Klarinet Archive - Posting 000106.txt from 2006/04

From: "Dee Flint" <deeflint01@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] Business aspects of music performance & education
Date: Sat, 15 Apr 2006 08:31:05 -0400


----- Original Message -----
From: "Karl Krelove" <karlkrelove@-----.net>
To: <klarinet@-----.org>
Sent: Friday, April 14, 2006 10:54 PM
Subject: RE: [kl] Business aspects of music performance & education

>> From: Ormondtoby Montoya [mailto:o4rmondtoby@-----.net]
>>
>> <snip>The result
>> was that arts and physical education (of all types) have
>> continued to lose ground over the last 2-3 years because "No
>> Child Left Behind" is forcing schools to spend an increasing
>> amount of money on English &
>> Math.
>
> There have been a number of articles including a recent one in the NY
> Times
> detailing this and other lengths to which schools feel forced to go to try
> to meet Adequate Yearly Progress benchmarks. It will be worse starting
> next
> year - in Pennsylvania, at least, science will be added to English and
> Math
> in the testing regimen. The pendulum will eventually swing away from the
> nonsense of NCLB and, with luck, we will be left with curricula that are
> more rigorous in all content areas but within a balanced, broader
> framework
> than NCLB permits.
>
> Karl
>

Yet it is necessary. We've been having kids graduate from high school with
straight A's who cannot string together an intelligible sentence and who
cannot balance a checkbook. What good does it do to be world renowned
musicians or athletes if they cannot read well enough and cipher well enough
to set up long term retirement funding or to determine if their agent or
manager is robbing them blind? Are we going to be so selfish as to put
non-survival skills on the same level as skills necessary to function in
society? There's been decades of neglect that, unfortunately, require a bit
of overdo to set right.

My parents and grandparents had far better math and English skills than
today's high school graduates yet one of my grandfathers did not go past the
8th grade (typical for many of the day).

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