While serving at the National Endowment for the Arts, I spent many months working on arts education policy. While one had to admire the dedication and spirit of people scrambling to deliver the arts to young Americans, I soon concluded that their efforts to persuade funders and politicians to support arts education misplaced the emphasis.

Academic discipline or instrument of personal change?

Review of The Lottery (2010), Directed by Madeleine Sackler

There is an interesting development at Beverly High School in Beverly, Massachusetts, north of Boston. Parents have been informed that every student must use an Apple MacBook in his and her work.

In the current issue of Education Next appears a summary by Robert Pondiscio of the philosophy and practice of Edutopia. Edutopia presents its pedagogy as cutting-edge and innovative, and its motto suggests a hard focus on evidence and feedback and outcomes. Within the article, though, appears a statement by the former executive director of the George Lucas Educational Foundation, Milton Chen, that sounds more like an a priori principle than an idea derived from experience: School life should resemble real life.

A few years ago I interviewed a professor of education about the training of arts teachers. She was enthusiastic about what her school was accomplishing, citing in particular its focus on social issues in the classroom. I asked her about what she does in the classroom, and she volunteered an interesting trend. The students resist her instruction, she admitted, but over the course of the semester they come around and recognize how important these lessons in social justice really are. For her, the pattern was a sign of how much the students learned, how much their awareness had broadened from Day One to the end of the semester.

The latest version of the "Core Standards Initiative for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies & Science" bears the phrase, “Through wide and deep reading of literature and literary nonfiction of steadily increasing sophistication, students gain a reservoir of literary and cultural knowledge, references, and images.” This is precisely the kind of acknowledgment of cultural literacy that education conservatives and curricular traditionalists of various kinds have been advocating for more than two decades. Still, I think, another step needs to take place in the next round of revisions.

Employers shouldn’t expect colleges to instill the writing skills employees need. The duty falls on high schools whether they like it or not and whether it is fair or not.

A story last week in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that fully 191 schools in the state of Georgia, 10 percent of the total number of elementary and middle schools, are up for investigation for altering test answer sheets. The next day's story put the count at one in five Georgia public schools.

As administrators struggle to engage wayward teenagers and make learning meaningful after hours, one can imagine a school turning an unused plot of grass on the grounds into a working garden. Some students could cultivate crops while others head to football and band practice. Getting a few credits for the work wouldn’t interfere with calculus and U.S. history, either, and it might improve attitudes toward school in general. That isn’t what happened at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, CA, though.