the bloggers I read are a difficult fit in illiterate classrooms.

Then these same people fail to account for their own biases and demonize classes where that high-level electric charge transfers more subtly, where students and teacher achieve meaningful, challenging, rigorous goals toward conceptual and procedural fluency, where rich media drives challenging practice sets. Dare to measure those goals at a statewide level, dare push a test with bubbles in front of these kids, and these bloggers concoct stories of children vomiting on tear-stained scantrons, coining all sorts of frustrating, counterproductive maxims and catchphrases, and, yeah, even though Rhee’s unilateral governance turns me off, I get where she’s coming from when she talks about “touchy-feely” educators not really getting it.

The rhetoric needs to accommodate many more gray values, yes, but it needs to get more pragmatic, and less romantic, also.

Shannon, I may seem like I’m contradicting myself here but while I recognize how important it is that my math instruction comprise media and art, I recognize that the priority of my limited time has to be the math.

My mind keeps coming back to the fact that dyslexics are overrepresented in prisons, but also as self-made millionaries and small business owners.

One of my problems with the elevation of math/reading/writing is that we tell the kids there’s something wrong with them, take them out of the classes they care about (like art, or drama, or shop or in my area, you take 3 periods of language arts, 2 periods of math, and 1 period of PE) when clearly they can still be successful in life.

This is just a long way of saying that our schools are built around a narrow range of intelligence, but life isn’t.

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?

And Tom’s distinction about Rothstein’s argument above is key. To ignore it (or Rothstein’s argument) is stubbornly unhelpful and will ultimately lead to harming more students than you help.