Another side effect

Here is a good article that our own Nancy Patterson forwarded to the MCTE listserv. I suppose this isn't breaking news at this point--we've all dealt with having to cut good curriculum to better prepare students for testing--but I think poetry is often overlooked in the first place, to the detriment of our kids' educations. Creative writing competitions such as the one the author mentions can be great motivation for teens, and I'm afraid that depriving them of such experiences will be more harmful than we think. A world wherein Billy Collins and Maya Angelou are office workers with excellent test scores but no volumes of poetry would be drab indeed.