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 Two

JANET ELBER: So, the one question we have about how do you blend the arts with the standards and in this time of accountability and testing, for both of you, what would you say are the two most important elements, or seven, whatever there are?

RONALD TREANOR: Part of the problem that we have always had is the test does not test what we are always teaching. As a result, because of the standards in New Jersey, we still had to stick to the core curriculum content standards. But the other part of that is all teachers were trained as a result of using these standards within the arts. And I really consider myself a teacher who happens to be the principal. If you look at how we have been teaching in the past, I do not think any teacher out there has just taught language arts by itself or mathematics by itself. So, every teacher at our particular school, because of their background in the arts but also because of their expertise in the academic areas, they were taught by our staff development coordinator in order to blend the core curriculum content standards through an arts domain.

JANET ELBER: So, professional development?

RONALD TREANOR: Yes, professional development is very important.

CAROL FINEBERG: And, Ronnie, you brought artists into the building for both training of teachers as well as teaching kids directly.

RONALD TREANOR: Right. Let me just address that. The important part of bringing artists into the building, I know, in Union City — again, I am basing everything on my experience there — an artist in the building is a novelty. "Isn't that nice? They're having it." And what happens as a result of that is when the artist leaves the building, the art domain, the discipline, is lost.

What we do at Woodrow Wilson is we interview the artists who are going to be working in conjunction with our teachers. They stay there for roughly anywhere from a 4- to 10-week span of time. And what we expect the artist to do is to teach our teachers, so that when the artist leaves that discipline is still going on within the classes.

The nice thing about what we do also is that teachers are not locked into a grade level. They work based on their discipline. I have upper-grade teachers, during our MIAD, during our mini-course time, who work with lower grades, and lower-grade teachers who will work with the upper grades.

JANET ELBER: I have a question related to another one of these questions. You started with gifted and talented students, and you are award-winning. How do you know it is not just because you started with the cream of the crop already? If you took your same planning to a reform school, would your system work there, too?

RONALD TREANOR: Janet, when we started the new school, what we decided during the interviewing process was that academic was only one umbrella. So, we did have students who came into our school who had great music potential but were not there academically. The arts basically helped them.

One thing that we are very proud of at Woodrow Wilson is that we have a large number of special ed students. And if you come into our school, you will notice that you would not be able to identify who is a special ed student and who is not. They really worked very well with all of the students.

And the positive part of this is that the special ed students have actually become leaders in our school because of the arts. To tell you the truth, when they found out about the program, a lot of the child study teams in Union City were doing whatever they could to get their special ed students into our school.

So, the whole idea, again, is not just basing student performance on the academics but what is the potential of the student, does the student have a background in the arts or drama. And, again, using the special ed students as a core of this, we are very successful with that.

WILLIAM SAFIRE: A couple of the questions there had to do with the current crisis, which is budgets in the arts are being cut everywhere, in everything, not just in the arts education, but the governmental support of the arts is being chopped. And I think one of the big questions facing you — and particularly you, Ellen — is we in the political world want to see measurable results. So, when we say, how can we show that there is an improvement in education, that gravitates toward math and reading because you can measure those.

But how can you measure whether you are having an effective arts program or what the inclusion of the arts does in the school? Ellen, how do you do that?

ELLEN RUDOLPH: This is not really my expertise, and I will talk about that aspect of the question a little bit later on. I will answer from my other expertise, not the part that I will talk about later. The people in this room know these answers better than I.

The one thing we know is that when the success or the value of the arts is measured just in terms of reading and math scores, it is not measuring really what the arts can accomplish in many cases. We need to figure out what the value of what the art is doing for the student's whole maturation and growth and development as a person and as a learning human being.

It so happens that in many of the art schools, and Carol and Ronnie can talk about this more, in many arts-centered schools the students are doing much better than their fellow schoolmates in all of the testing. The trouble is we do not really know that that is because of the arts. It could be because there are smaller classes. It could be because the students are really known by their teachers. It could be it has all the elements of the best small school, with someone who believes in the kids. It could be because it is experiential education.

So, we like to — and I from a background of many years in the arts — we would love to claim that it is all because of the arts, but we do not really know that. What we do know is that arts are an element in a school which tend to force more hands-on work, more hands-on learning, more getting to know the student as much as getting to know the teacher, more relationship building, more content exploration, more curiosity about the world around them. If all of those things happen, no matter how you try for it not to increase your scores, it often increases your scores. So, there is not a direct, neat answer or correlation that I think anyone has yet to that question of how do you prove the value when money is cut.

Did you want to take that?

CAROL FINEBERG: I think there are many people, as you say, in the audience who can corroborate this. We know of coincidences of rising test scores and active arts education programs. We also have on the record in research studies the fact that reading scores do not go down just because time is taken off from the workbooks to do something that involves the arts and really applied learning.

We know from a number research studies that if you are interested in having kids acquire the skills of higher-level thinking, that when they have to apply new skills to the creation of original works of art, in dance and music and play writing, in any of the creative domains, that, when triggered properly, the students can really both acquire new skills as well as polish ones that they have learned.

The problem for us in evaluation is manifold. On the one hand, as people who love the arts, we want the arts to come out in a positive way in various testing things. But, frankly, that puts a huge and unfair burden on the arts. Teaching and learning reading is maybe assisted by the arts, but do not blame the arts if the reading scores do not go up. There are school district now that would like to say, well, because the arts are not contributing to higher reading scores, throw them out. We do not need them. This is insupportable. How can we have a public system that only educates part of a child?

The other thing about many of the research studies that Ellen was referring to is that the claims are really nice propaganda but they do not bear a lot of scrutiny. One of the studies that does bear scrutiny is the one that Jim Catterall did, which as many of you may know was really an analysis of the relationships between rigorous arts education programs and social behavior as well as intellectual behavior.

Those studies that Jim has been doing have a certain weight in the field. There are other nice little mini-studies, but nobody wants to give a whole lot of money to do a really, really thorough study of the influence of the arts on intellectual development. So, a foundation will give $25,000 to prove the value of the arts in education. Well, that is a very, very small amount of money for a very, very large claim to be made.

ELLEN RUDOLPH: Is the James Catterall study listed in the resources?

CAROL FINEBERG: Yes.

JANET ELBERG: Yes, it is in the resources in the book.

And, Carol, before we get into evaluation too much further, we allotted some time at this point for questions on arts integration. So, if any of you want to grill Ronnie and Carol specifically about their work and arts integration grill and drill.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Another element that I think Ronnie might want to speak to, and I know Carol can speak about it, is the effect of parent involvement in an arts-centered school. Because one of the things we do know is that when parents are involved in their children's education, the children do better in school. The arts are a magnet to bring parents into schools. Parents want to come see their students' achievement and celebrate with them what they do in the arts. So, I wonder if you have noticed that that has added to the mix. Do you feel that you have stronger parent involvement in your school as a result of your arts-centered approach?

RONALD TREANOR: We have very strong parent involvement in our school. The nice thing about the parent involvement at Woodrow Wilson is that Union City, again, is a very highly Hispanic area, and many parents do not really have the ability to help their child in the academics as far as homework, so they do not have that sharing experience with them. The fact that a parent, a Hispanic parent in this case, can relate to music and relate to drama, they actually work with them. So, we do get quite a number of parents at PTO meetings. In fact, when we have culminating experiences, it is not isolated; the parents are part of that.

We have just completed a play, "The Wizard of Oz." It was a whole community project. It has never been done in Union City. We have taken our students, along with some amateur, what they call part players — again, that is the name that they have — and we decided that we are going to use our students, along with the community, along with the parents, and we are going to put on a production. We were extremely successful because, as I mentioned before with the MIAD's, each of the MIAD's was a part of the theme, based on “The Wizard of Oz,” whether it be scenery construction, whether it be costumes, whether it be storyline, drama and acting.

So, because the parents can relate in the acting area or the artistic area, they work more with us. And they are more on board with us. They come and contribute in terms of the artistic approach that we use.

CAROL FINEBERG: Just to add a little coda to that, when we talk as educators about parent involvement, we do not always define our terms. In Ronnie's school, parent involvement means getting in there and working with kids to solve a common problem, whether is has to do with putting on a school production or something like that. Some people use the term parent involvement to mean presence at PTA sessions. And of course Sharon mentioned that if you really want people to come to a PTA session, have your chorus or orchestra play, and then all the parents will come.

The fact of the matter is there are many other kinds of involvement with the school. When we were in Armenia some years ago, we saw parents sitting side by side with their children doing some of the more tedious work that older, more mature fingers could accomplish that little fingers could not. And it was the first time that I actually saw parent and child sets working together legally. So many times, they are not supposed to do that. It created such a wonderful atmosphere, and it is the kind of atmosphere that I saw in Ronnie's school, where parents are not afraid to go in, because they are bringing something to the school as opposed to finding out, oh, gosh, what is the next thing our kids did wrong?

RONALD TREANOR: Positive interaction.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I just wanted to make two comments. One is on the parent involvement. One of our schools in Kaltag, Alaska, it was the way that we were able to get the tribal elders involved in valuing really a standard space curriculum in a school that had been failing was to help them understand how the arts were going to deepen their students' understanding and have that same experience of bringing the folk art of the village into the school and working side by side with our coaches in order to do that.

I also want to make a comment in my other hat as a retired superintendent of schools. The debate always is, how do you go up against a school board? How do you go up against the decision-makers, even in Washington, and have them understand the value of the arts? And I think Jim Catterall's synopsis in "Critical Links" gives the non-arts-comfortable person something to hang their hat on because of all of that meta-analysis study that he did. It really talked about how the arts helped especially special populations and kids in need of remediation begin to succeed on the very measures that we measure them on, but through learning and deepening their understanding and getting engaged in the arts. And we are finding that especially with middle grades adolescent populations.

CAROL FINEBERG: Yes, and you can find reference to the Catterall study in the book and get a copy of "Critical Links" that way.

WILLIAM SAFIRE: Here is an interesting way that the performing arts can be integrated with the teaching of science and other things. We are just coming out now with a book called The Bard and The Brain, where we got a neuroscientist who is particularly good at imaging, taking pictures of what is going on inside the brain. And imaging, as you know, is big, huge new thing. And selecting portions of Shakespeare's plays that indicate mental disorders. There is Lady Macbeth, who thinks that she sees blood on her hands and she cannot wash it off. There is a technical term for that about some kind of compulsion. And you can actually see it in action in the brain in some of this new Positron Emission Topography, PET scans.

So, what is happening now at the Dana Center in London is we are taking that book, and we got a bunch of Shakespearian actors to perform the soliloquies or the dramatic readings, and the scientists will then explain graphically on the screen what disorder that reflects and what is the current state of the art in dealing with that.

Now, there is no reason you cannot do that in the schools. You get the dramatic society together with the science teacher and you can put that on. And that can enliven the teaching of science and at the same time enliven the dramatic arts in the school.

JANET ELBER: Are method actors now going to have to make sure the right part of their brain lights up when they are working on a soliloquy?

WILLIAM SAFIRE: There is a thought.

[Laughter]

JANET ELBER: Do you have another question?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: If I could follow-up a little bit with what william Saffire just said. I think that is well taken because, listen to what we are saying here. I am a principal in Manhattan. We did an experiment with one class going very heavily into the arts.

It is going to very unrealistic, I think, to expect entire schools to become totally arts-centered. We need a continuum. We may have a school such as arts, which I would love to do, but in most schools in New York City or any place in the country, you are not going to be able to move the entire staffs out and you are not going to be able to select the children. But all the children can certainly benefit from the arts.

What we had at one time in New York City is what we called project arts, with an art coordinator who helped bring in a variety of things so all the children in the school had exposure to the arts. So, I think that is important. Last year, due to the budget cuts, that entire position was cut out of the schools. And that really did not cost a lot. That might have been $60,000 or $70,000 a school.

So, I think if we cannot get full schools that are completely centered in the arts, we should at least look to have a coordinator in each school part-time or full-time who can help bring in the artists, help teachers in the school utilize the arts in their classrooms, and help provide some staff development. Art-centered schools would be wonderful if there were ways to do them. I am sure the results would be fantastic in terms of the achievement for reading and math. I have seen it. We did a study on it and it does work. I think what we should look at now is a continuum, some schools completely doing the arts, some doing aspects of it, but no school not having any arts in it at all.

CAROL FINEBERG: Here, here.

JANET ELBERG: Point well taken.

RONALD TREANOR: Good point.

CAROL FINEBERG: What is interesting about the continuum is that at any stage along the continuum somebody needs to take responsibility for the services that are to be provided and the quality of those services. Just as when you are talking about partnerships bringing artists in to help in the integration of the arts into the wider curriculum, there is a need for the match to be right and not to ask an artist to suddenly spend the weekend brushing up on the culture of Native American life so that they can infuse the arts into the social studies curriculum where the subject is Native Americans. All it ends up doing is frustrating everybody, and it frequently ends up with a kind of a trivial project. It just may be fun at the best but it is not really contributing to a deeper understanding of both Native American culture and all the aspects of it.

John?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Speaking as a former teacher and a science educator, I heard a number of speakers use the word "understanding," and Carol just used that word. It occurs to me that in arts-centered schools and ones that are not arts-centered schools we have a common focus. We want students to be able to understand the Pythagorean theorem, Othello's motivation, or Iago's, plate tectonics, and a Shellian lyric. And when we ask students to demonstrate their understanding, as I did with Othello, what came out were pictures, poems, and music. And all I did was ask students — and this was at the college level — to use any resources that they had — and it didn't have to be a formal paper — to demonstrate they understood what the nature of the play was or the character.

And I have seen this in science, where students use their imaginative capabilities to demonstrate their understanding of the quantum mechanics of an electron. I have seen it in social studies. So that the life of the imagination, as Bronowski said, is inherit as much in the science as it is in the literature.

And William Saffire mentioned evaluation assessment, and I am not sure that these kinds of results are going to come forth on a Scantron-type test, but if the schools are open to what we call teaching for understanding, and we give students an opportunity and the time to perform their understandings using all the powers of their imagination, then I am sure that we enhance the subject matter. It may appear as if the arts become utilitarian, but if the arts are given prominence in certain schools and so forth, it is almost a natural. Those kids have wonderful ways of demonstrating that they do or do not understand, and it is drawing on the basis of the arts as well as sciences.

ELLEN RUDOLPH: If I can just add something to that. At MIT, at least a decade ago, trying to examine students’ not only understanding but ability to express what they understand, they would not let students apply for a period of time — and I'm not sure if it's still in effect — for research grants unless part of the research grant was a component through which they would express what they had learned. And it could be expressed through any of the art forms as well as more traditional scientific ways of presenting a paper.

And MIT, as you probably know, is one of the few "science-based schools," where the arts have a very prominent role in all learning and expression of what the students have learned. And I thought that was just interesting that it was part of every research application.

PREVIOUS PART

NEXT PART