Like Mom and apple pie, everyone loves and believes in a well-rounded education. Ensuring that every child gets one, however, has proven to be a challenge of Herculean magnitude—despite compelling evidence that it’s precisely what disadvantaged students most desperately need to close persistent achievement gaps and compete academically with their more fortunate peers. Enter the Every Student Succeeds Act. As this report from Scott D. Jones and Emily Workman of the Education Commission of the States (ECS) notes, while concerns about providing children a well-rounded education “have not received the same degree of attention as hot-button issues like equitable funding and accountability indicators, it could be considered a foundational element of the new federal law.”
Foundational, perhaps. But is it enforceable? Education Secretary John King has lately been using the bully pulpit to promote the virtues of a well-rounded education. “States now have the opportunity to broaden their definition of educational excellence, to include providing students strong learning experiences in science, social studies, world languages, and the arts,” King is quoted as saying by the ECS authors. “That’s a huge and welcome change.”
Yes and no. In truth, states have always had the “opportunity” to broaden their definition of educational excellence. The question is why, in the main, they haven’t done so. On the one hand, a case can be made that federal education policy has discouraged states from providing a well-rounded education by tacitly promoting a too-narrow view of reading (I have argued elsewhere that this is precisely what happened under NCLB). Accountability policies that demand fast and measurable gains in reading functionally privilege a skills-and-strategies approach to reading instruction. This discourages the kind of steady investments in knowledge and vocabulary that build mature reading comprehension, which is a slow-growing plant. Merely encouraging a well-rounded education is insufficient. If states don’t use their “opportunity” under ESSA to actively and aggressively incentivize the delivery of a well-rounded education, the phrase will remain a mere platitude.
Jones and Workman offer examples of how ESSA might improve policy and practice. For starters we have the law’s expanded definition of a well-rounded education, which now includes writing, engineering, music, technology, and career and technical education. There’s Title I, which requires that all districts provide a “well-rounded program of instruction that meets the needs of all students,” and Title II, which allows funds to be used to help teachers “integrate comprehensive literacy instruction into a well-rounded education.” And there are “flexible block grants” through which ESSA “creates some accountability around incentives for providing a well-rounded education…particularly for minority groups, including women, English language learners, students with disabilities, and low-income students.” By not limiting states to specific areas in which to apply for funding, local education agencies “are free to emphasize any of the multiple subjects listed in ESSA, select their own, or integrate across subjects,” the authors note: “The possibilities are endless in how states can utilize this [block grant] program to make meaningful investments in their students.”
“With ESSA, districts are asked to conduct a comprehensive needs assessment to identify the needs of their unique populations and to make investments to address those needs,” the authors note. Let me offer districts a leg up on that needs assessment: Every child needs a well-rounded education. And you don’t start that after children learn how to read. You build readers by providing it from the very first days of school. The next Massachusetts will be the state that best understands this truth, adopts curriculum that delivers it, trains teachers to implement it, and uses their newfound flexibility to ensure that kids benefit from it.
Or we can just keep talking about it.
SOURCE: Emily Workman and Scott D. Jones, “ESSA’s Well-Rounded Education,” Education Commission of the States (June 2016).
