Educational Improvement

The RESPECT Project: Envisioning a Teaching Profession for the 21st Century

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Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, in addressing the "new normal" schools are facing – tight budget times that call for doing more with less and finding ways to innovate, increase efficiency and effectiveness, and accelerate reform – released promising practices last March to help states, districts, and schools meet this extraordinary challenge. The Department, in furthering the Secretary's efforts, offered a set of additional innovative approaches and best practices, Increasing Educational Productivity, last May.

(October 5, 2011)  The U.S. Department of Education announced today charter school grants totaling $4,792,526 to charter developers for planning, program design, and initial implementation, as well as for dissemination. These Charter School Program Non-state Educational Agency (Non-SEA) grants will assist in expanding the number of high quality charter schools in the nation by providing funding to 23 new, or recently opened, charter schools over the next three years. These grants will also provide three high quality charter schools the ability to partner with other charter and non-charter public schools to improve academic performance and share effective practices.

(September 28, 2011)  The U.S. Department of Education announced today charter school grants totaling $25 million to replicate and expand high-quality charter schools that have demonstrated success. Today's grants will serve nearly 45,000 students in 124 new and 3 expanded charter schools over the next five years.

As Arts in Education Week – September 11-17 – was being observed, arts integration was a hot topic nationally.  Consider these two statements about arts integration:  (1) “Creative teachers have integrated the arts with other subjects for years. During the past decade, however, there has been an upsurge of interest in this approach.”  And, (2), “In recent years, arts integration has … generated a lot of enthusiasm from classroom teachers, school administrators and policy researchers for its ability to produce results.”  These are very similar testaments to the concept of arts integration, but more than three decades separate the two.

The first statement is from “Coming to Our Senses: The Significance of  the Arts for American Education,” a landmark report of a national panel convened by David Rockefeller, Jr. in 1977 to explore the notion that “education” and “the arts” need not be mutually exclusive – that they in fact could be productive partners.  The second is taken from “Reinvesting in Arts Education: Winning America’s Future Through Creative Schools,” a report of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH) released this past May.