Teacher Takes a Stance

Kate Quarfordt is a mother, teacher, artist, and writer. But she is not a policy wonk who scrutinizes education proposals for legislation. That is until she was asked to appear at a briefing on Capitol Hill representing practitioners to discuss policy recommendations for the Well-rounded Education in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).

The act itself sounds great after years of hearing about math, science, reading and writing being highlighted in the 'No Child Left Behind' education policy. The budget request for ESEA in 2011 does reflect an increase of 38.9 million in funding to support teaching and learning in arts, history, civics, foreign languages, geography, and economics. But it seems as if this increase is achieved by combining eight subject-specific grant programs into a single competitive grant program.

Kate realized that disciplines other than math and science will have to compete against each other, "with some of them undoubtedly getting the short end of the stick". She further recognized the fact that pitting subjects against each other will undermine or eliminate the spirit of collaboration among disciplines in schools aiming to provide a well-rounded education.

My problem in addition to those stated by Kate lies in the small increase to cover so many important disciplines. $38.9 million dollars in the overall education budget is a proverbial drop in a bucket and will not have any impact on our 100,000 public schools. Neither will it lead to a truly comprehensive, well-rounded education program. A small comparison would be to look at the fully fledged foreign language schools in India and Pakistan to prepare their youth for the global markets. Or China focusing on world history and economics for the next generation to be the new world power.

The argument for more funding for the so called 'core subjects' is a mute point by now. It is well funded and fully integrated. The challenge now is to position our students to be competitive against students from the rest of the world. Somehow that critical point is lost in translation.

Michael Cordier