You walk in and they have this banner that says, “I have a dream,” and there’s Martin Luther King, looking down from his picture and you think, “Oh, is this what you dreamt? Is this any part of your dream, I wonder?”
—Nilaja Sun, New York Times interview on No Child…, her play about New York City’s public school system
September means new beginnings: new theatre seasons, new weather cycles and, of course, a new schoolyear. Some students will walk into schools with thriving arts education programs, but others—like those movingly dramatized in Nilaja Sun’s play No Child…— will walk first past security guards and through metal detectors into classrooms where they’ll find little or no formal creative engagement. As outlined in the recent National Center for Educational Statistics’s Fast Response Survey System, the percentage of public schools offering arts education declines as the percentage of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch increases.
The reality that schools with a higher concentration of students in poverty are less likely to offer arts education is made more painful by the demonstrable impact of the arts in contributing to positive social outcomes. I outlined some of this research in my May/June column, titled “Citizen-Building,” and just read that while graduation rates in Washington, D.C., fell to 59 percent overall in 2011, the Duke Ellington School of the Arts boasted a 92-percent graduation rate.
With all this research and our own firsthand experience, how can we explain dismaying statistics such as the drop in theatre-specific instruction at public elementary schools from 20 percent in 1999-2000 to only 4 percent by 2009-10? Is it connected to the now-infamous No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which shifted focus to standardized tests as the way to improve and measure student achievement?
Since 2007, NCLB has been awaiting congressional reauthorization. In this vacuum of uncertainty, President Obama and the Department of Education instituted a waiver system whereby states could apply to obtain relief from some of the act’s mandates in return for instituting substantial school reforms. News reports in July of this year revealed that 32 states, plus Washington, D.C., have been approved for the waiver—relief that could disappear when the law is reauthorized.
Another promising development in this administration’s commitment to arts education is a new program called Turnaround Arts. Announced by the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH), this public-private partnership is designed to narrow the achievement gap by aggressively deploying arts education in high-poverty, low-performing schools. This program was inspired by the PCAH’s landmark 2011 research study, “Re-investing in Arts Education: Winning America’s Future Through Creative Schools.”
That study recommends “expanding the role of teaching artists, in partnership with arts specialists and classroom teachers, through sustained engagements in schools.” Theatres and theatre-teaching artists have long been at the forefront of this kind of sustained engagement—Sun’s play No Child…, for example, grew out of her long teaching-artist experience as part of Epic Theatre Ensemble. In many ways, these artists and the education departments at our theatres have stepped into the arts education void and become activists by default. Their daily commitment to students across the economic divide is testament to the right of every child to a life of free and full creative expression.
AT TCG, we know that education departments at theatres often wrestle with challenges like buy-in from leadership and lack of money, time and space. However, technology affords us more opportunities for knowledge-sharing than ever, with TCG’s website showcasing the wealth of theatre education programming at our member theatres. Additionally, the Arts Education Partnership recently released ArtsEdSearch.org, the nation’s first online research and policy clearinghouse. By documenting educational outcomes, these resources can help the field leverage up-to-date facts about the impact of arts learning.
In 2010, Congress created National Arts in Education week to celebrate the important role of the arts in student achievement. Held the second week in September, this event provides an opportunity for us to reinvest in—and reeducate ourselves about—the role of the arts in the future of education.
To see the future of our country, we need only take a long, hard look at the present state of our schools. Do we see the fruition of Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream? Or do we see instead an education system of many bright spots marred by inequality and cycles of creative impoverishment? The dream of every student seizing the full measure of his or her creative potential—a dream empowered daily by our education departments and teaching artists—may be closer than we think, if each of us takes a measure of ownership in making it so. We must all be teaching artists now.
