Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, and What It Means to be an American

I'm always surprised by those who suggest that you cannot change the minds of other people through reasoned discussion.  I suppose the reason it surprises me is that I have, on more than one occasion, had radical shifts in some long-held beliefs.  Friends I have recently made are often shocked when I reveal to them some of these former thoughts.  I wasn't stupid or cruel back then: I just believed different things.  Then something happened.  I read something, someone talked to me, or I had some life experience that caused me to re-evaluate my position.  Isn't it supposed to work like that?

Well, it's that time again, and my Facebook is filled with opinions, both left and right.  I've been asked by a couple of people to clarify mine, so I thought I'd write a manifesto.  Well, not really a "manifesto," so much as a numbered list of things I think about a lot.  Here it goes:

1. America is an idea.  Now, I know a lot of people have noted this, but I'm not sure everyone gets what the idea is.  Some people talk about the "American dream," or whatever, and it seems to have something to do with owning a new home with a low-interest mortgage and being able to go to church.  I think the basic idea is that it doesn't matter how much money you have, or what your family name is, or what boat your people came over on, you get to decide who you are.  To me, Bob Dylan is the quintessential American.  He was the son of Armenian Jews living in Minnesota until he heard some hillbilly music on old 78 records and decided to change his name and become a folk singer.  A few years later he found that pigeon hole a little constrictive, so he plugged in and became a rock and roller.  Then he was a farmer, an evangelical Christian, a Hasid, a radio host - whatever he wanted to be.  That's an important idea in America.  Not only that, it's a civilizing idea that we should be exporting as much as possible, not by forcing others to adopt our political system, but by simply sharing the joy of that type of liberty.  The Cold War was largely won because Russians wanted to wear blue jeans.  That also means that the idea of American exceptionalism, or that America has something to do with this piece of real estate or a certain group of European descendants, doesn't make any sense.
2. Human beings are our greatest resource.  This has really always been true, but it's more apparent in the times in which we live.  Agrarianism is not viable for the overwhelming majority of us, fossil fuels are getting harder to extract and are limited anyway, and our economic vicissitudes since 2008 should teach us not to rely on our bank too much.  We need people.  Creative people who think critically and are able to solve problems.  We talk about that as an economic imperative, but the truth is, we need people like that in every area of our lives.  We should stop viewing school children as future "earners" and imagine them instead as those who can solve the world's problems.  If we did, it would radically change how we think about education in this country, and how we treated other people, including the very poor and the elderly.
3. If we want our political system to work, or perhaps even survive, we need to stop demonizing our fellow citizens.  One of my favorite quotes is by a Scottish theologian named Ian MacLaren who said, "Be kind: everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."  When I post that on Facebook, everyone seems to like it, but it doesn't keep us from talking shit about other people.  (I include myself among the guilty.)  I've heard people refer to the President of the United States as "evil."  Others have called his opponent an "idiot."  Now, less I be misunderstood, I get that people do things that just get on your nerves at times.  Let someone attack the importance of arts education, and I can lose my cool.  But here's the thing: people on the other side are Americans, too.  Everyone talks about the "47%" or the "other 99%" or whatever, but it's all of us.  I remember sitting in a meeting of arts educators once and a national presenter said, "We need to realize that some of those 'red state' people like the arts."  It never even occurred to him that a "red-state person" could be an artist.  We're in this boat together.  Johnny Cash once said that he had been friends with every U.S. president since Richard Nixon, and that he admired them all - though he hadn't voted for all of them.  
4. We need to decide what it means to be an American.  I don't think it has anything at all to do with religion or race or place of origin or language.  Some of the most brilliant contributions to America come from those who were the "tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free."  Some talk about "protecting our borders" as if there are hoards of Mexican terrorists blowing things up all over the South.  (We seem to forget that the Mayflower was filled with illegal immigrants, or did I miss the part of American history where the Massasoit granted travel visas to the Puritans?)  The truth is that too many of us just don't like people who are different.  That's not right and we need to say that - kindly, but firmly.  We insist on being left to ourselves, to being allowed to pursue our own happiness, yet we can also be very intent on preventing others from doing so at times.  It is okay to disagree with another without denying her basic humanity, or her "American-ness."
5. Our political dialog in this country needs to be elevated.  Although I adore social media (and the Internet in general) it has allowed us to be lazy in becoming well-informed and thoughtful in our decision-making.  It seems that we are much more adept as reciting talking points of our political parties than we are at discussing issues thoughtfully and respectfully.  Everyone is an expert on limited government, but no one has read The Federalist Papers.  Everyone has an opinion on Islam but no one knows the five pillars or the history of the Near East.  When was the last time you heard someone say, "I'm not sure - I think I would have to have more information before making an informed decision on that issue"?
6. Along those same lines, our political dialog in this country is too often dictated by the opinions of the far right and far left.  (This actually merits a lengthier discussion regarding electability in increasingly gerrymandered districts.)  The abortion debate is a good example.  Virtually the entire discussion is dominated by those who hold the extreme positions, yet the majority of Americans seem to have a position that is somewhere in between.  We need to have good faith discussions about hard topics like these without trying to destroy each other.
7. I support massive campaign finance reform.  I just read that the presidential candidates have already spent $575 million on television ads alone.  When you factor in all the other campaigns and all the other media, that means that we spend billions in determining who is in power.  I think that decent people would agree that this is unconscionable.  Our elected officials spend their entire political careers working toward re-election, to the neglect of other, more important duties.  I understand the concerns of those who believe the First Amendment protects political spending as protected speech, and might be tempted to agree with them if it did not seem to actually exclude many voices from being heard at all.  There has to be a better way for finding our political leaders.
8. Speaking of the First Amendment, I will happily add here that I support the Bill of Rights without reservation.  In my lifetime I have seen both the left and the right seek to curtail certain of these rights, especially that of free speech.  Although I have yet to meet an absolutist on this issue (fire in a crowded theater, etc.), I think I come pretty close.  I also support gun rights in a way that makes some people nervous.  There are those who suggest that we do not need powerful weapons when we have a standing army, but I would tend to think we need powerful weapons because we have a standing army.  I believe that many of the actions of our current federal government, especially those conducted under the guise of protecting our national security, actually constitute violations of these rights.  
9. Race is still the biggest issue in American culture.  How could it be otherwise?  Africans and their descendants were slaves in this country for over 200 years, then were denied basic human rights for the next 100+ years.  This is the classic example of "Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind."  All Americans, black and white, owe a huge cultural debt to both Europe and Africa.  The tension of this uneasy and usually violent relationship led to poignant and expressive art, especially in music.  (All American music has elements of both northwestern Europe and west Africa: blues, ragtime, hillbilly, jazz, rock, country, bluegrass, gospel, soul, hip-hop and all the rest.)  The downside has been generations of broken families, crime, and poverty.  Those who can't see the relationship between hundreds of years of racial oppression and 850,000 African-American men in prison are just blind.
10. I'm not sure what to think about our role on the world stage right now.  (Please see #5 above.)  I'm tempted to believe we should leave others to their own devices, yet I'm personally troubled when I see our fellow travelers in this world murdered or imprisoned without good cause.  We have the unique ability as a nation to intervene, yet our history of interventions has been very far from pure in motive or outcome.  In many (most?) cases, it has tended to backfire.  I realize how wishy-washy this is for a manifesto.  Can I get back to you on this one?
11. Demand more art.  (You didn't really think I was going to leave that one out did you?)

So, this is my thinking right now.  It's certainly subject to change.  Is it too much to hope you might want to talk about your ideas, too?

Amy

I'm on lots of boards as part of my job.  Sometimes it feels like my life is one long meeting.  For someone who is not a joiner by nature, it has been a rather strange experience and generally speaking, it is not the most enjoyable part of my job.  There are some exceptions though.

Today I was with the board of the West Virginia Thespians at the Poky Dot Diner in Fairmont.  The board meetings in each discipline are all very different and reflect the nature of the artists, I think.  Music educators' meetings tend to be highly organized and more formal.  Art teachers are a little less linear, shall we say, and seem bored by Robert's Rules.  Dance educators seem honored and surprised that there is a meeting for them.  Then there are the theatre folk.

For those of you who do not know any theatre teachers, let me begin by saying that they are a unique breed.  "Dramatic" doesn't really capture it, nor does "theatrical," though these are certainly true.  In any event, they are rather loud as a group.  Couple this with the fact that the Thespians hold their board meeting in conjunction with the student board meeting just one table over and you start to get the picture.

After the conclusion of the meeting, one member, Eileen Miller, wanted to speak to me.  Actually, she wanted to introduce me to a student of hers who serves on the board.  I'll call her Amy.  Amy is a junior this year.  Eileen asked her to tell me what happened yesterday.

"Well," she started, "we got our WESTEST scores back.  I hate when we get them.  It's the worst day all year."  Eileen told me that Amy had been especially worried about her scores this week.  

"How were they?" I asked.

"I got mastery or above mastery in all my reading scores," she said.

"Tell Mr. Deskins why that's a big deal to you," Eileen prodded.

"I had never scored above novice before, "Amy said.

For those of you who do not spend your days speaking educationese, I'll explain.  Students taking our summative assessment, the WESTEST, are given numerical scores.  These are also designated novice, below mastery, mastery, above mastery, or distinguished.  Basically, Amy had leap-frogged one to two levels in one year.  That almost never happens.

So I said, "Wow!  That's impressive.  How did you improve?"

"Mrs. Miller," she said.  "I love theatre."

Eileen told me that she had had Amy her freshman year in Theatre and that during her sophomore year she also took Scriptwriting.  Amy is a special education student, but Eileen keeps the bar high in her class.  Amy wrote and re-wrote.  Her parents said she reads all the time now.  She likes school.  And even though they don't have a lot of money, Amy's parents wrote a $100 check to the school theatre department because they saw the good it was doing their little girl.

Eileen said she had come running into her class yesterday morning and told her, "I'm not stupid anymore."

"You never were," Mrs. Miller answered.

Students like Amy are the reason I get up everyday.  Some of them are those academic "ugly ducklings" - like the geeky girl in the 80s movie who goes to the dance without her glasses and becomes prom queen.  Some of them spend years in a system that regards them in terms of their numerical value to the adults managing it, only to find out late in their school careers that they are good dancers or sing well.  Some of them never find out.

I have heard advocates for our current testing regime argue about the necessity of data collection as if it were a moral imperative.  I guess I understand that.  We need data to make informed decisions.  Yet as an educator I'm concerned with what physicists might call the observer effect.  The very mechanism used to collect data has become the raison d'être of our educational system.  The result has been, in far too many instances, the crushing of student aspirations.

The defenders of the system say that it is not intended to be used this way, that this is the unfortunate by-product of administrators and policy makers who do not understand the correct use of data.  That may be true, but it seems analogous to giving Ginsu knives to a group of three-year-olds and not taking responsibility for the resultant carnage.

The thing that is so tragic from my chair is that it has resulted in too many Amy's in West Virginia being deprived of theatre - or dance or art or music.  This is so wrong-headed as to be infuriating.

In the first place, the arts are central to what it means to be an educated person.  Simple skills in literacy and numeracy will not suffice in the 21st century.  They never did.  Every West Virginia student deserves a comprehensive arts education.

Secondly, even for those whose only concern are test scores, we know that students who have an arts-rich curriculum outperform their peers in nearly every measure of academic achievement.  All the data ever collected seem to suggest this and just this week we have data specific to our own state.

The cohort of West Virginia students who began 9th grade in the 2005-2006 year were studied according to the arts classes they took and leading indicators of achievement.  The study found that students who took two or more arts classes, above the single required course, significantly outperformed their peers on the WESTEST 2 as well as the ACT PLAN.

The data was disaggregated for students with exceptionalities as well as students from poverty - all of West Virginia's Amy's.  The finding?  In every case the result held and in some instances, the effect was more profound for these students.  (You can read a one-page summary of the research study here - thanks Nate Hixson and Andy Whisman.)

And so, I am inspired again to keep fighting, and I hope you are, too.  In West Virginia, the arts are core and arts education is a civil right.  Demand more art.

West Virginians Should Demand More Art in Schools

Anyone who knows me will tell you I've become fairly radicalized in the last few years.  I guess it has something to do with the gig I have, or perhaps its just a matter of looking at the evidence again and again.  Maybe its the fact that I live a lot closer to state politics than I used to.  In any event, "radical" is probably the best way to describe my opinions.  I'll begin with a proposition.

In 2012, a comprehensive arts education is the civil right of every student in West Virginia schools.

I didn't always think this way.  It's not that I wasn't an advocate of arts education - I was.  I just didn't think of it in those terms.  I believed that the arts were core academic offerings.  I still do.  I believed that every student should have a comprehensive arts education.  I just didn't frame it in terms of "rights." 

So, why do I now?

Well, let's begin with the facts, the things that are undisputed.

First, we know that the arts are central to what it means to be an educated person.  They always have been.  If you disagree with that, you are a Philistine at best and an imbecile at worst.  The idea that an educated person would be unfamiliar with the architecture of the Egyptians, the drama of the Greeks, the sculpture of the Romans, the poetry of the Hebrews, the calligraphy of the Chinese, the dance of the West Africans, the vocal polyphony of the Italian High Renaissance, etc., ad infinitum, is simply unthinkable.  I would like to get in my Delorean and flog the idiot who coined the phrase, "The Three R's."  Apart from his miserable capacity for spelling, he seems to have missed the point of education.  It as, as Robert Hutchins once said, to unsettle minds, widen horizons, and inflame intellects.

Secondly, it has been one of the primary goals of the Republic, at least, when she was led by statesmen.  I frequently quote John Adams on this point: " I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.  My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."  Do you get the import of that?!  Our second president believed all his efforts to establish a constitutional government by the people were to give his progeny the right to study the arts.  While I would not suggest that this is the only purpose of a peaceful republic, what nobler pursuits can one imagine?  

Lastly, let me point out all that we know about the benefits of a thorough education that includes the arts.  The arts are engaging to students.  The arts address the cognitive, affective, and physical needs of students.  The arts allow students with exceptional needs to experience academic success in multiple subjects.  Students from poverty perform better in school if they have the arts.  In fact, students with an arts-rich curriculum outperform their peers in nearly every measure of academic success.

These are the facts, and they are undisputed.  (Hat tip to Kevin Bacon in A Few Good Men there.)

So what's the effin' problem?  Why don't we have schools with comprehensive arts offerings?

The short answer is: because we choose to ignore the facts.

This should not be surprising.  For most of us, beliefs matter more than facts.  As a culture, we have come to believe a story about education, and the story tells us that the arts are somehow less important than language, mathematics, or the sciences.  As Ken Robinson has noted, this is largely due to the fact that public education systems are the product of the Industrial Revolution.  Simply put, we built education systems in this country (and around the world) the way that industrial barons wished them to be built.  The skills necessary for work in the mine, the mill, or the factory were the ones that were taught.  And not only were those skills and aptitudes taught, but so were those habits of mind: conformity, compliance, obedience, hierarchy, etc.

To suggest that this will not meet the present need is to simply state the obvious.  Yet in my home state, there is simply no political decision that is made that is not beholden to the coal industry.  I used to not believe that.  I am wiser now.  Come election day, voters in West Virginia will have a choice between a party that says they support coal and a party that says they really support coal.  All else is secondary.  West Virginia gets press for being anti-Obama because of its perceived racism.  While I don't doubt that plays a significant role, the simple truth is that the president is perceived as being anti-coal.  (I once was behind a coal truck in Mingo County with a bumper sticker that read: "Vote for Coal.  It's Black, Too." True story.)

Another key belief has something to do with an individual's rights.  Here in the U.S., we believe that property rights are sacrosanct.  Now, I believe in personal property rights.  I don't think that one has the right to seize the property of another, real or otherwise, without due process of law.  I also don't support the massive redistribution of wealth.  But English common law, the foundation of all of our notions about property rights, simply did not anticipate the fossil fuel industry.  It is inconceivable to me that a few generations of industrialists have the right to seize billions of dollars of non-renewable natural resources without it redounding to the benefit of the greater society.  It would be akin to draining the oceans of the world for profit while suggesting that no responsibility is owed to the culture at large.

"But coal companies pay taxes!"  I know they do.  Yet I also know that the counties in West Virginia that produce the most coal have some of the poorest school systems in the state.  I do not think this is coincidental.  For years, many of those school systems have been preparing those students for a life in the mines or on a tipple.  I would argue that this was ethically indefensible from the start; now it is also economically untenable.  Though the coal industry has historically been a major provider of work in our state, they increasingly employ fewer and fewer people to extract the same amount of minerals from the ground.  This is just the nature of technological development.

There are very many who today talk about the need for school reform.  They point to the changing nature of work in our country, and they are absolutely right.  Very few of our students in West Virginia schools will be joining the rank and file in the mines upon graduation.  Schools need to become places that allow students to succeed in a 21st century work force.  This includes the arts.  It is no longer necessary, for example, for a professional musician to live in Los Angeles or Nashville or New York or Chicago to work.  Many work virtually, from their homes, irrespective of geography.

Yet even the changing nature of work does not begin to suggest the changes that need to happen in education today.  To suggest that the primary role of public education is to prepare a workforce still presupposes that school systems serve the needs of industry.  If we are to transform education, schools must become places where we serve the needs of our students.  It is essential that our students leave schools prepared to make a living, but they also need to be prepared to make a life.  This includes so much more than job skills.  They need to be prepared to be informed citizens in the democracy.  They need to learn how to live healthy lives.  They need to love a life of the mind.  And they need the arts.

If we allow that education is the right of every child who lives in West Virginia (as our state's constitution does), then it stands to reason that they have a right to an education that includes the arts.  To deprive a child of an comprehensive arts education is to deprive a child of an education.  Our schools are neither "thorough" nor "efficient" (as required by law) if they do not include the arts.

This was a finding of the original "Recht decision" (Pauley v. Bailey) in 1982.  The West Virginia Supreme Court found that schools were in violation of a student's civil rights when they failed to meet certain criteria, including many in the arts.  Thirty years hence we have made little to no progress on this front, even though it could be argued that the arts are more vital now to a child's education.  Our technologies demand flexible, creative thinkers that arts classes foster.  We have a society that requires visual literacy more and more.  Dance provides another outlet for addressing our childhood obesity crisis.  And fundamentally, the arts are part of what it means to be a human being - in our century, the same as any other.

When will we see this transformation in our schools?  When we demand it.  The history of civil rights in this country teaches us that little progress is made until it is demanded of legislators, policy-makers, and other power brokers.  There have been advocates for arts education in this country for over a century.  Everyone knows the benefits of the arts for our students.  It is a "white hat" issue.  Yet there are children who have school every day without dance, without theatre, without visual art, or without music.  

I contend that we should teach dance every single day to children the same way we teach them mathematics.  I believe that art matters as much as language.  I think that theatre is no less important than science.

We need to abandon terms like "enrichment."  Of course the arts enrich us - in precisely the same way literacy does.  To be deprived of an arts education is to be consigned to educational poverty.  Describing these disciplines as "related arts" or "encore subjects" likewise suggests that the arts are not for everyone, or perhaps are of lesser importance for some of our students.  All West Virginia students need the arts.  The data suggest that the arts are actually more important for students from poverty or with disabilities. 

Students, parents, teachers, and community members should begin making these demands of their schools.  We should not be satisfied with smiles and words of encouragement.  Smiles and words are easy: change is hard.  We are glad for the sympathy of others, but what we need is their action.  

If West Virginia students are to meet their aspirations, all of us must begin demanding more art in school.  I hope you'll join me.