Now is the time to keep our eye on the prize
By Pat Boyd, Executive Director, South Dakotans for the Arts
 

Our fall edition always focuses on arts and education. This year it is hard to find that focus, hard to bring up any clear image of the face, body and spirit of education. Even as the busses roll and the classrooms fill, we wonder how this is going to work. We know full well that it will, and that we will not let our children down, despite the cuts and cutbacks we have inflicted on this and coming school years.

We know it first because we still believe in a complete education for every child, and would not purposefully withhold its treasures from a single one of them.  We know this because we love these individual children, and because collectively we understand their education to be the foundation and future of our democracy.

We also hold this truth because we can rely heavily on educators, families and organizations to rescue the children when the quality and integrity of the educational system is threatened. We can count on them to soldier on, to change their plans, to accept still more responsibility, to rework and accommodate more, to draw on their own resources as necessary. They will work to keep this yearÕs students from being set adrift between what used to be and what will be the new reality of education.  That laudable individual reliability is itself a factor in a set of cynical calculations that has effectively drawn down our expectations of public education in the swirling muddy waters of politics and economics.

Who am I accusing of cynicism? People who believe that education is a necessary evil in the economy, and not a part of the fix, are poisoning our blood supply. This means you, if education, including the arts, was not a priority in your decisions in recent elections. You, if you allow South Dakota's local control policy for education to continue without your participation and support of quality arts education. You, if you buy the patent statement that dollars spent per student do not correlate with test scores, as if that were the only measure of value - and if it is not acutely disturbing to you that South Dakota teachers are paid less than any others in the nation as we continue to pile on the workload and demand those scores. You, if you think we can fix that problem by lowering our standards.  You, if you quietly pay for private lessons without complaining.  Before you pride yourself as not among the cynics, one last self-test: if you agree that well, maybe your school district is too administratively top heavy, look beyond their titles to their job descriptions. You won't find many qualified volunteers to take over.

Here is one example of a cynical calculation about how much time we have to drift toward the future of education (say, the elementary career of today's kindergartener, about 6 years). With a few stellar exceptions, elementary schools across South Dakota have now fallen to record lows in terms of time and teaching dedicated to the arts. Many are straining to integrate the arts throughout the curriculum, because the data is there to prove the effectiveness of learning through the arts in sciences, math, history, social studies and language. Meanwhile, we continue to invest heavily in equipping and training teachers and students with technology, despite the lack of any clear evidence of its effect on standardized test scores-- because we think we are probably right that kids need to learn to use it, and now we think maybe those tests don't measure the right stuff.  We should fix that someday too.

Professional development and continuing education for teachers has been subsumed by technology training. Smart boards sprout from classroom walls, while pianos and the teachers who can play them have virtually disappeared from the elementary classroom. We are back to art kits and 20-minute crafts projects in many schools, and there is quite literally something wrong with this picture. If we know that the arts have connected education to life throughout human history, why are we abandoning them just as we are embarking into new worlds of thought and innovation? Have we calculated that if we drop fine arts out of the public education equation, someone will always be there to provide it? Are we still talking about every child or just some of them? Which do we think will get the best jobs, the ones who can run the programs or the ones who can create them?

No amount of advocacy is going to bring back the funds for education this year or next.  We will step up and do what we can to continue to provide arts in education for those elementary students, and for their older brothers and sisters.  That cynical calculation will prove correct, for a time. We will do it because the kids are still excited to be back in school -- they have great expectations, and we will not disappoint them because we need them to lead us.  The emerging body and spirit of education is in their faces, and that has to be our focus this year.  Eyes on the prize, advocates, we have much to do and they will provide more energy than the cynics can drain away.