Thursday, February 27, 2014

Wise Voices in CT About Education

I was teaching in NYC schools when No Child Left Behind avalanched into American education.  For those of us who treasure creativity, novelty, self-teaching by exploration and an eclectic education the principles behind NCLB were alarming.  Many teaching artists were both alarmed and wary of what it would mean for our work.  The law and the school system's policies that followed from it fundamentally changed how and what we taught.  And our revolutionary and transgressive roles in school were diminished.

It didn't take long before many of us turned our backs on the work.  We would have left anyway.  You can only work so long as an itinerant artist-educator.  At some point you long for focussed commitment -- either to your art or the teaching.  But even if I'd stayed longer, my analysis and critique of educational policy would have been disregarded.  I had no juice.  But the people I'm linking to do have juice.  One is the legendary Dr. James Comer, whose work I'd known of since the 1980's and the other is the Superintendent of East Lyme, CT Schools, Dr. James Lombardo, interviewed yesterday on WNPR-FM's Where We Live.  Lombardo wrote to Governor Malloy, Education Commissioner Pryor and others in state government enumerating just how wrong the "reform" initiatives the state is pursuing are and the false premises that led to them.

I hope these voices are part of a tide being turned.  It may be too late for much of public education, but perhaps that's the point.  I sometimes wonder if urban public education has become like early 20th settlement work.  Upper class women, prior to their coming out balls that signified their ascension into society would work with The Poor.  They performed charity work that by no means upended the systemic order of things.  The status remained quo.

Anyway, the links:

 New Haven Independent interview the Dr. Comer, and

WNPR.org story on Dr. Lombardo's letter to Malloy et al.


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