This story was in the New York Times earlier this week:
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced yesterday that the city’s Department of Education will require all schools to maintain arts programs, and that principals will be rated in their annual reviews on how well they run those programs. The announcement came just months after the department infuriated arts groups by eliminating a multimillion-dollar program to finance arts education. Under a new set of city standards, the arts curriculums will be judged for comprehensiveness, and potential pay bonuses for principals could be affected.
“An excellent arts education is essential,” the mayor said at a news conference at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan.Last winter, the city schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, told several arts advocates that the department was planning to give principals discretion over $67.5 million that had previously been budgeted specifically for Project Arts, which financed arts education. The project, developed in the Giuliani administration, was intended to rebuild arts programs that were obliterated during the fiscal crisis of the 1970s.
Read the complete story here.
Requiring arts programs and making administrators accountable for the quality of their arts programs is certainly a positive thing for the schools of New York City. As most people know, the arts can be first of the chopping block when school budgets are in crisis, and it is good to see the vast public school program in New York City make this a priority.
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Rudy Giuliani or Vampire Ghouliani?
Very interesting.
Who decides if a program is “comprehensive?”
It would be nice to know what comprehensive is, Jacque. They’ll dream something up.
I just graduated high school and I live in Paducah, KY. It’s better than the non-existant arts programs where I live. The choral director at my school recieved support financially and just general support of people in school. I played trombone and euphonium in the band since that’s what I started on in 6th grade. Band directors would come and go and the school didn’t really give support to the band because the band didn’t make the money so to speak. So the band was left to fend for it’s own while the choral department flourished.
Just to make it even better the orchestra at my school was canned in 1993. There is now not a single orchestra program in my county. There is in fact only one orchestra program in my entire region that is in a public school. And in order to give you an idea of how large my region is, it encompasses over 20 different high school programs in about 15 different counties.
It’s amazing to me that stringed instruments have basically been forgotten where I live and the few who pay them must study privately and will have to travel to study privately. I drove 3 hours to my lesson on a school night and would drive back just to get my lesson in.
I wouldn’t mind seeing an entire ovehaul to the music education in high school. Just have orchestra classes and teach all the instruments in one class. Lots of wind players quit band in high school because they don’t want to march. Are they untalented, ignorant, and stupid? No, they just know marching band sucks and won’t put up with it. Get those kids learning about something they care about and don’t make them walk around in circles on a football field. Academia should never, ever be remotely connected to a sport. It’s just sad, it really is.