Council for Basic Education
March 2004
The Council for Basic Education has gone back to its roots of defending liberal arts education with this report, which describes principals' perception of whether the amount of classroom time being devoted to reading, math, science, social studies/history, civics, geography, foreign language, and the arts - all central to a well-rounded liberal arts education - has increased or decreased over the past several years, and whether they expect it to increase/decrease in the near future. CBE undertook this study out of concern that, despite the many positive potential benefits of NCLB, that statute "may well contribute to a significant danger that has not received the attention it deserves: At a time when school budgets are under extraordinary stress, the exclusive focus on the law's accountability provisions on mathematics, reading, and, eventually, science is diverting significant time and resources from other academic subjects." Not surprisingly, survey results tend to confirm this suspicion: about 75 percent of schools have increased their instructional time devoted to reading, math, and science and authors found "ample evidence of waning commitment to the arts, foreign language, and elementary social studies," particularly in schools with high minority populations. For example, while only nine percent of low-minority school principals reported a decrease in the instructional time devoted to foreign languages, 23 percent of principals in high-minority schools reported such decreases. This trend was even more acute in social studies, where, overall, 29 percent of elementary principals reported decreases in instructional time while nearly half of principals in high minority schools reported such declines. The CBE report does not, however, mention the likelihood that these high minority schools need to devote more instructional time to remediation if their students are to meet the minimum requirements mandated by NCLB. Perhaps total instructional time needs to increase. A related question is whether the extra time for reading and math will end as more students reach proficiency in those subjects. We hope CBE will revisit this issue after several years of NCLB implementation. To access a copy of the report for yourself, visit http://www.c-b-e.org/PDF/cbe_principal_Report.pdf.
