Educational Reform — A Quick Glance

sidebar to Artists and Teachers Partner for School Reform
(This story appeared in High Performance #71, Spring 1996.)

Educational reform is probably one of the longest ongoing projects in human history, but there has been a serious bout of heavy weather in American education since the early '80s when a blizzard of government reports and foundation studies swept through the country, declaring a state of emergency in our schools. Prominent and influential was A Nation at Risk in April 1983, a cry of despair from the theoreticians and practicing educators of the National Commission on Excellence in Education. The Commission prepared its report at the behest of the Reagan Administration, which was concerned about "the widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system."

The Commission was indeed alarmed, but mostly about power. The very first sentences of the report were: "Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world," and all because "the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and people." The Commission had recommendations on content (delineating curriculum reform), standards and expectations (making them higher, measurable and more rigorous), time (longer school days and years, and more time for the New Basics) and teaching (higher standards, more pay, 11-month contracts, career ladders, employment of outside experts in science and math, incentives, and program design by master teachers).

President Bush and the nation's governors held an education summit in 1989 and the government began literally laying down the law about academic standards and testing. In a kind of War on Academic Failure, in 1990 (GOALS 2000, under Bush) and 1994 (the Educate America Act, under Clinton) Congress voted into law a roster of National Education Goals for revitalizing America's schools. Here they are in brief:

National Education Goals

By the year 2000:

• All children in America will start school ready to learn.
• The high school graduation rate will increase to at least 90 percent.
• All students will leave grades 4, 8, and 12 having demonstrated competency over challenging subject matter including English, mathematics, science, foreign languages, civics and government, economics, the arts, history, and geography, and every school in America will ensure that all students learn to use their minds well, so they may be prepared for responsible citizenship, further learning, and productive employment in our Nation's modern economy.
• United States students will be first in the world in mathematics and science achievement.
• Every adult American will be literate and will possess the knowledge and skills necessary to compete in a global economy and exercise the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.
• Every school in the United States will be free of drugs, violence, and the unauthorized presence of firearms and alcohol and will offer a disciplined environment conducive to learning.
• The Nation's teaching force will have access to programs for the continued improvement of their professional skills and the opportunity to acquire the knowledge and skills needed to instruct and prepare all American students for the next century.
• Every school will promote partnerships that will increase parental involvement and participation in promoting the social, emotional, and academic growth of children.

Naturally this mandate opened the floodgates on bureaucracy and federal funding. We now have, to name only a few new bureaus, a National Education Goals Panel, A National Education Standards and Improvement Council, a National Skills Board, an Office of Education Research and Improvement, an Office of Education Technology, Parental Assistance centers, grants for state and local systemic improvement and education research, and special authority to the Secretary of Education to waive federal regulations that impede reforms. Seed money to support state and local reforms aimed at "developing challenging standards for all students" has risen from $105 million in 1994 to a proposed $750 million in 1996.

Foundations jumped aboard with funding for all sorts of creative and experimental projects both inside and outside of academia. For the last 15 years projects have been underway at most of the major universities delving into and launching massive studies on how children learn, how teachers teach and how schools operate. Groundbreaking work was put forth by theoreticians such as Howard Gardner, John Goodlad, Gerald Grant, Robert Hampel, Sarah Gordon Lightfoot, Seymour Sarason, James Comer and Theodore Sizer, to name only a few. Some of the more visible projects are Project Zero, the A+ program, Project Spectrum and the Coalition of Essential Schools.

Thinkers, practitioners and politicians are at it hammer and tongs over such topics as learning measurement, tracking of students, standardized testing, educational equity, multiple intelligences, the role of state and federal government, school-based management and, most controversial of all, "world-class standards."

As in the case of all government-driven initiatives, critics of this agenda of educational reform abound on the right and left. The Left objects to the amount of money being sucked up by administrators and theoreticians for the creation of bureaucratic jobs, guidelines and statistical studies, compared to what they view as relatively few actual dollars filtering to real reform in the classroom.

Meanwhile ultra-conservative Republican Presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan in his stump speech proposed gutting GOALS 2000 and demolishing the entire Department of Education. He accuses federal bureaucrats of trying to foster a liberal agenda and force ideology into public education. He is particularly critical of the GOALS 2000 offer of millions of dollars to states to develop academic standards, and joins former National Endowment of the Humanities Chair Lynne Cheney in condemning the infamous National History Standards, developed at UCLA, in which, says Cheney "race, ethnicity and gender received three times as much emphasis as political freedom." Somehow a movement initiated by a hawkish Reagan-era Commission to protect our global supremacy got highjacked by "people in the '60s generation with an elitist attitude," says Buchanan. "This whole thing is embryonic, but just think what it could grow into." A bipartisan struggle over education is now at the center of the budget battle in Washington.

Reform at the State Level

Massachusetts, already moving in a progressive direction, got aboard the change train in 1993 with the Education Reform Act, "establishing challenging curriculum standards for students and expanding the site-based autonomy with which educators and community members can create challenging learning environments for students." While the state's Department of Education admits the majority of the Act's impact will take a decade or longer to be fully felt in Massachusetts, it boasts of a number of accomplishments in Year One.

Among them was the fact that more than 15,000 citizens participated in developing the Massachusetts Common Core of Learning, outlining what all students should know and be able to do upon graduation. These standards will become a graduation requirement beginning with the Class of 1999.

The Core, whose guidelines form a massive piece of writing about educational reform, includes the arts. The Art Curriculum Framework, which alone runs to 75 pages, lays down a Core Concept, Guiding Principles and Habits of Mind for the arts. All are based on the precept that the creative experience is essential for all learners and develops each learner's capacity to make meaning from experience, respond to creativity and contribute to society.

Massachusetts schools are using all this guidance to create arts programs in the schools and finding ways to pay for them within this reformed framework. In addition to in-school arts curricula, there are smaller projects being created in individual schools by teachers and professional artists and community partners working together, creatively but meagerly funded. Some of the most fruitful are those designed by people who want to make a difference in the towns where they live and are willing to commit long-term partnerships.

—Linda Frye Burnham

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Original CAN/API publication: December 1999