Edublog for Erica

I received this article in the NY times from my boyfriend about yet another attempt to incorporate the demands of No Child Left Behind into the educational curriculum. Several states including Washington, New York and California have restructured their curriculum to be nothing but reading and math-based, leaving minute amounts of time for any of the arts, history and foreign languages. ” AtMartin Luther King Jr. Junior High School in Sacramento, about 150 of the school’s 885 students spend five of their six class periods on math, reading and gym, leaving only one 55-minute period for all other subjects.” School districts with similar curriculums have stated the reasons for this are in keeping with the federal laws concerning education and feel that it is in their best interests to teach what our government specifies.

I can see the rationale for this, for school districts whose reading and math levels are far below the national average, it would probably be in their best interests to focus on reading and math, but it does mean that their students will suffer a cultural depletion in their schools with the lack of the arts and history and sciences. To educate a student body in such a rigid manner in order to receive more federal funding is detrimental to its students overall and when these students enter the workforce, their “proficiency” in math and reading will mean nothing if they were not exposed to all areas of subject matter in order to find their niche. Students are not robots, we can’t just stuff them all full of the same information and refuse all of them access to other subjects in order to meet the status quo. The demand for the “other” subjects will still be there, whether or not the schools care to meet that demand. I foresee that if NCLB is not at least revised, we will start to see teachers and students leaving public school in search of schools that meet their needs. The money that schools have turned their curriculum upside down for will be lost if there are no student who want to come to that school.

I think that for elementary schools it would be a good idea to focus on building good reading and math skills and if there were elementarys that only focused on those subjects it would not be as bad as a high school who refused to allow their students access to all subjects. I haven’t even touched on what this trend means for someone like me whose major is Music Education.

Schools should not be slaves to standardised testing because everyone loses. The schools lose money if their students don’t meet the test standards, which means theyu lose the ability to give their students the best possible education which in turn makes the students less able to learn what they need to know, be it math or reading or everything else. I think the math and reading track has potential, but not if those are the only subjects being taught to students.