IEA Newsletter for Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Welcome to the Institute for Education and the Arts’ weekly newsletter for
EDUCATION AND LEGISLATION
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
“On August 3, Senators Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Hillary Clinton (D-NY), and Bernie Sanders (D-VT) introduced S.2014. The legislation would provide $100 million in competitive grants for states for the development and implementation of statewide longitudinal data systems that include all ten essential elements recommended by the Data Quality Campaign and $100 million in formula grants to states for alignment, professional development, and other efforts to improve the use of data. The legislation also authorizes funding to support a state education data center and state educational data coordinators to improve data collection, reporting, and compliance processes. Also on August 3, Representative Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) introduced the Success in the Middle Act, which is the first school improvement bill of its kind directed specifically at the middle grades. The bill targets the schools that have middle level grades that feed into the nearly 2,000 “dropout factories” that are spread throughout the country. Dropout factories are high schools in which 60 percent (or fewer) of freshmen will have become seniors three years after finishing their ninth-grade year. These schools account for approximately half of the nation’s dropouts … Grijalva’s legislation would authorize $1 billion a year in formula grants for states to improve low-performing schools that contain middle grades.”
Learn more about education in the legislature>>
Learn more about the Data Quality Campaign>>
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
LOOKING BACK AT PAST WRITINGS ABOUT AESTHETIC EDUCATION
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
George Sykes, Educational Leadership, 5/82, as reported in the ASCD blog:
“Arts education faces fierce competition in the age of No Child Left Behind. As George Sykes points out in the May 1982 issue of Educational Leadership, this is nothing new. Sykes lists factors that have marginalized arts education throughout history: ‘the Puritan admonition of the arts as sinful, the anti-intellectualism of a nation more concerned with conquering a continent, [and] the arts perceived as the exclusive domain of the rich.’ Sykes, however, considers the arts a critical component of education and emphasizes the development of ‘aesthetic literacy’—the ability to perceive and communicate the language of art. He states that the traditional participatory art curriculum, which includes enrollment in band or visual arts, must not be considered the entire scope of arts education. Rather than seeing art as a series of completed products, Sykes urges educators across the curriculum to encourage engagement with the arts as a process, such as when students consider the creative development behind a painting or story.”
Read the blog posting referring to the article>>
Read the 1982 article>>
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
ARTS EDUCATION RESOURCES
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Office of the State Superintendent of Education, District of
“Discussions about reviving and strengthening arts education in public schools are emerging and gaining momentum across the country … Proponents argue, essentially, that the arts are an essential component of education, and all children, not only those with specific artistic talent, benefit from an education in the arts including opportunities to create, perform, and communicate through various artistic media. Major debates today within K-12 arts education concern issues of fundamental justification. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, an increasing number of studies have found that arts programs motivate children to learn, assisting in improving performance in core academic subjects. For some children, the arts provide the impetus to stay in school until graduation and, for others, inspire them to pursue a college education. Arts education programs will continue to play a pivotal role as the nation struggles to improve high school graduation rates, develop pre-kindergarten programs, and counter the achievement gap in urban communities. This issue of the OSSE Digest presents a range of research and information on the emerging prospects for arts education.”
View extensive links to arts education articles and research>>
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
FUNDING FOR THE ARTS
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Laurence Arnold, Bloomberg News,
“[Arts groups] have an ally in Robert Redford. The Academy Award- winning actor and Americans for the Arts, an advocacy group that lobbies for more funding for the arts, have teamed up to urge corporations, foundations and individuals to think of the arts as a way to address educational, health and environmental problems rather than as a competing philanthropic cause.
Learn more>>
DIGITAL PRESERVATION
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
John Eggerton, Broadcasting & Cable,
“The Library of Congress has launched a variety of partnerships with private companies, associations and nonprofit groups to come up with strategies to archive and preserve the growing number of digital works, including TV shows, films, recordings and video games. Through the news Preserving Creative America Initiative, part of its National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, the library will spend $2.13 million to start developing standardized approaches and best practices for preserving content and metadata.”
Read more>>
SCRIPTED CURRICULUM VS. SPONTANEITY
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Nancy Ginsburg Gill, Education Week,
“[T]he popularity of scripted curricula has spread to many public schools, especially those serving poor communities. In response to the widespread belief that high-stakes testing will improve the nation’s schools, teachers are pressured to teach to standardized tests and not waste time on lessons or activities that won’t be on one of these tests. Even if there is a major event the children are eager to discuss—a presidential election, an eclipse, the collapse of a freeway, or an earthquake—many teachers fear spending precious class time on anything that won’t be on the end-of-the-year standardized test. These schools can be even more mind-numbing for teachers who have been attracted to the profession by a desire to engender in their students a passion for learning. While some new teachers may welcome a script that spells out what to do with most of the school day, veteran teachers and dynamic, creative young teachers are more likely than ever to leave the profession, disgusted by the tedium of drill-and-kill and saddened by the lack of time or freedom to engage their students in the excitement of learning interesting stuff.”
Read more>>
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
“BABY EINSTEIN” VIDEO VIEWING CORRELATES WITH SMALLER VOCABULARY IN BABIES
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
“BABY EINSTEIN”: NOT SUCH A BRIGHT IDEA
Amber Dance,
“Parents hoping to raise baby Einsteins by using infant educational videos are actually creating baby Homer Simpsons, according to a new study released today. For every hour a day that babies 8 to 16 months old were shown such popular series as "Brainy Baby" or "Baby Einstein," they knew six to eight fewer words than other children, the study found … [Dr. Dimitri] Christakis and his colleagues surveyed 1,000 parents in Washington and Minnesota and determined their babies' vocabularies using a set of 90 common baby words, including mommy, nose and choo-choo … according to the study in the Journal of Pediatrics.”
Read more from the L.A. Times>>
Hear the story as reported on NPR>>
Read the story as reported by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer>>
GRANTS, FUNDING, CONTESTS, AND AWARDS
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Kids in Need
Deadline:
“The purpose of the grants is to provide funds for classroom teachers who have innovative, meritorious ideas. Your project may qualify for funding if it makes creative use of common teaching aids, approaches the curriculum from an imaginative angle, or ties nontraditional concepts together for the purpose of illustrating commonalities … The applicant must be a K-12 certified teacher working at a public, private, or parochial school in the subject of the project. Kids In Need does not fund pre-school projects.”
Learn more>>
- ### -
posted by Kristin @ 8:52 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home