I'm down to the last six weeks of my thirty three year career. I'm having trouble letting go. What will the program look like and sound like. I'm concerned that kids and families won't ever know what they will miss. I've mourned the loss of the music program I built and nurtured for 17 years and before that for 12 years at my previous school. It's like the school system saying, "We love you, but what you did doesn't mean anything to us." The administration will say how much I've contributed to education and how important my work was, but these will be just words. The hard truth is shown in actions.
The community, the school administrations, and the school system administrators are now under the pressure of high stakes testing. The effects of this are subtle, strong, pervasive, and entirely negative to the advancement of children and learning. The effect of this testing program is the cause of my retirement. It's caused personal attacks on my professional abilities. It's caused children and their families to rearrange priorities at school to include test remediation and advanced placement courses instead of music classes. It's caused the staff at my school to focus entirely on test preparation, excluding curricular materials and experiences that are not tested. It's caused professional artists who are also educators to become irrelevant and out of step with the current educational climate. The arts are not tested. The arts are not part of the testing program. The arts educators are not included in the planning and teamwork shown by the rest of the staff in preparing for the testing program. If any choice is to be made concerning school-wide programs, curricular and extra-curricular schedules, or course offerings the decision will ALWAYS be made in favor of the testing program with the arts curriculum left to pick up the pieces.
It's the high stakes testing! It's political! It's absolutely the wrong way to educate the children! It's the children who are being harmed! It's the arts that are being damaged! It's good, experienced teachers who are being lost to irrelevance. We care about test scores not kids!
