Changing Education Through the Arts

Presenters: Amy Duma, The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, DC; Stephen D. Hockett, Fairfax County Public Schools, Reston, VA

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

I. CETA — An Introduction

AMY DUMA: This session today is scheduled to go to 9:00 o'clock and what we're planning to do is this: We have a program that's called Changing Education Through the Arts (CETA). What we want to do in this session is to explain what we mean by this program, and also share with you what we have learned as we have gone through the process of creating this program. Some of the things that we're going to be highlighting that are a vital part of this program are partnerships — in this case between a performing arts center and some schools — as well as looking at professional development and how we have structured the professional development component of this program, because that's really the focus of it. What CETA is not is, it's not artists in residence — that's not what we're providing to the schools. We're not providing opportunities for students to go to performances or museums or anything like that. The schools are doing that on their own. But the focus of CETA is really professional development for teachers and administrators, and that's what we're going to be talking about in this session today.

As we go through the session, we hope that you will stop us with any questions that come up and we are planning on having some time at the end for discussion. We'd love to hear your feedback, your comments, how you think this might have any implications for your work, because that's of great interest to us as well. So that's our plan for the session today.

STEPHEN HOCKETT: About four years ago, eight schools in the metropolitan Washington, DC area began to meet with Amy and the Kennedy Center to develop a partnership to study the arts and arts integration in the schools. The schools that are involved are either arts magnet schools or arts focus schools, and they are elementary and middle schools. Do you want to tell them about the arts focus schools and I can explain the magnet schools?

AMY DUMA: Sure. The schools are really of wide range. Steve will explain the arts magnet school part, but most of our schools are arts focus schools. When we began the project, some of those schools were not officially arts focus schools recognized by their school system. They were sort of self-proclaimed arts focus schools. The principals basically just said, the arts are an important part of our school and what we would like to do is declare ourselves an arts focus school.

That doesn't mean that they get additional funding from their school system necessarily; it just means that they have said that they wanted the arts to be an important of what they're doing, and the principal takes that into consideration when they're hiring teachers. He or she is looking for teachers who have an arts background, who are interested in learning to integrate the arts. In fact, one of our schools has named itself an "illegitimate arts focus school" because they receive absolutely no additional funding from their school system. They're just doing it all on their own.

STEPHEN HOCKETT: The magnet schools … We're part of Fairfax County [Virginia] Public Schools, and two of us magnet schools for the arts and sciences. We do get additional funding for being a magnet. Our school is not entirely magnet — my demographics can be similar to the other magnet schools, but I have 860 students in my elementary school, and, of that, 400 are community school students, 220 are magnet students, and about 240 come to our school for what we call the Gifted and Talented Center. I know that's probably some that Virginia does but a lot of places don't.

Basically, my community school students and my magnet school students are in classes together, and what they get is an enriched program in the arts and sciences. My center also gets that. The school is Head Start through sixth grade; 25 percent of the community school is free and reduced lunch. The magnet schools, in both cases in Fairfax County, were put into two schools where they felt there was a need to provide academic role models to assist schools in raising their achievements. So this is our sixth year as a magnet school. And the other magnet school in Fairfax County has been around for seven or eight years.

AMY DUMA: All of the schools that are involved are very diverse schools. They have high ESL populations, and at least half of them are between 40 and 60 percent free and reduced lunch. So that kind of gives you an idea of the schools that we're working with. The schools are in Virginia and Maryland because Virginia and Maryland are right on the border with DC — those are the schools that we're working with — which gives us another set of challenges, too, because we're dealing with two sets of state standards in every single subject area and the arts and different resources that are available to the schools as well from their state departments of education.

When we started with CETA, we had one thing in mind, and that was the end product, which was the students. What we really wanted to be about was helping students succeed, both in school and in life. To do that, we all had a strong belief that arts integration could be a powerful vehicle for reaching students. That was the underlying premise of CETA. That's why the chose the eight arts focus or arts magnet schools because there was already a core group of people in those schools who had the same belief system. We didn't have to convince them of the power of the arts. They knew that.

The way that we were going to be addressing arts integration, as I said before, was through professional development. That was our focus. We also recognized that we couldn't do this by ourselves. Even though the Kennedy Center has a lot of resources — both locally and nationally — available to us, we realized that we also needed help from the communities. We were looking to smaller arts organizations. We were looking at artists in residence that the schools could contract with on their own and use their resources, and community support also in terms of the state departments of education, the state art councils. We figured anybody who would help us with this, we would try to work their resources into the program.

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