education in museums: field trip #1

This semester I am taking a class that explores education in community settings, specifically museums. The class involves field trips. Even in grad school, field trips are a fun alternative to classrooms and lectures.
Today I went to a new area of New York City: Chelsea. My class was visiting the New York Museum School. It is a public school (grades 6-12) that incorporates museums into the curriculum. The students take the regular sort of classes- English, History, Biology, Algebra. But they also visit museums each week, participating in a module that integrates the classroom discussion with the field trips. For example, students learning about the American Revolution go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to study portraits that portray life during that time. The students develop projects to enrich their learning experience. In the age of education where school seems to be all about the "test," these teachers believe their students succeed because they aren't teaching to the test. Instead the students make connections to the content material that really allow them to fully understand the ideas and concepts they are learning.
Unfortunately, even with this school's student success rates, the political climate surrounding the testing movement is affecting even this school. The middle school classes are being phased out. The skills and knowledge these students acquire through the museum modules that synthesize learning and make education interesting are once again losing out to the only skill that counts: passing a standardized test.