Fairfax County
Public Schools in the PINK
Roger Tomhave
My assistant superintendent for accountability
once asked me, “Roger,
what would education
look like in Fairfax County Public
Schools that would knock our socks
off?” So began a journey that started
in January 2005. Our superintendent, Jack Dale, sat at the front of
the conference room with a large red
and white striped Cat in the Hat hat
on, to drive home the point that our
leadership team was not looking for
business-as-usual responses.
At the table were all of our assistant superintendents, and all of our
curriculum coordinators—around
thirty of the most dedicated, hard-est working, and best thinkers that I
know.
made their “adequate yearly progress” for a second year due to one or
more subgroups missing the mark.
At these schools, we had seen parents with the wherewithal for school
choice move to neighboring schools,
leaving behind
the lowest
performing students. Worse,
we had seen
teachers with great skills transfer
to other schools leaving first-year
teachers to replace them.
The Climate of NCLB
Fairfax County, like every other
public school system in the nation,
was trying to project out to 2014 in
a climate of No Child Left Behind
(NCLB). We were well aware of the
foreboding prospect of 100% of our
students passing all of Virginia’s
requirements of federally mandated
examinations, something that our
mathematics coordinator had called
“a statistical impossibility.”
We had seen the results of excellent public schools that had not
erated in twenty-first century skills.
These skills can be summarized
as skills of creativity and innovation, critical thinking and problem
solving, and communication and
collaboration, including those of
informa-
I believed we were teaching and tion literacy,
testing our students for our past media literacy,
and not for their future. multicultural
literacy, and
visual literacy. In short, we need stu-
dents who can think and communi-
cate in many ways in a global arena.
Another great source to make
the case for the arts amid an ever-
narrowing curriculum is the work
of Ellen Winner, Lois Hetland, and
company: “There is, however, a very
good reason to teach arts in schools,
and it’s not the one that arts sup-
porters tend to fall back on. In a
recent study of several art classes in
Boston-area schools, we found that
arts programs teach a specific set
of thinking skills rarely addressed
elsewhere in the curriculum—and
that far from being irrelevant in a
test-driven education system, arts
education is becoming even more
important as standardized tests like
the MCAS exert a narrowing influ-
ence over what schools teach. The
implications are broad, not just for
schools but for society. As schools
cut time for the arts, they may
be losing their ability to produce
not just the artistic creators of the
future, but innovative leaders who
improve the world they inherit.”
(Winner and Hetland, 2007)
A Whole New Mind
In December 2005, as a present
from Ann Erickson, one of our art
resource teachers, I received A
Whole New Mind:
Moving from the
Information Age to
the Conceptual Age,
by Daniel H. Pink,
contributing editor for
Wired magazine and
former speech writer
for former Vice Presi-
dent Al Gore.
I related to our
superintendent why I
was so excited about
the book. I described
how I believed we
were teaching and
testing our students
for our past and not
for their future. We needed to be pre-
paring our students for a “conceptual
age.”
In A Whole New Mind, Daniel
Pink describes abundance, Asia, and
automation as the driving forces that
are moving us away from a technological age to a conceptual age. He
describes the aptitudes of design,
story, symphony, play, empathy,
and meaning as those essential to
success in the twenty-first century.
The skills Pink describes are reit-
Twenty-First Century Skills
The educational ties to Pink’s aptitudes, our take on twenty-first century skills, and the latest research
for the importance of the arts in
education have taken off in Fairfax
County Public Schools. Since the
