5/3/05 -- According to NSBA’s new president, Joan Schmidt, schools must educate the whole child, and that means the arts, health, and early childhood education are just as important as such basics as math and reading.
Schmidt, who assumed the presidency of NSBA for 2005-06 April 18 during NSBA’s Annual Conference, outlined her key concerns in a speech at the final General Session.
“If we are committed to meaningful education reform,” Schmidt says, “we must address the needs of the whole child. This becomes a moral imperative with no room for compromise. And it won’t be easy in today’s political climate.”
One reason is the lack of resources. “Funding has been withdrawn from music programs,” Schmidt says, “despite research showing that music instruction can improve literacy, build brain connections that strengthen mathematical reasoning, and improve critical thinking skills.”
And, she says, health programs also are facing funding cuts, “despite research showing that children who are physically and emotionally healthy learn better and achieve more.”
But the lack of funding isn’t the only problem, Schmidt says. “High-stakes testing is putting unprecedented pressure on our public schools. And one consequence has been a narrowing of the curriculum.”
“Meanwhile,” she says, “there is an ongoing need for early childhood programs that address the needs of children who are just entering our public schools.”
“It takes courage to stand firm as an advocate of excellence in education for every child,” Schmidt told the audience. School board members must “insist that the needs of the whole child be addressed, to proclaim to a doubting public that hungry, hurting children do not learn well, and then to set high standards for what students should know and be able to do, knowing full well that education is costly, and that children do not vote.”
She also says, “It takes courage to stand firm as an advocate of equity in education for every child, to seek ways to eradicate biases against racial and ethnic minorities, and to confront the ways in which poverty ravages its innocent victims, knowing full well that quality education is the ultimate form of affirmative action.”
According to Schmidt, “these are tough times, and service on a school board is not for the faint of heart.”
“If we are truly committed to educating all of the children, we had better not settle for merely raising test scores,” she says. “We must prepare our children to participate in a democratic society, to make ethical decisions, to live in a community. And we must help them grow as human beings, able to experience life intellectually and artistically, enriched by music, theater, and art. And we must support the physical and emotional well-being of our children.”
And the hard part, she says, is “we must be role models of all that we want the children to become.”
“We are one nation,” she says, “called to educate all of the children -- the ones who have traveled the world and the ones who have never stepped outside of the ghetto, the children whose every meal is nutritious and those whose only healthy meal is the school lunch, children who can read when they enter kindergarten and those who have never held a book in their hands.”
“These are our children -- every one of them,” Schmidt says. “They are counting on us.”