While I was producing my profile of Saranac Lake High School choral director Helen Demong yesterday, I kept thinking about public education in general.<\/p>\n
Demong does something which, on its face, is pretty hard.\u00a0 She teaches incredibly complex music — much of it classical — to students who enter her program, many of them arriving with very little grounding in the arts.<\/p>\n
She demands that her students comport themselves like, well, adults.\u00a0 They are held to technical standards that are extraordinarily high.\u00a0\u00a0 They also present themselves with dignity and poise.<\/p>\n
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Demong does what we all want our public schools to do, forcing young people to think and reason and work, while also guiding them through a complex transition from childhood to adulthood.<\/p>\n
Most of us have experienced teachers this good at one time or another and it’s why so many of us consider public education a near-sacred institution.<\/p>\n
But it’s also fair to ask, especially in a state like New York where we spend incredible amounts of money on education, why this isn’t more common.<\/p>\n
Yes, schools are faced with severe budget challenges these days.<\/p>\n
But according to the APRAP report releaed by the Adirondack Association of Towns and Villages, the number of school teachers in the Park rose 34 percent over the last four decades, while the number of students dropped by 31 percent.<\/p>\n
In theory, that means we should still have the people-power to deliver brilliant, innovative, risk-taking, and demanding education to our kids.<\/p>\n
We should be attracting instructors accomplished enough — in their fields of instruction and as teachers — to demand excellence from the young people in our schools.<\/p>\n
I’m not suggesting that our schools and our teachers are inferior.\u00a0 Helen Demong is living proof that we have pockets of real excellence.\u00a0 And our overall standards are, to borrow Garrison Keillor’s phrase, above average.<\/p>\n
I’m just wondering if we can’t pursue her model of demanding instruction and her level of ambition more aggressively in other fields, from math and science departments to English and foreign language programs.<\/p>\n
As always, your thoughts welcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
While I was producing my profile of Saranac Lake High School choral director Helen Demong […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[6],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3804"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3804"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3804\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3805,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3804\/revisions\/3805"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}