NEWSWEEK/SCORE 2000, Education Issue (2000)
"Get Your Fingers into Art," article on national art education trends featuring Abstraction Made Elementary, nonprofit organization founded by John Ruggieri
by Karen Springen
Painting, music and dance are often the first subjects to go when school budgets are cut. But they are very much part of the learning experience. How parents can help fill the gaps.
His mother says Dan Cervone, 13, is a "closet" cellist. "He doesn't play it in school," says Barbara Cervone. "He would get a bad reputation." So Dan plays his cello at home in Rhode Island, but at least he's making music--unlike most kids his age. The number of eighth graders playing a musical instrument dropped to 27 percent in 1997 from 35 percent in 1971, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Many Americans see the arts as "elite or effete," says Dan's mother, national director of the Annenberg Challenge, which funds arts-education programs. That attitude has helped make the arts poor stepchildren in many American schools. Despite a booming economy, the federal government allocates a paltry $30 million to arts education in the nation's elementary and high schools. In a great many school districts, arts classes are regarded as frills. "The arts are the first programs cut in times of school-budget crisis," says Paul Lehman, former president of the Music Educators National Conference (MENC).
Officially, more than 90 percent of the country's elementary and secondary schools offer instruction in music and art (though fewer than one in four offers dance and theater). All the states but one essentially folle the 1994 voluntary National Standards for Arts Education, which defines what kids ought to know. (The exception is Iowa, which leaves it to local school districts to set standards.) Arts education seems to pay off in many ways. On the 1999 SATs, for example, students with experience in musical performance scored higher than nonmusical students, by 53 points on the verbal portion of the test and by 39 points in math.
But when it comes to school curricula, the current emphasis on science and math has helped relegate the arts to second-class status. In some public-school districts, parents have been forced to raise money to pay for programs like art education. "Nobody would think about asking the PTA to pay for the math program," complains John Mahlmann, executive direction of MENC. Because most colleges do not require arts training, those programs are even more vulnerable.
Parents who want their children to learn more than the color wheel and the notes in a scale need to look outside the schools -- to free concerts and museums, parks programs, arts camps and the Internet. Some bigger, more prosperous communities have a lot to choose from. In Highland Park, Ill., a Chicago suburb, offerings include outdoor summer concerts for kids at the Ravinia Music Theater, ballet and tap-dance lessons at the North Shore School of Dance and ceramics lessons at the Suburban Fine Arts Center. The local park district offers weekly lessons in the arts that teach kindergarteners more than the basics. They learn color mixing and design by decorating a cake. In a lesson based on the paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe, they examine blossoms under a magnifying glass. "It forces them to draw the flowers the way she did," explains teacher Kim Loprest.
In some schools, budget cuts imposed nearly a generation ago have never been restored. California slashed its arts budgets in 1978 after the passage of Proposition 13, which dramatically reduced property-tax revenues. Until two years ago, elementary students in Big Sur, Calif., rarely saw an art teacher in school. Now the privately funded Big Sur Arts Initiative pays professional artists to visit the schools each week. And for those who regard gardening and cooking as art forms, the Chez Panisse Foundation, started by the famous chef Alice Waters, gave the Big Sur program $5,000 recently for raised garden beds and an outdoor kitchen at one school.
Even in schools that provide arts classes, outside programs can offer a different perspective. At the James M. Curley Elementary School in Boston, modern artists visit every Tuesday under the auspices of a nonprofit group called Abstraction Made Elementary. A veteran of the program, Willis T. Burke, 11, now a sixth grader, says he has to follow the rules in other classes; a dragon must look like a certain kind of dragon. The visiting artists teach youngsters to loosen up. "They sort of say, 'Invent new things'," reports Willis. He likes to sprinkle dried paint on paper and then dab at it with a damp sponge to see what happens.
Museums are an obvious resource for art-starved children, both for the treasures they contain and for the links they offer to the rest of the art world. Children visiting the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago get to see famous pop works, such as Andy Warhol's paintings of Jacqueline Kennedy. (Asked to identify the subject, one group of second graders loudly chorused" "Monica Lewinsky!") The MCA also has a computer lab, where children can design their own cities, among other projects. And to help parents or teachers, the museum offers sample lesson plans on its Web site (mcachicago.org).
These days, many in-school arts-education programs are paid for by private charities such as the Annenberg Foundation or Save the Music, a program run by VH1, the music-video channel. So far VH1 and its corporate partners have raised $25 million and have started music programs at 350 schools in 30 American cities. Their ultimate goal is to raise $100 million and to bring music instruction to 1 million children. The campaign also collects used instruments, refurbishes them and distributes them to schools. Last year celebrities such as Tony Bennett and Meat Loaf helped collect instruments, and President Clinton contributed his old saxophone at a Save the Music gathering in Washington, D.C.
The ancient Greeks regarded the arts and mathematics as parts of the same discipline. At PS 134 in Manhattan recently, fifth-grade students figured out exactly how many cups of blue paint to mix with how many cups of yellow to get the perfect shade of green for their pre-Columbian masks. "That's science, baby, that's math," says Katha Cato, an arts-in-education coordinator for the Henry Street Settlement, a nonprofit social-service agency that brings artists into New York City schools. Before they made their masks, the kids read some of the history of pre-Columbian peoples in the Americas. "Arts education doesn't replace book learning. It's in addition to it," says Cato. It's also an opportunity for parents to broaden themselves. Drilling your kids in the nine-times table may not be much fun, but helping them dress up like an Inca or an Aztec -- now, that's a different story.
Copyright © 2007 John Ruggieri. All rights reserved. © 2000 Newsweek, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the copyright laws of the United States. The laws prohibit any copying, redistribution or retransmission of this material without express written permission from Newsweek.