Two Sales to Benefit Mt. Hope Learning Center

Two upcoming events will benefit the Mount Hope Learning Center.

TONIGHT: OOP’s Downtown Store at 220 Westminster will donate 15% of all sales made between 5:00 and 7:00 p.m. to the Learning Center and the George Wiley Center. Here’s a flyer describing the event.

Saturday, May 10, there will be a Plant and Bake and Yard Sale at the Learning Center, 140 Cypress Street, from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Here’s a flyer describing the event.

Tomorrow: Meeting on Bishop Construction Plans

Public Meeting
to review final architectural & construction plans for the
New Nathan Bishop
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008
7 p.m. at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School, 35 Camp St.

Two years after the closing of Nathan Bishop Middle School was announced, renovation work is about to begin to create the new Nathan Bishop! We expect the construction contract to be awarded by May 1, and work to begin immediately thereafter.

At our request, and with the assistance of Councilman Cliff Wood, the City of Providence has invited the project architects, Architectural Involutions (AI3), to present their final plans to the community. We expect them to be joined by the the project manager and a representative from the company that is awarded the contract.

There will be an opportunity to ask questions about both the design and the construction plans & timetable.

We had hoped to hold the meeting at Bishop itself, but it now appears that work will already have begun and that space won’t be available. We have confirmed the availability of the King school, but are awaiting final confirmation that this location will be suitable for the presentation. Watch for updates here.

Please save the date, and join us on May 7th

We are planning a second public meeting, mostly likely in June, on progress in planning the academic program and school leadership & governance at Bishop.

Education Committee to Meet

UPDATE: The meeting start time has been moved back to 6:00 p.m.

City Council’s Education Committee

Monday, May 5th
5:30 6:00pm
City Hall, 3rd Floor

School Board members and Providence Public School officers will present information and answer questions about next year’s budget. If you missed last week’s presentation at Central High School, this is a good opportunity to become informed about the budget situation.

For more information, contact the Committee Chair, Councilman Cliff Wood at cliffwood06@cox.net
Note: you can read more about the budget here.

M.L.King’s Lazzareschi is Principal of the Year

Jill Davidson, Dr. M.L. King Jr. Elementary School PTO President and ESPEC Steering Committee member, has sent word that King’s principal, Michael Lazzareschi, has been named Rhode Island Elementary Principal of the Year by the Rhode Island Association of School Principals.

Congratulations Mr. Lazzareschi!

The King PTO will have a celebration as part of its May 21 meeting (at 6:00 p.m.)

The photo of Mr. Lazzareschi at right is from a ProJo article about the groundbreaking at King’s new garden.

School Board Budget Presentation

Last night I attended the Providence School Board’s budget presentation, about which subscribers to the ESPEC email list were informed in an email. Mark Dunham, the PPSD chief financial officer gave a formal presentation of the budget figures. This was followed by a Q&A session, with questions coming first from School Board members, and then from the public. I had to leave before the public Q&A to attend another meeting.

Linda Borg has a story on the meeting in today’s Providence Journal.

You can see Mr. Dunham’s presentation here. (PDF version of a Powerpoint presentation).

Here are some of the items that struck me as most significant:

• The total budget request is $382.6M. This is a $8.6M (2.7%) increase over last year. Nearly 3/4 of the increase is accounted for by health insurance costs ($3.6M) pensions ($1.8M), salaries ($600K)
• Of the $382.6M, $323M comes from “local sources” (city and state funds). Of the $323M, $199M comes from the state and the remainder from the city.
• The state’s share of the budget has been shrinking over recent years, from 63.5% in 2003 to 59% in 2009.
• Projective revenues (given no state increase over last year) are $313.2M. Thus, the District faces a $9.7M shortfall.
• PPSD has cut $25M (300 positions) in the last 5 years. Independent studies show that Providence is an efficient district.
• 98% of the budget is fixed costs, only 2% is discretionary. The only solution, absent a funding increase, is to continue to cut programs and services.
• 80% of Providence students are in free/reduced lunch programs, which is far higher than other districts. In fact, 37.4% of the states’ free/reduced lunch students live in Providence. Costs for these students are estimated to be 40% higher than for other students
• Nonetheless, Providence’s per-pupil spending of $13,782 is right about at the state average ($13,660).
• Providence teacher salaries are 2.8% higher than the state average.

• The School Board will vote on the budget on April 28th, and the Mayor will submit his budget to the City Council on May 1. The Council will hold budget hearings in May and June, with a July 1 deadline for passage of the budget.

The situation described above is clearly dire. What can be done? Obviously, advocating for adequate funding in the City Council is a logical next step, though it’s unclear that the City can raise the funds. Several groups, including ESPEC, have advocated before the state legislature for more state funding. Despite those efforts, the General Assembly last year killed a 3% increase proposed by the Governor. Regrettably, members of the Providence delegation, including East Side representatives voted against the increase, despite the dramatic negative effects on Providence. Given the current state budget crunch, things don’t look better in the G.A. for this year. One possible ray of hope lies in a bill, THE EDUCATION EQUITY AND PROPERTY TAX RELIEF ACT (S-2650) introduced by Senators Gallo and Perry. The bill would create a funding formula based on student need and community wealth. Given Providence’s high number of students in poverty, this would be highly beneficial to our City, but it would also improve the situation for a large number of other communities. More on this later.

Sam Zurier on Bumping in East Side Monthly

As readers here know, Sam Zurier, a member of the ESPEC Steering Committee (who drafted the anti-bumping legislation discussed in the ProJo story below) writes an education column for the East Side Monthly. Appropriately, this month’s column is on bumping:

Solving the Bumping Problem
By Sam Zurier

After taking over a community meeting for East Side elected officials last October, the subject of teacher “bumping” has generated much discussion at different levels. Cliff Wood, one of the forum participants, convened a meeting of the Providence City Council’s Education Committee to gather information on the subject. Recently, the East Side Public Education Coalition (ESPEC) accepted an invitation from Rhode Island House Majority Leader Gordon Fox to provide a draft of proposed legislation for him to review and submit to the General Assembly.

ESPEC’s draft bill, which was filed as Bill S-2620 by Senator Rhoda Perry, can be viewed online at www.rilin.state.ri.us/billtext08/senatetext08/s2620.pdf. Because ESPEC lacks professional expertise in this policy area, its proposal adopted language that appears in the current Massachusetts law. Massachusetts public schools have improved greatly since the enactment of the 1993 education reform law, which was enacted after a court ruled that the state’s education program failed to meet Constitutional requirements. While Massachusetts and Rhode Island offered comparable programs in 1993, over the last 15 years, the Bay State has improved at a much faster rate than the Ocean State.

While Massachusetts has not solved the bumping problem entirely, the 1993 reforms included several initiatives that reduce the problem significantly. The 1993 law instituted a systematic program of teacher evaluation, consisting of a set of baseline standards developed by the state, with the opportunity for local districts to supplement. The 1993 law instituted certain “site based management” reforms, under which principals are authorized to evaluate teachers and to remove them for failing to meet performance standards. Finally, the 1993 law removed the requirement of seniority-based terminations for layoffs. These three initiatives provide the basic structure of the ESPEC proposal.

Were the ESPEC proposal to become law in Rhode Island, teacher performance could become a new standard for comparing teachers when making personnel decisions. Teachers at Hope High School have accepted the concept of “peer based” evaluation, but Providence lacks any district-wide policies or standards to evaluate teachers. The same is true for the majority of other districts in the State. ESPEC has not researched how performance evaluations have fared in Massachusetts, although the Commonwealth’s overall increases in student achievement suggest a beneficial result.

Bumping at the State House

Note: It’s been a busy week and I’ve not posted much. Ironically, the things I should be posting about are the things that have kept me from posting. Today is catch-up, beginning with a Wednesday 4/2 ProJo article about “anti-bumping” legislation that got a hearing that afternoon. I’ll follow up with some notes on the hearing itself.

Parents’ group takes teacher bumping issue to the Statehouse
08:17 AM EDT on Wednesday, April 2, 2008
By Linda Borg, Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE — Legislation that would make it impossible for school districts to lay off teachers purely on the basis of seniority was expected to be heard before the Senate Committee on Education this afternoon.

The proposal was written by members of the East Side Public Education Coalition, a parents’ group, and is being sponsored by Sen. Rhoda E. Perry, D-Providence. Sam Zurier, a lawyer and member of the East Side coalition, said his group decided to take on the issue of bumping after it became a topic of concern at a summer education forum at the Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School.

At a meeting with Supt. Donnie Evans in early February, teachers sounded off about bumping, the process by which teachers with more seniority displace those with less. In one case, three teachers were hired on the same date. In a process called a tie-breaker, each teacher was assigned a number and the number that was plucked from the mix won the job.

Other teachers described their frustration at not knowing whether they will return to the same school or the same classroom from one year to the next. Because of the budget crisis this year, even senior teachers are losing their classrooms. In some smaller schools, it isn’t unusual for the principal to lose a third of the staff, which makes it difficult to build a shared culture.

Senate Education Committee Hearing on “Bumping”

Summary: Legislation designed to keep our best teachers in the classroom by ending seniority-based “bumping” will receive a hearing before the Senate Education Committee at the State House this Wednesday, April 2 at 4:30 pm. We are looking for supporters to attend this meeting, and for people who have direct experience with bumping to testify. See below for details.

Our public meeting at King Elementary last October produced a spontaneous and vigorous outcry from many of you against “bumping”, the process by which senior teachers displace junior teachers, with no consideration being given to teacher quality or the needs of the students in the classroom.

At that meeting, Senator Rhoda Perry and House Majority Leader Gordon Fox both offered to introduce legislation to eliminate bumping. The ESPEC steering committee submitted a bill to each of them. The bill, which is patterned after current Massachusetts law, has the following goals:

1. Eliminate the provision of state law requiring that all layoffs must be done in reverse order of seniority. Under the bill, seniority could remain a criterion under negotiated contracts, but contracts could specify that merit be among the considerations.

2. Require that each district evaluate teachers, principals and administrators according to standards developed by the RI Department of Education, which may be supplemented by standards developed by district school committees. Currently, Rhode Island is one of a handful of states which do not, by state law, establish teacher evaluation requirements.

3. Allow principals to demote or dismiss teachers, subject to review by the superintendent of the district. The bill lays out the criteria for dismissal including the failure to meet performance standards, and preserves rights of appeal to the Commissioner of Education.

Senator Perry has introduced the bill in the Senate. The full text of the bill can be found here. We learned this weekend that Senate Education Committee is scheduled to take up the bill in a hearing beginning at 4:30 pm on Wednesday, April 2nd.

ESPEC steering committee members plan to attend the hearing and testify in support of the bill. We also have a few parents lined up who will speak about their experiences with excellent teachers being lost to bumping, but we are hoping to find a few more who can do the same. If you are interested in doing so, please email me.

Those who do not wish to testify, but would like to turn out to show support for this legislation, should meet in front of the library on the second floor of the State House at 4:15 on Wednesday. You should know that these hearings sometimes run for several hours, and we are not yet sure where on the agenda this bill will be placed.

Majority Leader Fox also submitted a bill to the House last week, but it is considerably different from the model we submitted. We are studying the bill and hope to discuss it with Leader Fox soon. We are not aware that any hearings have been scheduled on this bill.

New Superintendent Hired

UPDATE: Here’s the press release from Mayor Cicilline’s office announcing the hiring of Tom Brady as the next Superintendent of Providence Schools, and a recently-posted ProJo article. It’s not entirely clear when he will start. Dr. Evans’ contract runs until September 19th. The Inquirer says that Brady will stay in Philadelphia until June.

The Providence Journal is reporting in its 7-7 breaking news blog:

Providence Mayor David N. Cicilline and School Board President Mary McClure plan to announce the school board’s appointment of a new superintendent today.

A statement sent from the mayor’s office says the new superintendent’s name will be announced at a 1 p.m. news conference in Cicilline’s office.

Meanwhile, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports as follows.

Interim Phila. schools CEO to head Providence, R.I., district
By Susan Snyder, INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

Tom Brady, the Philadelphia School District’s interim chief executive officer, will be announced today as the new superintendent of the Providence, R.I., school district, sources said.

Brady will remain running the schools in Philadelphia until early June.

He became the interim CEO in Philadelphia last June when Paul Vallas departed for New Orleans to run the public schools there. The Philadelphia School District earlier this month hired former San Francisco school superintendent Arlene Ackerman as its new CEO.

Here’s a 2007 press release on Brady, from the Broad Academy, from which he graduated.

School Siting Bill Considered

Hearings will be held tomorrow H-7577, a bill designed to prevent siting new schools on contaminated land. The bill has bipartisan support, and is co-sponsored by East Side Representative David Segal. I am not familiar enough with the bill to speak to specifics, but, according to a release from the group supporting the bill,

Cash strapped school districts across Rhode Island are building schools on contaminated sites, putting children and teachers at risk of exposure to harmful pollutants. This legislation consists of two reforms that would ensure that local school districts do not site schools on property that is contaminated by pollution left on the site as a result of former industrial or commercial uses:

If enacted several years ago, this legislation would have prevented the siting of schools such as the Carnevale Elementary and Springfield Middle Schools (built on the site of the former Providence City Dump) and the Adelaide Avenue High School (built on the site of the highly contaminated Gorham Silver Manufacturing Company).

The group has begun a CitizenSpeak campaign to make it easy to send email to representatives. http://stage.citizenspeak.org/node/1229

If you would like more information, you may email Alex Moore, one of the group’s organizers.

March 24th School Board Meeting

The School Board meets tomorrow, Monday March 24. Agendas for meeting are published on-line, usually the previous Friday, which means you really have to pay attention to know what’s going on. We might encourage the Board to post agendas sooner than the last minute required by state law.

Go to ProvidenceSchools.org, select “office…school board…dates and agendas” and click on the “eletronic school board”, which will pull up a calendar. Or, just go to http://www.providenceschools.org/pesb/ and find the calendar on the right hand side.

I’ve pasted in the agenda below the “continue reading” line.

The items that seem most immediately interesting are the Superintendent’s report, which includes an analysis of NECAP scores and an “adequate yearly progress update, the school calendar for next year, and a third-quarter report on corrective action for schools in trouble.

If you go to the website, you’ll find clickable links for the above items and more. I will add that I think the School Board has done a great job in the last year of modernizing its website and making information more accessible.

Tennis Anyone?

This is not education-related, but it does concern Nathan Bishop.

One of the benefits of the Bishop remodeling plan is that it preserves the tennis and basketball courts behind the school. These are not actually part of the school, but are managed by the City’s Parks Department. Those of us who played at Bishop last summer noticed that the courts have settled quite dramatically, leaving a large crack running across all the courts and making play difficult. (I do have to admit that I have found the crack useful on occasion as an excuse for missing a return).

Councilman Cliff Wood has been working with the City to get the courts resurfaced. He reports that the work will begin when the temperatures hit 50 degrees.  That can’t come too soon!

More Art!

Many thanks to Nancy Safian, the Program Manager of RISD’s “Project Open Door” for passing along the information below. Note that this is a high school program, but they are interested in working with 8th graders. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have this at Nathan Bishop when it opens?

I am on your mailing list and I wanted to point you to a web site run by Project Open Door, RISD’s free after school art and design program for teens from Providence (and RI). The programs goals are to help art and design students develop high quality portfolios in preparation for art college. The program is led by graduate and undergraduate RISD students and professional artist educators. Project Open Door currently works with high schoolers only, but we have considered working with 8th graders as they transition to high school. The program is directed by Dr. Paul Sproll, Head of the Department of Art + Design Education.

Currently Project Open Door provides school-based free after school art enrichment classes at Hope High and Feinstein High School. Any students from the city’s public schools a interested in continuing their art and design training are invited to attend this program free of charge.

Here is the web link. It contains art learning opportunities for students: http://risd.digication.com/projectopendoor

Nathan Bishop Outreach Committee Formed

A sub-committee of the ESPEC steering committee is being formed to reach out to parents of prospective attendees of the new Nathan Bishop. Co-chairs are Kim Rohm, a parent and PTO member at King Elementary and Karina Wood, PTO president at Vartan Gregorian.

Karina and Kim will be looking for others who can help with this commitee’s work. 
Twenty-five people attended our February meeting for prospective parents at Dr. ML King Jr. Elementary. They, as well as others who have contacted us but could not attend the meeting, can expect to receive emails from the committee soon.

You can add your name to the list by emailing me.

NCLB: Reform & Renewal or Retirement?

With a tip of the hat to the Hard Deadlines blog down in Portsmouth for catching something I missed in the papers:

Yesterday’s (March 19) New York Times has a story on a new development in No Child Left Behind.

The Bush administration, acknowledging that the federal No Child Left Behind law is diagnosing too many public schools as failing, said Tuesday that it would relax the law’s provisions for some states, allowing them to distinguish schools with a few problems from those that need major surgery.

The Dept. of Ed’s new initative, which will be available to up to 10 states, is called “Differentiated Accountablity”.

Under the new program, the federal Department of Education will give up to 10 states permission to focus reform efforts on schools that are drastically underperforming and intervene less forcefully in schools that are raising the test scores of most students but struggling with one group, like the disabled, for instance.

Right now, schools that miss 100% of their targets can wind up with the same “in need of improvement” label as schools that miss only 1 target. As I have previously noted, RI’s application of NCLB sometimes ends up condeming a school even when it reaches more than 90% of its targets. Sometimes the targets are simply unrealistic.

The story points out that some critics have attacked the proposal as an attempt to patch up a failing program. NCLB is due for reauthorization this year.

Other critics have called the plan the “the Suburban Schools Relief Act.” Suburban schools, with less minority students and students in poverty are more likely than urban schools to be failing the standards in only one or a few categories. Currently, schools with less than 45 students in a category do not have to report that group’s scores separately.

I confess to being torn about this, but I guess I’m not alone. The NEA supports the change and the AFT opposes it.

I’ve previously expressed my astonishment at the mindless way NCLB turned Nathanael Greene into a non-performing school because, and only because, students with IEP’s, many of them very severe disabilities, did not reach the same level of proficiency on the test as the rest of the kids. Even if giving these kids the exam were reasonable in the first place, responding to their predictably lower scores by simply stamping the negative label on the school creates a false impression about the school as a whole and takes the focus off the group, where it belongs. Moreover, a school with less than 45 such students would pass, even if those students were “failing to meet the standard”, as long as the school average was high enough.

On the other hand, this proposal will likely magically turn suburban schools into “successful” schools, even if gaps increase between advantaged and disadvantaged populations. If that means schools will be freer to ignore those gaps, it strikes me as the wrong approach.

VIPS is Here and Helping. You can too!

A couple of recent conversations reminded me that it’s been a while since we mentioned VIPS- Volunteers in Providence Schools. From their website:

VIPS is a not-for-profit educational organization dedicated to enabling our city’s students to succeed in school by providing them with educational support services and individualized help so that they can grow academically and socially. VIPS vision is that all Providence public school students have an equal chance for success.

VIPS does great work. They offer tutoring and mentoring (both in-school and after-school and on weekends), mini-courses at their Technology and Learning Center, support for Reading is Fundamental (RIF), parent workshops, and summer camps. VIPS already has a presence at King and Gregorian elementary schools, and they are going to be a critical support for the new Nathan Bishop.

I encourage you to support VIPS. You could help a young child learn to read or help a high-school student master calculus, lead an after-school club, or just use your skills and labor to support the staff.

Can you spare just one hour per week? Go to VIP’s website and apply on-line to be a volunteer.

Nathan Bishop Bidders’ Conference

Yesterday morning, the pre-bid conference for contractors was held at Nathan Bishop. Diane McAleer, long-time immediate neighbor of Bishop and active member of the Superintendent’s Nathan Bishop Committee, reports 35 to 40 cars and trucks arrived, which seems to indicate a good level of interest. Potential contractors and sub-contractors, many carrying blueprints, toured the school and took pictures. As noted below, bids are due April 14th.

Superintendent Evans to Resign

Update: This (Tuesday) morning, the ProJo has a longer version of the story that was posted last night. It no longer mentions Nathan Bishop.

As was reported on the 11:00 news tonight, and in the Providence Journal on-line, Dr. Donnie Evans, Superintendent of Providence Schools, has submitted his resignation, effective at the expiration of his contract on September 19th, to the Providence School Board. Dr. Evans’ letter can be read here.

I would like to comment on one part of the ProJo story on Evans’ resignation. The story cites “the furor over the fate of the Nathan Bishop Middle School” as one of the problems of Dr. Evans’ administration. While it is certainly fair to say that ESPEC was unhappy about the decision to close Bishop- in fact, the closing was what brought us into being- it is also true that, over the following two years we have worked closely with Dr. Evans and found him to be interested, engaged, and extremely helpful to our efforts to restore public education at Bishop. He formed the Bishop Committee and invited community stake-holders (including myself and several other members of the ESPEC steering committee) to serve on it. He has been supportive of our efforts to bring public middle school education back to the East Side of Providence. For that, at least, we owe him a debt of gratitude.

Silver Linings in the Cloud Over Arts

As a follow up to the post below, and as an antidote to its negative tone, I would like to point out that the recent ProJo story that I mentioned also has some encouraging news from a neighborhood elementary school, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary.

“Katharina Shroeter has her hands full. She divides her time between two elementary schools, Martin Luther King Jr. and Reservoir Avenue. Between them, she teaches art to 700 students.”

Shroeter said she is fortunate to work at King Elementary because the school has a large, well-stocked art room, thanks in large part to the generosity of the Parent Teacher Organization and retired teachers. At the Reservoir Avenue School, however, the supplies are depleted. Last year, she said, the school was left with little else than crayons and paper.

Martin Luther King is fortunate in other respects. The East Side school also offers art enrichment — smaller, project-based classes for students who are either gifted in art or struggling in core subjects such as English and math. The school also excludes art and music teachers from lunchroom duty in recognition of their heavy teaching schedules, according to Principal Michael Lazzareschi.

“We’re really the exception to the rule,” he said. “We have an after-school program funded by the PTO. Parents [who] play instruments have taught pieces of the music class.”

But even at King, Lazzareschi said that it is difficult to squeeze arts classes into the schedule because of the increasing emphasis on math and literacy instruction.

It is wonderful to hear that parents, teachers and administration are pulling together to make up for the shortcomings in the arts education provided by the the district. The concern is that schools with less resources will be less successful in this.

When Will the Arts Return to Our Schools, and How?

A recent article in the Providence Journal points to the moribund condition of art education in the Providence Schools. This is an issue that affects the Providence School District as a whole, but it also has a direct impact on the reopening of Nathan Bishop and on ESPEC’s goal of drawing more children from our neighborhoods into the public schools. Parents who believe arts are crucial to their children’s education will resist attending schools where arts are absent.

Providence has suffered cuts in art and music education over a number of years, beginning with previous superintendents. (The instrumental music program, for instance, was cut in 2003 by Supt. Johnson). In December 2006, Commissioner of Education Peter McWalters found that the Providence School District was not in compliance with its “Basic Education Plan” with regard to arts and music education. and ordered Superintendent Donnie Evans to restore these programs. In January 2007, Dr. Evans announced that he would appoint a “fine arts task force” to study how how make the arts available to students. To my knowlege, that task force was never created. However, Dr. Evans did submit a plan to the Commissioner.

In February 2008, the Commissioner sent a letter to the Providence Teachers Union, stating that the District is still not in compliance. However, as the ProJo reports:

Despite his earlier comments, McWalters said that he was not going to demand compliance because the district “at this time does not have the adequacy of resources to meet these requirements, especially in small themed high schools.”

“Given the complexity of the issues faced by the [school district] in meeting the basic education plan,” he said, “we acknowledge that the [district] is not in compliance with the [basic education plan].”

Since the state Department of Education has been asked to revise the state’s basic education plan, McWalters, in his letter to the union, said that it doesn’t make sense to launch any further investigation into the district’s fine arts offerings.

While it is understandably difficult to make progress in tight budget times, it is disturbing that, more than a year after his initial finding of noncompliance, the Commissioner has indicated that nothing need be done until the Dept. of Ed has reformulated the Basic Education Plan. Since it is inconceivable that the plan will not include arts education, why not work on making progress in the meantime?

As McWalters notes, part of the problem is budgetary. As budgets tighten, arts tend to take the first and biggest hits. However, there are other factors at work here. The problem, in part, be directly traced to the “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) law. NCLB’s emphasis on math and reading has lead to cut-backs in the time devoted to not only the arts, but also social studies and even science. A recently-released study by the Center for Educational Policy found that elementary schools in a majority of school districts increased instructional time for mathematics and language arts. Those districts reduced their instructional time for music and art by an average of one hour per week.

An irony here is that the arts are one of the “core academic subjects” in NCLB. However, since test scores are reported only for math and language arts, there is no incentive for districts to increase art education. Indeed, NCLB testing puts pressure on them to move resources and class time away from arts.

Update: As part of an effort to educate myself and think about what actions can be taken by citizens to support arts education, I’m collecting websites and other resources, which I’ll put on our web resources page. If any art advocates out there have suggestions, please post a comment here or email me. Thanks.