William Safire Introduces: Planning an Arts-Centered School

Presenters: William Safire, The Dana Foundation; Janet Elber, Artistic Director, Martha Graham Resources; Carol Fineberg, Arts And Education Consultant, New York; Ronald Treanor, Woodrow Wilson Integrated Arts School, Weehauken, New Jersey; and Ellen Rudolph, Surdna Foundation, New York.

This session is presented in separate parts. Use the buttons at the end of the transcription to navigate between each part.

Part One

INTRODUCER: — career as journalist, speechwriter, historian, novelist and lexicographer. He worked on the first Eisenhower presidential campaign and later became a senior speechwriter in the Nixon White House, from which he escaped in time to write Before The Fall: A History of the Pre-Watergate White House. Obviously, those were his words.

As a lexicographer, he is author of Safire's New Political Dictionary, a half-million-word study of the words that have inspired and inflamed the electorate. As an historical novelist, he wrote Freedom, about the Civil War, and his latest is Scandalmonger, about the origins of America's press freedom. His anthology of the world's greatest speeches, Lend Me Your Ears, has become a classic.

As a political columnist, he began his twice-weekly column three decades ago in the New York Times, writing from the point of view of a libertarian conservative. He is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary and is now a member of the Pulitzer Board. And I am delighted to introduce William Safire.

[Applause]

WILLIAM SAFIRE: Well, what you are surely wondering is, what is a vituperative, rightwing, hawkish, scandalmonger doing at an education conference? And the answer is I am here wearing my good guy's hat. I am the Chairman now of the Dana Foundation, which is mainly involved in neuroscience and neuroimmunology, but in the last few years has picked up on something we have been involved in for 50 years, and that is innovation in education, and particularly the use of the performing arts in education.

I can bear witness to the effect of the arts on somebody who is not an artist. I went to the Bronx High School of Science, and a sidekick of mine also got into this merit school in New York City. And, to tell you the truth, I was not very good in science. I graduated in the fourth-fifth of the class and was lucky to be that high up.

Indeed, I was introducing a bunch of Nobel laureates in Switzerland last year, and the Nobel laureate in physics that I introduced, I looked at and said, "You look familiar." And he said, "We went to Bronx Science together and you used to crib off of me at every test." And I said, "That shows I had good judgment as to who would go places in physics."

[Laughter]

WILLIAM SAFIRE: But I did find a teacher there who was interested in English and introduced me to the art of fiction. I began to write a little bit of fiction, and it was kind of a sore thumb situation, where everybody else was studying science and I was interested in fiction and in poetry. And my sidekick, he also was not doing well in science, but he was interested in numbers and mathematics. He was also interested in photography. So, there we were, kicking around with very low self-esteem, but enjoying ourselves in a small area, and having the only esteem we had which was we were good at the little things that we did.

Well, I stuck to the arts and used that artistic training in a non-arts school, and now I am on the Pulitzer Board that gives out the awards for the prize for drama or for poetry. I am good at it. I can participate in the discussions and I know something about it. So that worked out pretty well.

We talk about fiction, and I have written four or five novels. It is an area that, once you get started in, even if you do not specialize in it, it enriches your life. So, I can testify, from a student who was in a school that doesn't specialize in arts, if he gets a chance to do something in arts, it can affect his life.

My sidekick went out and made a lot of money and did well in investment banking, but he was always interested in photography. And last year he became the President of the Museum of Modern Art. Again, it was something that he did not plan on, but it was something that was implanted in him, embedded in him, in early education.

So, at Dana, what we have done is taken what we have learned in the world of neuroscience and applied it to what we can do in helping infuse a sense of the arts in public schools. What we did in neuroscience is say to these great scientists of brain science: Get out of your ivory tower and stop talking to each other and start talking to the public and start telling people what you are doing, what is exciting about it, and what hope you can give them.

And after the first year or so of looking askance at us, Jim Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, took an interest in it and became our co-chairman. And, all of a sudden, a lot of them followed him. And, before you know it, we have about 300 of the world's leading neuroscientists belonging to the Dana Alliance, who are evangelists for science and are going out and explaining what they can do. And what we do is newsletters and books and magazines and sponsor things that would otherwise not get into print and get the scientists in this field talking to each other and talking to the general public. That has enhanced the public and private support of brain science and all the diseases that are part of that area.

So, we took that successful formula and applied it to our interests in arts and education. We reached out for the best consultants we could find, and they are there. You will meet some of them today. The first that I want to introduce to you, and she will introduce all the others, is Janet Elber. Janet is one of the great modern dancers of our time. She was the principal dancer at the Martha Graham Dance Company through the seventies and eighties and is now not only the Artistic Director of Martha Graham Resources but a consultant to the Library of Congress on reconstruction of dances and our chief arts consultant.

She has been directing grants to do two things. One is to teach artists how to teach in schools. As Janet was just explaining to me, 90 percent of artists wind up teaching and 90 percent of artists get no education training, no training in teaching, until very late in their lives. So, one of the areas that we are interested in is finding outfits that teach artists how to teach in public schools.

The other area is teaching or training public school teachers, who have arts courses or are in charge of the arts in the schools, how to accept and incorporate artists as they come in and not just say, okay, we have a period where we have this great dancer or musician or dramatic artist coming in and I will go out and have a smoke or something. Nobody does that anymore, but you see them out there.

So, what some of these successful operations have shown us is that you can teach artists how to teach children, and they need that training. And you can motivate and teach arts teachers how to accept and not compete with an artist who comes into a classroom and how to use that artist and follow-up in the classrooms afterwards.

Then what we do is get symposia together and produce publications like the one that you were handed as you walked in. What's the title of it? Planning an Arts-Centered School. Pick one up, if you haven't got one, on the way out. What we do in a case like that is put people together who are in this business, ones who are our grantees and a lot of others who are not, and say, what are the best practices? It is amazing how little intercommunication there is about best practices and how you develop an arts-centered school.

That is the reason for our interests. And now I would like to turn it over, first, to Janet, and take it away.

JANET ELBER: Thank you, Bill. When I left dancing, it was great uncertainty as to whether I would be able to find something in my life that would allow me to work with such passion and commitment. I am fortunate to have found an area that gives that back to me and that has introduced me to people who work with as much passion and commitment as dancers do, and they are here with me today.

To Bill's right is Ellen Rudolph, who is Program Director for Arts at the Surdna Foundation. And she has served as a consultant to various cultural organizations, foundations, schools, and policy organizations. She has been Executive Director for Cultural Education Collaborative, a Theater Program Specialist for the New York State Council of the Arts, Executive Director of Art in New York, and Program Director for Arts Connection, et cetera, et cetera. This does not say anything about your time as a weather girl in Atlanta.

[Laughter]

JANET ELBER: Ellen is responsible for Chapter 12 in the handbook Planning For Effective Collaborations, which also has a very concise and useful self-assessment instrument in the appendix that we are going to talk about today.

And to Ellen's right is Ronald Treanor, who is Principal of the award-winning Woodrow Wilson School in Union City, New Jersey, where he has worked for over 30 years now, winning any number of education awards, the National Talent Network's Golden Apple and Golden Acorn Awards, and the PTA Enrichment Program Award. He has served as a consultant on enrichment programs nationally. He has served on the New Jersey State Commission on Environmental Education, and has contributed to Chapter 8, A Comprehensive Approach to Integrated Arts Curriculum at the Woodrow Wilson School. This was co-authored by Anthony Buscetti, who was also instrumental in founding the school.

Carol Fineberg, I probably do not need to introduce to you, because three or four of you came to find out why the heck Bill Safire was here and the rest of you know Carol.

[Laughter]

JANET ELBER: She masterminded the symposium that this publication grew out of and brought together a group of experts from a variety of fields, certainly some that I would never have thought to bring together, to talk about how do you plan a school. The publication grew out of the papers presented at that symposium. And Carol edited it and contributed a couple of chapters to it.

She has spent the last so many years working in arts education in many capacities — designing, evaluating and writing. She was a teacher, and so was Ellen. All three of you have taught. She taught at the High School of Arts, where she was graduated as a music major. She now has her doctorate. She has been published and has designed several arts-centered schools and has been a terrific partner in all of this.

She has two chapters in the book, Integrating the Arts Into the Wider Curriculum, that is Chapter 9 and Chapter 18, which is “Options For Evaluating an Arts-Centered School.” And, Carol, I am going to ask you, now that we have been introduced, to find out who really is in the audience. Do a little poll.

CAROL FINEBERG: Take off your masks. What we really plan to do, and of course we are close but we are not there yet, we wanted to have sort of a living room conversation with you. Welcome to our living room. What we wanted to do was create a living room kind of environment.

So, instead of the usual theater organization in these conference rooms, we were going to have clumps of people just sort of sitting on the floor, coming close to us, getting a chance to interact in a socially normal way. Of course, conferences are not built for that. So, we would like you to at least help us realize part of our fantasy by moving up if you could, so that we do not sound quite so formal. Those of you who are my friends and shills in the back and are leading the way, we are really, really happy that you are doing this.

The book is a realization of truly a lifetime of work in making education and the arts true partners. In order for the partnership to flourish, we have got to know something about our colleagues in the education world to whom we address this book. What we wanted to do was find out a little bit about you so that we could address our remarks specifically to you. For example, how many of you are active school principals right now?

[A show of hands.]

CAROL FINEBERG: We anticipated that. That is good. How many of you who are principals are heads of arts-centered schools, that is, either magnet schools are specialty schools?

[A show of hands.]

CAROL FINEBERG: How many of you want to be principals of arts-centered schools?

[A show of hands.]

CAROL FINEBERG: Ah, there she is.

How many of you are superintendents of schools?

[A show of hands.]

CAROL FINEBERG: Wonderful. Oh, good. Good, good. So, we have got the bosses here as well as the almost bosses.

How many of you are curriculum and instruction supervisors?

[A show of hands.]

CAROL FINEBERG: How many of you are friends are mine?

[Laughter]

CAROL FINEBERG: How many of you are something else, consultants, artists, university people?

[A show of hands.]

CAROL FINEBERG: How many of you are working professional artists?

[A show of hands.]

CAROL FINEBERG: Oh, thank you very much. Two people. Anybody

else? Maybe? Three, okay.How many of you are actually students in university courses, university programs? I think you should stand. This is Dan. He is a real live student. You represent the entire student body of the United States here. It is for you that we are meeting today.

How many of you are consultants in the field?

[A show of hands.]

CAROL FINEBERG: So, we have really got a cross-section of the kind of audience that we anticipated. We are so grateful to ASCD for presenting this particular panel. Because we often, as Bill mentioned before about the neuroscientist, we tend to talk to our advocates. We tend to talk to the people who believe what we believe. We tend to talk to arts people and arts organization people. But we do not always get a chance to talk to the people where the real job of educating kids is located.

So, what we want to know is what you want to know and, in the process, we will revise our remark. Now, Vanna White could not be here today. You are now going to have your minutes taken by one of the most beautiful dancers that ever was on the stage, but I will not embarrass you.

JANET ELBER: Thank you.

CAROL FINEBERG: What are some of the issues that are in the forefront of your minds now that you would like us address? Yes.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: How to blend an arts-focused school with all the curriculum frameworks and the subsequent testing that we have to do with kids across the United States, at least now, and accomplish all that?

CAROL FINEBERG: In 25 days or less.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: At least 180 in 2000.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: What I would like to know is how we are we going to maintain the wonderful strides we have made in the arts with all of the budget cuts throughout the United States in all the States?

CAROL FINEBERG: Good question. A lot of people have brought that question up.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: What I am concerned about in our arts-centered school, because of the budget cuts, all of our staffing is gone. Our department is cut in half. We are on a real skeleton budget. And I am curious about what are the models out there of arts schools. What are the different ways of how you deliver the arts to the students, integrating the academics with the arts, and seeing how other schools are doing it compared to the model that we are currently using?

CAROL FINEBERG: You have certainly come to the right place. Hopefully, we can respond to your questions.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: My question is incorporating this work and these concepts into teacher preparation so that when they come to a school that is an arts-centered school, they understand the value of it and how to work within that context.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yes, good afternoon. I am the principal of a reform school in the city of Philadelphia, and I have this notion, crazy though it may be, that the arts and creativity can be the solution to some of our correctional problems. So, I would like some information and your thoughts about that.

CAROL FINEBERG: I am glad you are asking that question, because we do have a number of schools in the country where the arts have surged in terms of inmate population.

Any other questions?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I am interested in knowing more about how to assess the arts.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I am interested in the admission policies that are available or what criteria are used to select students when you have waiting lists for kids to get into an art school.

CAROL FINEBERG: What we have in this book that Dana has so generously supported, not only in printing it and distributing it but making it available to you in numbers for no cost — I want to repeat that; we are not here pushing royalties. This is a book that hopefully will clarify some of the options that are available to people who are planning arts-centered schools. There is a resource section that gives you a whole bunch of Web sites for information. And there are, of course, starting with Ronnie and Ellen, real live people who have been there, done that, and have something important to add to the conversation.

While we may not be able to respond to each one of these, we did anticipate most of the your questions, happily. So, what we wanted to do, because we thought that the integration issue was a primary one, is spend a few minutes on that, which would deal with any of your population. And Ronnie and I are going to talk a little bit about that because, as some of you know, Ronnie's school is a model for the State of New Jersey in integrated arts education, first grade through eighth grade. It is a very interesting model and it is very different from a lot of the other attempts that we have seen in the field.

We are going to talk to you a little bit and then we are going to open it up to questions on the whole issue of managing, developing, and implementing the integrated section.

WILLIAM SAFIRE: So, let's find out, Ronnie, what is so hot about your school?

RONALD TREANOR: Thank you. I would just like to start off by talking about our school. We started about eight years ago, and we were in a unique situation. Our superintendent definitely has tremendous educational vision. He met with me day — and I will be very quick with this because it is really interesting how we started. He wanted to meet with me for lunch one day. I was assistant principal of Emerson High School at that particular time, with a background in gifted and talented education for most of my career. I told him I was not really ready to meet him and that I don't eat lunch, and things of that particular nature. But he said: You are to be here immediately.

So, during that conversation, he said, basically: I like your educational vision. I want you to put a school together. And what I want you to know about this school at this point — and you will see that also in the article — is you do not have a school. You do not have any students. You do not have any teachers. You do not even have a building. But the building I am thinking of putting you in is in another district, and they do not want us there. So, that was very interesting.

So, basically, what we decided was we had a gifted and talented prior to this in Union City that was really floating without a sail. It was going nowhere. The teachers, more or less, lost their energy, their vision. And as a result of this, because the neighboring town has a student enrollment from kindergarten to high school of 1,000 students, Union City has 11,000 students in roughly 1.2 miles. It is the most densely populated city in the United States. It also is below the poverty line.

So, what we decided to do at that particular time is that we were going to start anew. Which simply means we started with students. Unfortunately, my experience in the past is that we have all these different programs and you fit students into it and hope for the best. We decided to identify our students and start from that particular point. We looked at each student as being extremely unique. What we decided to do is to not only look at the academic potential of every student but look at the artistic potential of each and every student.

As a result of that, we decided that the teachers that we would be interviewing must not only be great teachers but must have an arts background. So, during this interviewing, we interviewed roughly about 100 teachers for about 25 positions. Every single teacher that we met came on board with an arts background. And what we tried to do, even with the nomination process, is no longer look at GT education in the academic area but look at the potential of every single student. As a result of that, when students were nominated for our school, we broke it down to music, drama, and dance, along with the academics.

As a result of this, a committee was put together to interview students. Students were selected based on their particular potential. Also, to address this, because in New Jersey we do have what is referred to as the New Jersey Core Curriculum Content Standards, the curriculum has to been aligned to that. So, what we decided to do was, yes, we were going into a parallel line with the academics, but what we decided to do is create what they used to call mini-courses. We call them MIAD courses, which is an acronym for the Multi-Intelligence Arts Domain.

And what we did through this is that the teachers, because of their background, were able to create arts courses, which we run roughly about four times a week, double classes, as result of that. The beginning grades, one, two and three, we said we wanted to have every possible academic and artistic experience that is possible, because at that point we are searching for their uniqueness. The middle grades have a little bit more selection. By the time they are in the upper grades, we feel we have identified their potential, their uniqueness, and we have studio courses as a result of that.

CAROL FINEBERG: Well, I think the interesting feature that Ronnie's school introduced was a parity between teaching the arts as artistic disciplines in and of themselves and a requirement that classroom teachers, first grade through eighth grade, would integrate arts, knowledge and skills into their "wider curriculum." So that social studies teachers and language arts teachers and math teachers and science teachers and the computer teacher and the whole staff was hired on the basis of their capacity to integrate the arts.

So, on the one hand, the kids were learning the arts as regular subjects so that when it came time for integration they could bring something to the table. At the same time, the teachers recognized that they themselves had to have a handle on the various arts disciplines, because there is no point in trying to integrate the arts when you do not know anything about that which you are integrating.

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