For Neda

When the Nazis came for the communists, I did not protest;
I was not a communist.

Then they locked up the social democrats, I did not protest;
I was not a social democrat.

Then they came for the trade unionists, I did not protest;
I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, I did not protest;
I was not a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to protest.

--- Pastor Martin Niemöller

I am not an Iranian, either. But we are all Neda.

Final Round: Federal Funding of Arts Education Research

Below, you will find my response to the email I received yesterday from John Q. Easton, the newly-appointed Director of the Department of Education's Institute for Education Research, which was in turn a response to my inquiry about the IES' policy of excluding arts education from research funding.

I am entirely satisfied by this response, which I'll hazard to summarize as "the policy priorities that you have questioned are under review, and a public-comment phase is part of the review process, so you can have your say then."

My cynical side can't help but notice that the process that led to the adoption of the current priorities also had a public-comment phase, and that -- according to the minutes of the meeting at which the current priorities were approved -- one of the most common public comments requested a "broadening of the focus on academic content beyond math, reading, and science." Why would public comment succeed in broadening the IES' focus this time around, when such public comment had no apparent effect last time?

To answer my own question, the answer may be that the current financial crisis -- with its potential for decimating of arts education programs nationwide -- may lead the arts education advocacy community to make an even stronger lobbying effort this time around. Nothing focuses the mind like a hanging.

If, on the other hand, the arts education community cannot mount a sufficiently-strong lobbying effort to change this policy, then that failure will prove that the political cost of under-funding arts education research is small, and the current policy is likely to continue.

Gentlepersons, start your engines.

-----------------------

From: Jim Plamondon [mailto:jim@igetitmusic.com]
Sent: Tuesday, June 23, 2009 8:53 AM
To: 'Easton, John'
Cc: 'Harvey, Edith'; 'Geddes, Claire'; 'Jonathan Levy'; 'Ruth Clark'; 'Tom Rudolph'; 'Wendy Free'; 'Michael McCaul'; 'Kay Bailey Hutchison'; 'John Cornyn'
Subject: RE: arts education research policy

Dear Dr. Easton,

I look forward to participating in the IES’ priority-review process. If you would be so kind as to have my email address added to the relevant list server, I would appreciate it. I will also explore further the IES’ “unsolicited proposals” program.

Your description of the IES’ upcoming priority-review process, and your invitation to participate in it via public comment, satisfies my policy inquiry. Other than adding my email address to the relevant list server, I will seek no further follow-up. I appreciate your pursuing this inquiry to a satisfactory response. :-)

Regarding Chicago’s Ambrose Plamondon School – it was built in 1905, and named after Ambrose Plamondon (1833-1896), a founder of Chicago’s manufacturing industry. His firms led the nation in developing the “high-tech” equipment that efficiently transmitted steam power to individual factory machines (before the industrial use of electricity), and in developing “high-tech” systems for efficiently pasteurizing beer (thus making beer more affordable and enabling its nation-wide distribution).

Ambrose’s brother was my grandfather’s grandfather, so I am Ambrose’s (very distant) nephew. My grandfather – also named Ambrose Plamondon – was a motorcycle cop in Chicago after World War I, until an accident shattered his leg, ruined his circulation, and led him to move to warmer California in the early 1930’s. His descendants are now scattered across the West.

My relationship with Ambrose is closer than blood, however. He and I share an intense focus on using contemporary “high tech” to increase efficiency, reduce costs, and broaden access – objectives which, I suspect, are right in line with those of the Obama Administration, given the financial constraints under which it finds itself.

Eager to help ensure that this focus on educational efficiency will figure prominently in the IES’ revised priorities, I remain

Yours Respectfully,

Jim Plamondon
Austin, Texas

Round 4: Federal Funding of Arts Education Research

Here's an email I received yesterday from Dr. John Eastman, the newly-confirmed Director of the Department of Education's Institute for Education Science (IES). I've added a couple of embedded URLs, but not edited it in any other way.

-----------------

From: Easton, John [mailto:John.Easton@ed.gov]
Sent: Monday, June 22, 2009 1:54 PM
To: jim@igetitmusic.com
Subject:

Dear Mr. Plamondon,

Thank you for your interest in education research and your belief in the importance of arts education. As you may know, we recently released NAEP assessment results for music and visual arts for grades 4 and 8. I attended the release and was heartened by the turnout of so many people who believe in the importance for arts education in our schools today.

As the Director of IES, it is my responsibility to propose priorities for IES to the National Board for Education Sciences, which has the authority to approve or reject those priorities. The current priorities were approved by the Board on September 6, 2005. Over the next year, as I expand my understanding of the needs of schools in our country, I will develop new priorities for IES. The proposed priorities will be available for public comment through the Federal Register and the IES website. After consideration of those comments, the priorities will be proposed to the Board for approval. I will be eager to hear your input, along with many others.

Please note that currently there are provisions for proposed research that is not directly linked to our priorities -- through our “unsolicited proposals” program. See http://ies.ed.gov/funding/unsolicited.asp

Finally, as you may know, I just started in this position on June 1, having come from Chicago where I worked with schools in a variety of research related positions. I made several visits to CPS’s Plamondon school this past year. I wonder if there is a connection?

Sincerely,

John Q. Easton
Director
Institute of Education Sciences

Passing arguments to Flex event handlers using closures

Today, with help from my new friend Jack Kennedy (in San Antonio) and various online sources, I learned how to use "closures" to pass arguments to event handlers in Flex. I remember learning about function closures in a abstract way when studying for my Computer Science degree back in the mid-1980's, but I'd never had the opportunity/need to use them professionally. They weren't supported by any of the languages I was using then, but they are more widely supported now. They are supported in ActionScript 3.0.

Here's the problem I faced this week. I wanted to use a Flex timer to drive an animation, so I created a Timer object and registered an event listener function on it. The listener callback would be called whenever the timer dispatched a TIMER or TIMER_COMPLETE message. But...the callback function needed to access information that was not available within the scope of the callback function. I could put that information into a global variable, but that would smell bad. There did not seem to be a way to hook Timer to dispatch a custom subclass of TimerEvent, which was my first thought -- and my local info wouldn't be available to Timer's TimerEvent factory, anyway. I was stumped.

I recalled that Jack had mentioned, over dinner recently, that he used Timers frequently (and Flash animation rarely), so I figured that he must know how to overcome this problem. Between his cogent, concise response to my email inquiry, and some research to help me understand what closures were and how to use them correctly, I got my code working properly.

First, though, I put together this simple test app to experiment with:


Press the "Draw Circles" button, and the code draws a bunch of randomly-sized circles. The first circle is red, with subsequent circles increasing in hue through a cyclic rainbow until reaching red again, at which point all of the circles are erased. Clearly, the callback function "knows something" about color, else it could not progress smoothly through the rainbow as it does. How is the "Draw Circles" button's click handler providing that state information to the TIMER event callback function?

The answer: through the use of a closure. See the code here.

www.igetitmusic.com/blog/SWFs/ClosureTest/srcview/index.html

All of the magic happens in drawCircleHandler(). Here's the code from inside of drawCircleHandler() that registers the callback function for TIMER events:
// pass args to TIMER event handler using a "closure"
var count:Number = 0;
t.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER,
function TimerHandler():void {
// Every time TimerHandler() is called, it increments
// drawCircleHandler()'s local variable "count"
count += DEGREES_IN_CIRCLE/MAX_CIRCLES;
drawColoredCircleInComponent(degreesToRGB(count), cCanvas);
});

(Clearly, I need to figure out how to embed pretty-printed source code in these blog posts.)

The essential point is that TimerHandler(), being defined within the body of drawCircleHandler(), can access drawCircleHandler()'s local variables, such as "count". Every time TimerHandler() is called by Flex's event-dispatching code, it increments the value of "count". This is rather magical, since drawCircleHandler() will long since have completed its execution by then, so one might think that its local (stack frame) variables would have been liquidated. But apparently, the closure's environment is allocated dynamically (from the heap) and retained (i.e., not garbage-collected) so long as anything points at it...anything, including as a Timer's listener-list.

You'll note that "count" is incremented in TimerHandler(). That wasn't my first design. First, I passed "count" into drawColoredCircleInComponent(), in which I incremented it and calculated its RGB equivalent. I figured that since "count" was a Number and therefore an Object, it was being passed by reference, so anything I did to "count" inside of drawColoredCircleInComponent() would act on the local "count" in drawCircleHandler(). Not so; the value of "count" stayed zero -- its initial value. Bummer.

In the second design, I incremented "count" in TimerHandler() and then passed it into drawColoredCircleInComponent(), where its RGB equivalent was calculated. This worked, but it didn't smell right -- why should drawColoredCircleInComponent() know about both "count" and color? My first design had the same smell, once I thought about it. It smelled better -- to my nose, at least -- to have TimerHandler() do handle both incrementing "count" and the calculation of its RGB equivalent, thereby localizing the semantics of "count" within the scope of drawCircleHandler().

That's my story, anyway, and I'm sticking to it. ;-)

Thanks, Jack! :-)

Federal Funding of Arts Education Research: Round 3

Here's the follow-up email I sent earlier today to the US Department of Education, in response to their response of June 9th to my policy inquiry of May 19th.

Basically, I just ask the same questions over again, after pointing out how their initial response was, er, unresponsive. I also suggest that perhaps the new head of the DoEd's Institute for Education Science (IES) – whose appointment had not yet been confirmed, nor term begun, when I sent my first inquiry – would be the best person to answer the questions, since the research funding programs are administered by the IES.

I await the IES' response.

------------------------------

From: Jim Plamondon [mailto:jim@igetitmusic.com]
Sent: Saturday, June 13, 2009 3:17 PM
To: 'Harvey, Edith'; 'Easton, John'
Cc: 'Geddes, Claire'; 'Jonathan Levy'; 'Ruth Clark'; 'Tom Rudolph'; 'Wendy Free'; 'Michael McCaul'; 'Kay Bailey Hutchison'; 'John Cornyn'
Subject: RE: US Department of Education response to your inquiry

Dear Ms. Harvey,

I appreciate your response of 9th June (below) to my email of 19th May to Secretary Duncan, in which I inquired as to whether the Department of Education would continue the Bush-era policy of excluding arts education research from receiving funding from the DoEd’s research grant programs.

I would have appreciated your response even more if it had answered the questions that I had asked. ;-)

In your response, you stated that “The Institute of Education Sciences oversees the research initiatives you inquire about. Their website can be found at the following address: http://ies.ed.gov.”

I appreciate your bringing this information to my attention, although my initial email (appended below)
(a) mentioned the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) and its relevant research funding programs by name;
(a) included links to IES website’s relevant web pages; and
(b) was copied to the IES staff member (Dr. Jonathan Levy) who administers those research grant programs.

[Jim: yes, I really did number these items a, a, & b – rather than a, b, & c – which I noticed only after I had sent the email.]

In your response, you stated that “The Department of Education funds several arts education grant programs.”

The only such arts-related program mentioned on DoEd’s website as receiving DoEd grant funding is its Arts in Education outreach program, of which, according to this web page, you are the overseer. Thank you for helping this outreach program, which is described on that web page as seeking to “encourage the involvement of, and foster greater awareness of the need for, arts programs for persons with disabilities.” While this is indeed a worthy program, which I heartily support, it is an outreach program, and my initial inquiry was focused specifically on *research* funding, not outreach funding. If the DoEd funds any arts education *research* programs, I would welcome hearing about them.

With arts education poised to bear the brunt of crisis-driven state and local school budget cuts, research into new means of significantly increasing the educational efficiency of arts instruction – thus giving it more bang for the buck – could not be more timely. This is particularly true, given that the percentage of the US economy that is driven by arts-based creative industries is high and rising. Unfortunately, the IES’ website states clearly that research funding is available only for research into “reading, writing, mathematics, or science” – a list which clearly excludes research into arts education per se.

For your convenience, I will re-state the questions I asked in my initial email:
1. Is it the official policy of the IES, under the Obama Administration, to continue to exclude arts education research from funding under the IES’ Education Technology research initiative?
2. Is it the official policy of the IES, under the Obama Administration, to continue to exclude arts education research from funding under the IES’ Cognition and Student Learning research initiative?
3. If the answer to either or both of the above questions is “yes,” then what change in circumstances would need to be effected in order to make those answers “yes" [Jim: should have been "no" – another typo/error] and what chain of events would be required to bring about that ultimate change in circumstances?

Perhaps these questions could be best answered by the IES’ new Director, Dr. John Q. Easton (whose appointment was confirmed, and whose term began, after I sent my initial enquiry on May 19th). I have taken the liberty of copying Dr. Easton’s presumed email address, John.Easton@ed.gov, on the “to-line” of this message. If this is not his actual email address, I would appreciate your forwarding it to him accordingly.

Respectfully Yours,

Jim Plamondon
Austin, Texas

Federal Arts Funding: Response

I just received the following response from the Department of Education to my email of May 19th.
-----------------------------------

From: Geddes, Claire [mailto:Claire.Geddes@ed.gov]
Sent: Friday, June 12, 2009 10:49 AM
To: 'jim@igetitmusic.com'
Subject: US Department of Education response to your inquiry

June 9, 2009

Dear Mr. Plamondon:

Thank you for your letter to Secretary Duncan indicating your concern about the inclusion of arts education technology research in the Institute of Education Sciences’ (IES) research initiatives. Your letter has been sent to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Innovation and Improvement for a response and I have been asked to respond.

It is encouraging to hear from people such as yourself who have definitive ideas about arts education research and its applications. I encourage you to share your ideas on arts education research and instruction with local educators and community leaders.

The research in your JIMS program demonstrates your dedication to arts education technology research and to students. The Department of Education funds several arts education grant programs, and reports from these programs indicate that students who participate in the arts are students who typically do well in reading and math. The Institute of Education Sciences oversees the research initiatives you inquire about. Their website can be found at the following address: http://ies.ed.gov/.

Again, thank you for sharing your concerns with us.

Sincerely,

Edith Harvey
Director
Improvement Programs

-----------------------------------

I'd hoped for more -- including, perhaps, actual answers to my direct questions -- but the above is perhaps the best I could reasonably have expected: a boilerplate non-response.

For example, consider the last two sentences of the above response:

The Institute of Education Sciences oversees the research initiatives you inquire about. Their website can be found at the following address: http://ies.ed.gov/.

These sentences make it clear that my email was not read with any care, as my email's second sentence stated that:

I have copied Dr. Jonathan Levy, Program Officer for the Institute for Educational Sciences’ research programs into Education Technology and Cognition and Student Learning, on this email. According to the IES’ website...

...which makes it obvious that I was already aware of the Institute of Education Sciences and its website to which the response draws my attention. Indeed, it is the specific policies described on that website which were the basis of the questions raised in my email.

To give the DoEd the benefit of the doubt, though, the ideal person to respond to my policy inquiry is the Director of the IES, John Q. Easton. I didn't address my email to him because his nomination was not confirmed until after I sent my policy inquiry, and he didn't start with the IES until June 1st, so I appreciate having someone else answer my inquiry in the meantime.

I will respond to the DoEd's response shortly.