March 2008: Education Updates
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Political Landscape section is a collection of news items, updates, and essays on policy issues, state and federal legislation, academic standards, testing issues, the politics of funding, and other issues.
STEM Network Launched
On January 30, 2008, state leaders joined with Battelle (Carl Kohrt CEO) and its partners to launch the Ohio STEM Learning Network to promote student learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in Ohio. The Ohio General Assembly included in the biennial budget (HB119) funds to support STEM schools and STEM programs of excellence in Ohio. The STEM Subcommittee of the Partnership for Continued Learning selected schools and programs in mid-February 2008 to receive funding. Battelle has been selected to provide support for these STEM schools and programs, and recently received $12 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support STEM initiatives. The Ohio STEM Learning Network is available at http://www.osln.org/.
Post-Secondary Enrollment Options
House Education Testimony: Chair of the House Education Committee, Representative Arleen Setzer, presented sponsor testimony on HB 424 before the committee on January 29, 2008. HB 424 makes several changes in law regarding Post-Secondary Enrollment Options (PSEO), dual enrollment programs, and eliminates the performance index score as a factor in school district and building performance ratings. According to an analysis of the bill, SB424 does the following:
- States that the purpose of PSEO is “to provide post-secondary education opportunities, including career-technical and skills development courses, for secondary grade students who are ready to do college-level work and to help secondary grade students transition to college or the work force.”
- Requires that high schools determine the amount of high school credit to award for a college course by examining the course syllabus or instructional materials or both. The amount of high school credit must be “based on the level of difficulty and depth of and breadth of the course content, rather than on the amount of hours of classroom instruction included in the course.”
- Provides that the student’s high school must include in the student’s record the grade achieved in the college course and must use that grade in computing not only the student’s cumulative grade point average but also any weighted grade point average or class rank maintained for the student.
- Defines an accelerated learning program as one that “enables a student to complete coursework while enrolled in high school for which the student earns high school credit and also may earn credit toward a degree from an institution of higher education upon the student’s matriculation at that institution.” Advanced Placement courses and International Baccalaureate programs would qualify as accelerated learning.
- Eliminates the performance index score as a factor in the school district and building performance ratings, and replaces it with the newly developed value-added progress dimension, which tracks the amount of a student’s academic growth attributable to a district or building.
Why Arts Education Matters
Why Arts Education Matters, a commentary in the January 29, 2008 online version of Education Week by Stephanie Perrin, urges policy makers to recognize how an education in the arts helps students to become creative, innovative, imaginative, and more competitive in the global economy. (See the archived Principal’s Office article, “School Leadership for Arts Integration Education.”)
According to Ms. Perrin, “As the country contemplates reauthorization of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, political and policy leaders must recognize that an education in and through the arts, as a central part of a total school program, allows schools to better address these challenges than a curriculum that defines success as aptitude in literacy and math only.” She goes on to describe five challenges that demonstrate why learning in and through the arts will better equip students to thrive in this new century. The five challenges are included below. The full article is available to subscribers.
The Five Challenges
- America continues to face declining social engagement and a culture of division. Arts education develops in students a capacity for empathy and collaborative work. The culture of schools where the arts are part of the core curriculum is engaging and positive. In such schools, one finds self-motivated students, greater parental involvement, intensified student and teacher engagement, strengthened collegiate aspirations, and respect for cultural differences.
- One of the greatest public-health issues in America, it could be argued, is the failure of the education system to provide direction and purpose to young people, particularly adolescents. This results in apathy at best and, at worst, youth violence. Intensive engagement in the arts actively supports the psychological, physical, and social development of preadolescent and adolescent students. Because training in the arts often engages the whole child, it is also effective in schools with student populations that have a wide variety of learning styles, experiences, and backgrounds. It has been shown, for example, to reduce the incidence of such problems as apathy and aggression among students in urban settings.
- The impact of the ‘globalization’ of culture and commerce in an increasingly interdependent world is not yet being adequately addressed by American educators. Because the arts share a global language and a common culture of training and production, they can provide a ready pathway for global communication. The arts are a universal language, one that bridges cultures and articulates the highest aspirations of humankind.
- America is in danger of losing its competitive advantage to emerging nations that increasingly use arts education as a learning tool to help nurture an innovative and flexible workforce. The study of the arts promotes the development of such skills and capacities as risk-taking and creative thinking, which are important to success in a globally competitive marketplace. Most American high schools, though, still employ an educational model designed for a 19th-century industrial economy, limiting learning to discrete disciplines and focusing on the coverage of content, rather than the development of broader skills and understandings that apply to many contexts.
- The crisis of this American century is not material or intellectual, but spiritual. Unlike traditional academic disciplines, arts education can support an outcome greater than personal success, cultural advancement, or economic influence. The study of the arts asks young people to consider the meaning, both personal and communal, of the work in which they are engaged. Students working in the arts are by definition connected with their culture. The arts traditionally express and test the highest values of any culture, and are a response to people's longing for connection to a narrative greater than their own personal stories.
To read the state budget report, visit http://www.cbpp.org/1-15-08sfp.htm.
