Nah no bloat
Arts in Education Model Development and
Dissemination Grants. Reasonable people can
disagree about whether or not a strong arts
component is required for an “excellent” education.
This program, which works to
strengthen arts education in elementary and
secondary schools,54 is therefore acceptable
under this heading.
At least two grant recipients, however, are
not, because they offer programs that can in
no way be construed as providing an “excellent”
education. The first, a partnership
between the Long Beach Unified School
District, Cal State University at Long Beach,
and an arts agency called Dramatic Results,
runs a project that “will provide systematic,
illustrated information showing how to use
basketry to provide quality arts instruction
and how to integrate basketry into the academic
curricula to strengthen instruction in
math.”55 A project literally relying on basket
weaving to teach about art and math? That
hardly seems conducive to establishing
“national excellence.”
The second grantee is Storybridge, a partnership
between Stagebridge, “a nationally
acclaimed theatre of seniors,” and the
Oakland Unified School District. Its mission
is to bring “storytelling, oral history, and
intergenerational theater by senior citizens to
at-risk, low-income urban elementary students.”
56 Worthwhile objectives, perhaps, but
oral story telling and “intergenerational
understanding” are hardly central to educational
excellence. Moreover, a district like
Oakland, California, which has performed so
poorly that the state took it over in 2003,57
would surely be better served by applying the
time and money spent on Storybridge to
teaching basic reading and writing. Together,
the Storybridge and Dramatic Results projects
have received nearly half a million dollars
from the federal government.58
