My View: Don’t narrow the focus of our schools

By Gene Carter, Special to CNN

Licensed through the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

Editor’s note:  Gene Carter is CEO and executive director of ASCD, an international education leadership association with 150,000 members—superintendents, principals, teachers, professors, and advocates — in more than 145 countries.  A veteran educator with experience as a teacher, administrator, superintendent and university professor, Carter took over the helm of ASCD (formerly the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) in 1992.

Every parent knows how important it is for a child to experience classes beyond math and reading. Many parents I talk to tell me that their child’s favorite subject is art, history or physical education.

One parent recently described to me how her daughter’s physical education teacher was able to tie science and physics to each lesson. Another parent praised the school gardening program and how much her son was learning about health and math by plotting out garden planters that grew many varieties of vegetables. Read more →

We invite you to read the NYT article by Nicolas Kristof. There have been other studios that Elaine Cimino Studios has been working with who have seen the Born to Draw iBooks and have commented on the environmental aspects of the books and said they would not want to stress these type of issues in their children’s educational programming. I am glad to see that this article was published and that it gives others the courage to teach sustainability in their classrooms.

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I posted this article nearly a year ago on blogger spot. it received some attention and I think it is an important article. Here it is again. Rather long but very interesting especially when you have or teach gifted children.

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Reprint of NYT Article February 2, 2010 Creative Commons license 2011
Op-Ed Contributor
By SUSAN ENGEL
New Marlborough, Mass.

THE Obama administration is planning some big changes to how we measure the success or failure of schools and how we apportion federal money based on those assessments. It’s great that the administration is trying to undertake reforms, but if we want to make sure all children learn, we will need to overhaul the curriculum itself. Our current educational approach — and the testing that is driving it — is completely at odds with what scientists understand about how children develop during the elementary school years and has led to a curriculum that is strangling children and teachers alike.
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