For a long time the powers that create these standardized educational ideals have largely ignored areas such as art, music,
theatre, dance,
etc. since it is such a blatantly subjective medium. How do we know art is good? How do we know a monologue is bad? "We" all know it, because we've observed the spectrum over the course of our careers and can differentiate between a performance that lacks fundamental qualities or one that knocks it out of the
park to create something beyond what we've built as a
foundation and framework for our students to
build their knowledge upon.
The problem that the establishment has with these things is how can you put a number on that? And so they glossed over it for a long time.
Years ago (I'm drawing on my band director experience a
bit) we used to
call the adjudication event for bands, choruses, and orchestras "festivals". It was an event to share and recreate music so that students could observe their peers performing similar literature at a variety of levels (good and bad, high and low, and everything in-between). It was designed to promulgate the idea that all students could achieve a relatively high standard of musicianship and it worked. Over the course of the past decade, it has been renamed "Music Performance Assessment" or MPA as a nod to the testing community that this "festival" is, like their FCAT's and Common Core's, devoid of all meaningful expression and thought and is merely a blunt
instrument for measuring perceived success from year to year. I do say that with a certain bitterness, because I feel that the original goal in all of this was lost in an effort to make the event relevant to our test-obsessed society.
I feel we are losing a battle we cannot possibly win in chasing ways and means to quantify what it is that arts curriculum does for students. There is nothing wrong with the concept of writing standards for our teachers and students to meet. The whole goal of festival was to elegantly establish a perpetually changing standard that could be easily transmitted to students and teachers across a geographic area. The issue with measuring the completion of standards in the arts is that to understand growth and development in this area, you have to possess a unique understanding of it. You have to be in it and be a part of it for some time to develop within yourself the ability to take your subjective and objective interpretation of the performance and create from that a meaningful and useful assessment of the performance piece. The problem there is that your average administrator doesn't have the time nor the where-with-all to develop such traits, so the big-wig idea is that if there can be standards that are observed in action, the teacher must be doing the right things, regardless of the quality of performance that is derived.
I don't have a solution to this problem. I'm not against the development of a framework to establish better traits and goals for education, but putting a number on a kid painting a picture is not going to help anyone become better at painting, nor is paying her teacher based on that number going to make that teacher any better at crafting artists.
I threw up in my mouth a little when you said Common Core. Sorry...married to an elementary school teacher, with 2 kids dealing with it. Overall it's bull.
