Journal of Educational Practice for Social Change 2012 | Page 4

Jennifer King Pullman has been an educator for over 20 years, teaching students from pre-school through college in both
general and art education. Her work in urban districts inspired a passion for helping so-called failing students achieve positive
self-esteem, success, and impressive accomplishments through art education, in academic as well as artistic arenas. In 2007,
she completed her Ph.D. in Education with a self-designed specialization in Art Education K-12 from Walden University. She
currently teaches art at Atlantic City High School in NJ, and heads the Community Arts Collaboration, linking art students
with community projects to advance their success as young artists, and to support positive social change in the community
through art events and projects. Jennifer also serves as a mentor for beginning art teachers, and writes about the challenges
and amazing opportunities of learning through the arts.

JENNIFER KING PULLMAN

Y

esterday I left the brilliant August sunshine and soft, summer breezes to
enter my stale, windowless art classroom, where mountains of supply
boxes awaited my attention. In an initial act to christen the start of a

new school year, I pulled my lesson plan and curriculum guide binders out of a
jammed storage closet to begin to make room for another school year’s needs. A
stack of old plans slipped from one binder, fanning out and landing at my feet as
if to remind me of all we’d been through together—and all the intense work that is
about to begin.
As I picked up the papers from the floor, my mind wandered uneasily to
thoughts of the newly implemented stringent and increased teacher evaluations
we will all face in New Jersey this year, similar to those of so many other teachers
in the United States. Teams of supervisors will be in our classrooms multiple
times, evaluating the effectiveness of our teaching based on—well, that part has
not been clarified much yet, other than in outlines found in communications from
our teachers association leaders. These updates indicate our success will be
evaluated as it is seen in our students’ “performance tasks” (New Jersey
Department of Education, 2011). For arts teachers, the performance tasks will be
heavily weighted, since our subjects are not included in the major proposed focal
component—improvements in student standardized test scores (Knab & DeBlieu,
2011). “Value-added models” (VAMs) are currently in the news as a means for
using statistical methods to evaluate changes in students’ test scores over time,
and further, to identify influential factors contributing to the changes (DarlingHammond, Amrein-Beardsley, Haertel, & Rothstein, 2012). As arts educators, we
can be considered one of the “influential factors”, even if our subjects are not
testable ones. How well these new approaches will ultimately work is fodder for
debate (Newton, Darling-Hammond, Haertel, & Thomas, 2011; Rothstein, 2007),
but the approaches are a reality nonetheless.
We now find ourselves entangled in dictates and procedures extending
beyond the once-simple task of assessing our arts students. Our evaluations as
teachers now come into play and affect the way we must assess our students. We
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