Robert D. Skeels' responses to the Arts for LA Spring LAUSD Candidate Survey

First published on Echo Park Patch on January 2, 2013.

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"Thinking is not the intellectual reproduction of what already exists anyway." — Theodor Adorno

One of the more intriguing aspects of being a candidate for a high profile office like Member of Board of Education, Los Angeles Unified School District, is the number of questionnaires various organizations ask you to complete. Some of these are for endorsement considerations, others are just to publicize your stances on various issues. Today Arts for LA sent me a five question survey. When answering the questions, I realized it would be worth publishing the Q&A since, in my eyes, it addresses many of the fundamentally flawed issues with national standards and punitive testing regimes they engender.

Arts for LA: What meaningful experiences with the arts (visual arts, dance, drama, and/or music) did you have growing up?

Robert D. Skeels: Even though I grew up in relative poverty (food-stamps, welfare, etc), our New York schools required playing an instrument, participation in drama, and taking classes in visual arts. I was exposed to French horn, trombone, and guitar, and still play the latter to this day. One of the most memorable field trips I recall from childhood is when our class went Radio City Music Hall to see Madama Butterfly. We even had electives like music theory which relate to mathematics. Classes in fine art gave me enough skills that when I later became a graphic artist, my illustration abilities kept me in constant demand. All of those experiences were interconnected with literature, an appreciation for arts, and an understanding that there is much more to being human than test scores and salaries.

Arts for LA: What role do you think the arts can play in supporting key priorities of the district, such as closing the achievement gap, reducing the dropout rate, and preparing more students for college eligibility and the twenty-first century workforce?

Robert D. Skeels: The critical thinking skills and ability to cognate interconnectedness between disparate disciplines fostered by the arts are far more important than rote memorization for standardized tests. For the record, critical thinking skills are essential regardless of what century we are in. This is why the children of the wealthy are exposed so heavily to the arts, whereas working class children aren't. Finding things that interest and captivate students is the key to reducing the dropout rate, encouraging students to find passions that lead them to college, etc. If we were educating the whole child in addition to providing wrap around services, then the achievement gap would ameliorate.

Arts for LA: A standards-based arts curriculum is one of the five core subjects in No Child Left Behind and critical for developing job skills vital in the creative economy and the twenty-first century workforce. Yet, most often, only "what is tested is taught" in our schools. How do you envision bringing balance back for a comprehensive education and ensuring all students have access to a quality, standards-based arts education curriculum?

Robert D. Skeels: The obsession with standards and punitive testing brought on by NCLB and its descendants RTTT and CCSS, have perverted and warped curriculum. Bringing balance back means resisting standardized tests and curriculum, and insisting that our students are provided rounded, culturally relevant curricula. While we still need to push for more arts and a rounded curriculum within the current regime of standards, ultimately we need to fight for curriculum decisions being made on a local level that address the needs of students. A nationally standardized arts curriculum further marginalizes children of color and those from different cultures. We need arts that are part of ethnic studies courses in order to respect cultural heritages.

Arts for LA: If elected, how will you engage classroom teachers, arts teachers, parents, and community arts organizations to implement your district's strategic arts plan? If you are not familiar with the plan, how can the district make the plan more visible?

Robert D. Skeels: Again, the de-emphasis in the arts in our schools is a direct result of national policies that have created an abject high-stakes environment where test preparation takes precedent over teaching and learning. I would work with all the stake-holders (who are natural allies) mentioned in the question above to create widespread awareness and outreach as to the critical importance of a rounded curriculum that sees the arts, including literature, as the primary, not secondary goal of education. Such a campaign would necessitate revising the existing LAUSD arts plan, which still sees test-prep as being paramount.

Arts for LA: Over 50% of School Districts in Los Angeles County have adopted Arts Education policies and plans to restore all arts disciplines into the core curriculum of K-12 classrooms. If elected, what would you do to develop and adopt a policy and implementation plan to increase access to the arts in the district?

Robert D. Skeels: Efforts to restore arts via policies and plans are laudable. However, so long as our public schools are threatened with catastrophic consequences like closure, reconstitution, or being handed over to a privately managed charter corporations, there is little hope that they will actually be able to execute such policies and plans. National education policy has created conditions where deviation from what is required on standardized tests is impossible, despite platitudes from the Secretary of Education on the importance of the arts. Board Members on the second largest school district have a moral obligation to challenge the reasons why the arts, electives, vocational training, and anything outside the narrow confines of NCLB/RTTT/CCSS aren't considered important. In practice, really expanding our arts curricula in LAUSD would be a visible sign of resistance to the testing-industrial-complex controlling U.S. education policy.

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LAUSD School Board Candidate, public education activist, researcher, and writer Robert D. Skeels has lived, worked, and organized in District 2 for over 18 years. He and his wife, Yoon Jung Lee, make their home in Historic Filipinotown. Robert is a U.S. Navy Veteran. He attended Glendale Community College and the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Robert taught Catechism at St. Teresa of Avila Church for 12 years. For the past 15 years he has volunteered ten hours a week teaching life and literacy skills at the Mary Lind Foundation. Robert is a committed member of a number of grassroots education and immigrant rights organizations including Coalition for Educational Justice, Public Education and Social Justice Advocacy, The Trinational Coalition To Defend Public Education, The Southern California Immigration Coalition, and Veterans for Peace. Robert’s articles and essays have appeared in publications including: Schools Matter, CounterPunch, Dissident Voice, Daily Censored, Echo Park Patch, and The Los Angeles Daily News.

Robert's grassroots school board campaign has been endorsed by United Teachers Los Angeles and some of the most celebrated experts on education in the nation, including Professor Diane Ravitch.

The Arts and 21st Century Skills

While our society is fixated on test-taking and teaching test-taking, test-taking is never identified as an essential skill for the 21st Century. Hmm.

From the Boston Globe (ht to Bob at FairTest):

Art's Power to Teach 21st Century Skills
By Lisa Guisbond | December 8, 2008

A RECENT report calling for Massachusetts schools to develop 21st-century skills is cause for both optimism and unease. The promise is that all children, no matter their ZIP code, will benefit from more expansive educational goals, including access to the arts. The concern is that the call to teach and assess more than a narrow set of academic skills will translate into a longer list of high-stakes hoops for teachers and students to jump through.

Education leaders considering how to implement the state's 21st Century Skills Task Force's recommendations can look to an extraordinary local arts program for inspiration. Every summer, Brookline's Creative Arts at Park offers a vivid demonstration of art's power to teach, transform, and develop skills essential for success. Watching my son and his campmates perform "A Midsummer Night's Dream" last July, I thought there could be no better way to learn Shakespeare than to perform it. But this diverse group of young people did much more than memorize one act of a play in five weeks. They mastered a long list of skills, including collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, problem solving, and communication.

According to the 21st Century Skills report, these are the competencies everyone will need to succeed as citizens and workers. These are the skills employers and colleges say are now severely lacking among high school graduates and entering students.

The task force report wisely acknowledges that different tools are needed to assess such skills, including performance assessments like speeches, projects, and exhibitions. Clearly, multiple-choice tests with short written essays are not up to the task. But simply adding more kinds of exams to the current high-stakes system would be a mistake. To promote and assess 21st-century skills, Massachusetts needs to construct a balanced assessment system, as called for in the Education Reform Act.

Some fear that moving beyond our current focus on high-stakes testing and toward multiple measures will mean lowered standards. This argument falsely assumes tests themselves are standards. The fact is that too many schools are now narrowly focused on preparing kids for tests, not educating the whole child.

Nor is it true that students must first memorize some set of basics before they can engage in thinking and interacting with the world. To the contrary, cognitive science and the experiences of nations that score high on international assessments prove that students learn better when they are challenged to think and do, not simply memorize and repeat. Many students are engaged by arts instruction, and when students are engaged, their overall motivation to learn improves.

Massachusetts needs a broader system with more emphasis on classroom-based and performance assessments. We need to make graduation decisions not by a series of separate hurdles but through an integrated approach that taps into our children's diversity of strengths and talents. The cost of such a system is modest and the payoffs large as better-educated students enter adulthood.

The Brookline arts program suggests how much could be gained by giving all students access to the kinds of opportunities usually reserved for rich kids. Wouldn't many children blossom given the chance to steep themselves in Shakespearean culture and language, as they must to put on a coherent performance? Wouldn't they benefit from collaborating and cooperating the way an ensemble cast must do? And wouldn't every child be challenged and grow as a result of all the problem-solving required to put on a play?

Of course, schools should not be turned into theater camps. Quality academic instruction is essential. However, there's been little in my son's school experience to compare with the multidimensional growth I saw as a result of the challenge of playing Nick Bottom. Sadly, the more schools eliminate arts to spend more time boosting test scores, the more access to these experiences is restricted to children whose parents can afford to pay the added costs.

It's time to expand our notion of education and extend the chance for these transformative experiences to all children. I'll be the first to shout "Bravo!" if that is a result of the 21st-century skills report.

Lisa Guisbond is a policy analyst at FairTest and serves on the board of Citizens for Public Schools.