Klarinet Archive - Posting 000133.txt from 2006/04

From: "Karl Krelove" <karlkrelove@-----.net>
Subj: RE: [kl] Business aspects of music performance & education
Date: Sat, 15 Apr 2006 17:21:49 -0400


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dee Flint [mailto:deeflint01@-----.net]
>
> Because you were in school at a time when teachers demanded
> that you perform
> in math and English. Perhaps your school was like mine. For
> example, if a
> student turned in an essay in art class with poor grammar and
> spelling, he
> got an F on the paper or was required to redo it. Today, a
> teacher cannot
> do that. They are only allowed to grade the content (if they
> can figure it
> out). So the students are allowed to "slide" on their
> English skills.

You're absolutely right, and I always feel so like Paul Lind ("What's the
matter with kids today?"), but the schools were more demanding. At the risk
of being boringly redundant, this has nothing to do with the
pseudo-evaluation that NCLB has forced on the schools, nor was there any
such a thing in force when I was in school.

There are a number of things that have happened since then to lower the
quality of instruction, a great deal of them the outcome of Federal mandates
with which local school boards must comply (or at least appear to) but which
they cannot or will not adequately fund. The same Federal government that
now has added one additional mandate - the one carried by the NCLB act. We
need to fix our schools where they are broken, stop interfering with ones
that aren't and, above all, return to some degree of realism in our
expectation that every child is equal and therefore will achieve equally if
only the teachers try harder. None of that requires gutting everything but
reading, writing and math (and now science) nor does it require permitting
throw away courses that contribute nothing to students' development.

I think our views of the problem are in agreement. It's our respective views
of *this* solution that seem so diametrically opposed.

Karl

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