Klarinet Archive - Posting 000108.txt from 2006/04

From: "Karl Krelove" <karlkrelove@-----.net>
Subj: RE: [kl] Business aspects of music performance & education
Date: Sat, 15 Apr 2006 09:47:17 -0400


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dee Flint [mailto:deeflint01@-----.net]
>
> 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).
>
I have better math and English skills than most of today's high school
graduates. Somehow I also managed to be educated in history, science, music,
art and any number of other areas not even represented by specific classes
in the schedule.

The point in the whole thing is that everyone sees a problem, but NCLB, if
carried out unmodified to its logical conclusion, will cause far more damage
than improvement to the public schools in the US. In the end it will not
have solved the problem of declining *skills* for a number of reasons, not
the least of which is that the assessment of those skills rests on testing
programs that are neither uniform from state to state nor necessarily valid
for measuring the skills we want to improve.

Improving the outcome of education in the US has become an urgent problem
with a variety of root causes, but NCLB is a punitive, destructive and,
without modification, ultimately fatal solution. In the process American
schools will have been progressively and unneedfully dehumanized.

Enough for now - I could go on a great deal more, but most of this has been
well covered in the national media, and I have very little hope of
convincing anyone of the folly of NCLB with the poor writing skills I was
able to develop on the way to becoming a musician.

Karl

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