What are the arts for? What do they do?
These are loaded questions, implying that the arts should provide tangible benefits in order to justify their existence. But how do you quantify a string quartet? How can you take the measure of a new play? What is the replacement value of a "priceless" Vermeer or Van Dyck?
Questions about the value of the arts come into focus when we speak of arts education. In addition to providing intellectual and creative stimuli, arts education has been shown in several high-profile studies to improve students' overall academic performance. Perhaps this helps to explain why former Mayor Rudy Giuliani (hardly known for his art-for-art's-sake stance) invested heavily in arts education through Project "Arts Restoration Throughout the Schools" (Project A.R.T.S.). Another reason that the city supports arts education has been suggested by Giuliani's Commissioner for Cultural Affairs, Schuyler Chapin, who argues that such programming "creates future audiences and patrons for our wonderful theaters, concert halls and museums"--institutions that fuel the city's $12-billion cultural engine.
Created in 1997 under the auspices of Chancellor Rudy Crew, Project A.R.T.S. is an incentive program that encourages schools to rebuild their arts programs, which had been gutted in previous years. Under Project A.R.T.S, all of New York's 1100 schools became eligible for substantial funding to support arts instruction--whether through professional development, programming, or the purchase of equipment and resources. Individual school districts were given the choice of how to allocate the funds.
Since September 11, however, many schools' arts budgets have been frozen. The new city budget, passed at the end of December, eliminates $766 million in spending, including substantial cuts to cultural programs (although the City Council did manage to restore some of the mayor's proposed cuts). This will undoubtedly have an impact on school arts programs, as well as the 300 cultural organizations that offer their services to the city's schools, and depend upon such programs as an important revenue source.
The Manhattan-based Epic Theatre Center is fortunate in some ways; they have no pre-September 11 yardstick against which to measure their current financial health. They were in the first days of operation during the week of the World Trade Center attacks--just beginning to embark on their education program-- when the attacks threw their efforts into high gear. Fueled by the desire to "do something," the group of actors, directors, and writers--many among them experienced teaching artists--got together to brainstorm about how they might help the city's public schools deal with the fallout. "It was not like 'We've got to save the kids,' but 'We've got to create public forums,'" Epic's artistic director, Ron Russell, recalls. "If Epic had owned a space we'd have flung the doors open: 'Please come in, let's talk.' That's why we went right into the schools."
Epic's artists came up with a simple classroom exercise, a variation on an actor's probing into his or her character's motivations and desires. On September 14 they were in a classroom in I.S. 25, in Queens, one of the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods in the city. They asked students to recall September 10, and then asked them to shout out answers to three questions--what they wanted, what they loved, and what they needed on that day. They then asked students to answer those questions in the present--with the knowledge of the World Trade Center attacks. Finally, they asked them to answer these questions as if it were a year later. The artists then conducted the students in creating a "word symphony," or group poem, from the responses.
Shaheen Vaaz, an actor in the group, recalls that the answers varied wildly; before 9/11, students wanted the usual things--no homework, shopping, chicken; after 9/11, "food stayed constant," Vaaz tells me, but now students added that they wanted the twin towers back, world peace, or bombs--in addition to chicken. "When I listen to kids talk about 9/11," Russell says, "they talk as if it happened somewhere else--I think what they're thinking of is that visual image"--of the planes striking the towers that played incessantly on television for weeks. "Theater, because it's based in an oral tradition, can open up experience, create a place for conversation to happen."
For an emerging theater like Epic, going into schools is a way to generate income and visibility. It's also a way to counter the predominance of a movie-and-television driven culture--to build support "not just for our theater, but the theater," as Russell puts is. Epic created the "Antigone-in-Progress" project to involve students in every aspect of play production--research and discussion, writing and adapting, rehearsal and performance. First, Epic's actors go to classrooms and perform a new translation and adaptation of Sophocles 5th-century text, in which the Chorus's traditional role as commentator is replaced by an on-the-scene reporter, who solicits responses from the students as the clash between King Creon and the recalcitrant Antigone plays out. Students then spend several weeks working with teaching artists to develop their own, contemporary version of the play, which they then perform with Epic's actors.
"We wanted to figure out how to involve civic education," Vaaz says of the project. The central conflict of Antigone--between the individual and the group--fits into the logic of a classroom, where students are asked to conform to the needs of the class as a whole, and submit to the teacher's authority. In considering how to resolve Antigone and Creon's conflicting priorities, students are encouraged to think about compromise, and about their own roles as individuals in their societies--the classroom, their neighborhood, the city. "At first," Vaaz tells me, "students are always for Antigone, saying, 'Yeah, I'd want to bury my brother too.'" The Epic actors try to "un-black-and-white" the conflict by asking the students if they'd still side with Antigone if her brother had done something very bad--what if he were a terrorist, for example? Students are encouraged to come up with their own notion of a Chorus, whether that be a rap group, the media, or a group of their peers.
At Epic's education fundraiser in early December, a group of sixth, seventh, and eighth-graders from the East Harlem School presented scenes from their Antigone, including a potent staging of the battle between Oedipus' two sons, who kill each other, Sophocles records, "in a twofold blow." With far more decorum than might be expected from young boys given permission to fight, the two actors face off and slay one another, collapsing to the stage in a beautifully synchronized , slow-motion fall. An imposing figure--a character of the students' own invention--walks on and surveys the carnage. "I am the 'Eye,'" she says, "I see the past and the future." It's an amazingly theatrical moment, by any standards.
Epic has survived its first few months on income from ticket sales, school programs, and donations of $100 or less. They have been able to bring "Antigone-in-Progress" to four public schools, and hope to do more. They received many letters of thanks from teachers and students after their work in classrooms in September, and have also won the support of two luminaries in the education reform movement--Jonathan Kozol, a writer and educator, and Eric Booth, an actor, director, and Educator, who argues in favor of arts Education in his essay on the College Board Web site, "Art in the Every Day: Can It Change our Schools?":
"In challenging the standard thinking of the place of art in schools, we need to describe the 'skills of art' as the essential learning skills, capacities that underlie the 3Rs and curriculum material. These 'basic basics' include: intrinsic motivation to learn, the capacity to concentrate, the ability to make connections between and across subjects, confidence in your own judgment, the ability to respond effectively, the facility to use and understand metaphor, and the yearning for 'more.' These learning essentials are developed in the arts and express themselves in the works of art we recognize and value, as well as in other media of life (our work, our families, our leisure time, our everyday routines) that we usually overlook for their creative potential. Thus, to truly wrestle with change in our schools, perhaps we need to see -- and implement -- the arts as a fundamental, rather than a peripheral, focus for learning."
I reported last month on "Going on with the Show," the Center for an Urban Future's November 19 survey of how the city's arts groups have fared since September 11. The survey concluded that, with drops in ticket sales and funding, "nonprofit arts organizations are entering their rockiest period in over 30 years." On the day after the report's publication, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation announced the creation of a $50 million fund to assist those arts and cultural organizations that have been directly affected by the World Trade Center attacks. William G. Bowen, the president of the Foundation, expressed his desire that Mellon's actions will prompt other funders to support the city's museums, libraries, and performing arts organizations "that so powerfully help to define New York City's special qualities." Some of the $50 million will benefit the city's parks, which, in the words of Mellon Financial Vice President, Dennis Sullivan, "served such an important role in the immediate aftermath of the September events."
Like nearly every institution in New York, the City University of New York was damaged by the events of September 11. There were 111 students or alumni from John Jay College who died in the attack on the World Trade Center, and 81 from the College of Staten Island. The Borough of Manhattan Community College, two blocks away from Ground Zero, shut down for three weeks, one of its buildings destroyed, the other taken over by rescue teams as a command center. When the school finally reopened, 1,300 of its students decided not to return.
But the personal tragedies and the physical damage were not the only ways that City University has been affected. The university's fiscal well-being, already precarious, was further weakened by the attack.
It is a terrible irony that, in addition to the jolt that the Borough of Manhattan Community College suffered because of the events of September 11, it will also be asked to cut spending by more than four million dollars. This will mean a reduction in teaching staff, which will cause the cancellation of some classes, which will result in even fewer students. Fewer students mean less money in state tuition aid. So, Antonio Perez, the president, estimates his college will lose an additional $20 million in tuition and tuition aid as students leave the school -- not just because of the World Trade Center tragedy, but now because of the cutbacks.
CUNY has an incredible record of success. Nine of its doctoral programs are ranked in the top 20 in the nation. The John Jay College of Criminal Justice graduate program ranks number one in the nation, and Baruch's School of Business and Hunter's School of Social Work are highly rated. Numerous faculty members have won national prizes.
Above all, CUNY is the place of opportunity for the poor and working people of New York. Students who graduate from CUNY are able to become productive citizens with jobS paying taxes, buying homes and raising children in the city.
But the excellence of the City University of New York has not swayed public officials when it comes to the budget. In August, the state legislature passed a bare-bones budget that gave $733.2 million to the City University of New York, down from a billion dollars ten years ago, and an increase of only $2.9 million in state aid from last year. (This included a cut of $4.9 million for the senior colleges and an increase of $7.8 million for the community colleges.) Chancellor Matthew Goldstein had already been lobbying to restore funding to CUNY's senior colleges. Then, on September 11, the situation got much worse. Projections for state revenues for the year spiraled down, and the state supplemental budget that has just been passed did not include CUNY. Because of declining revenues, the mayor has asked most city programs to cut spending by 15 percent during this fiscal year.
These cuts come on top of cutbacks handed to CUNY since the fiscal crisis in the mid 1970s. From 1980 to 1997, CUNY funding from the state decreased 40 percent in constant dollars. In the 1990s, New York State ranked last in the country in the percentage increase in state and local funding for higher education, according to the National Center for Public Policy in Higher Education,
The cuts have had a powerful effect. Between the years 1976 and 2000, the full-time CUNY faculty was reduced by half, from 11,268 to 5,594, so that 60 percent of all classes are now taught by part-time faculty. Tuition increased by 93 percent from 1988 to 1997, putting it above the national average for public universities.
The 11 senior colleges and graduate programs of CUNY are supported by the state, while the six community colleges and the associate degree programs at four senior colleges are funded principally by the city. Because of this funding arrangement, the senior colleges, while not protected from state funding reductions, have been protected from city cuts.
The six community colleges have not been so fortunate and have suffered from city cutbacks throughout the Giuliani administration. In 1990, the city provided 43 percent of the funding for operating costs at the community colleges. It now provides only 21 percent. The difference has been made up by raising tuition. It is now $2,500 a year for a full-time student.
While the mayor recognized the importance of primary and secondary education and assigned only a 2.5 percent cut to the school system, he failed to give the CUNY community colleges a similar reprieve from his 15 percent across-the-board cuts. This means the community colleges will have to cut spending by $19.2 million this year.
These cutbacks will leave CUNY less able to offer the education that New Yorkers need.
Lynne Weikart, an associate professor at Baruch College School of Public Affairs, teaches budgeting and financial management.
One of the school system's most vexing problems is what to do to improve schools that are not functioning. Over the past decade, a quarter of all public schools in New York City at one time or another have been officially declared to be failing. These are called SURR schools, or schools under registration review.
At one of these schools, I visited a small elementary school art class. The class was in total chaos, with children standing on desks and jumping off them, running around and screaming. The teacher was yelling too. The teacher told us she had "only" been with the class for three months and that, as a substitute, she did not know the children's names and had never been given a roster, despite having asked for it several times.
Unfortunately, educators know this kind of situation well.
What makes a failing school? Many things, say state investigators, including:
The Board of Education was slow to respond to these problems. There was little overall planning or accountability until former Chancellor Rudy Crew created the "Chancellor's District", also called District 85 which grouped the worst schools together to supervise their improvement. These schools roughly correspond to those on the SURR list.
In 1989, New York State devised the scheme for putting low performing schools under "registration review." The targeted schools, which get some extra funds and assistance in curriculum and planning, are those that are farthest from meeting the state's performance standards according to their students' standardized test scores, or have been identified as being "poor learning environments." If the schools do not improve, they are shut down.
Since 1989, roughly 250 New York City public schools have been placed on the SURR list. Currently, 114 schools, 98 of them in New York City, are under registration review.
Just how bad at least some of these schools must be becomes clear when one looks at school performance overall. Throughout New York State, only 60 percent of fourth graders in public schools meet state standards for both reading and math. In New York City's SURR schools, only 10 percent of the fourth graders meet the standards.
The SURR process was supposed to improve the poorly performing schools, not shut them down. Critics, though, say this is not happening.
A new study, "The Tip of the Iceberg" by Joseph Viteritti and Kevin Kosar of New York University, published by the Manhattan Institute, states that on average, schools that do not improve remain on the SURR list for nine years before finally being closed. During this time, of course, thousands of students remain enrolled in what the state itself calls a poor learning environment.
While schools that improved enough to be removed from the list continue to do better than SURR schools, the study found, the majority of students in those former SURR schools still perform well below acceptable academic levels. The report also questions whether the SURR system masks the "iceberg" of general low performance in all city schools. In sum, argues the report, 70 percent or more of the students read below state standards in over a third of city schools.
The state admits that there needs to be quicker, more accurate data collection and evaluation of schools. (The state's role in identifying and improving low-performing schools is the subject of pending litigation). But the State Education Department officially declares that "the registration review process works," according to its August 2000 "Registration Review Report. It noted that 96 schools have been removed from the list since 1990, and the removal rate is accelerating. Only 17 were taken off from 1990 to 1995, whereas 79 were removed over the next five years. In December, 2000, an additional 25 schools on the state list were removed, the most ever in a single year, because test scores had moved them above the SURR threshold.
Critics contend that the removal rate says little about the quality of the schools. A school's students can have very low scores and the school can still be above the threshold for SURR. Further, they argue, test scores are subject to fluctuation and a statistical upward "blip" is likely among schools at the very bottom. Therefore, schools might rotate off the list to be replaced by others more because of probability than progress.
While he was a state regent, Harold Levy took steps (that he has backed away from since becoming chancellor) that would require SURR schools to employ only certified teachers. (Ten percent of city teachers are not certified, and many more teach outside their area of expertise.) The school system also reached an agreement with the United Federation of Teachers that makes teachers in SURR schools eligible for extra pay. Experienced teachers, however, have been slow to respond to incentives, and so most of the certified teaches in SURR schools are new teachers, many of whom have only the minimal preparation offered under a new state program. Thus, students in failing schools still get the least experienced and least prepared teachers.
Different states have taken varying approaches to the problem of failing schools. For most of the 1990s, New York focused on painstaking school-by-school reform and generally avoided state takeovers of entire districts. Other states, such as New Jersey, took over districts, including Newark and Jersey City, but failed to significantly improve the schools.
The difficulty of finding sweeping solutions came sharply into focus early this year when Schools Chancellor Harold Levy tried to privatize five SURR schools under the auspices of the for-profit Edison Schools, Inc. Like most low performing schools, these schools had spent years on the list undergoing a long sequence of "corrective action," planning and reviews.
Acting under pressure from Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Levy declared Edison could do a better job. But for his plan to take effect under state rules, parents of at least 50 percent of the students at a given school had to approve the idea. After a heated campaign, parents at all five schools rejected Edison. Today, the schools remain on the SURR list and two of them, IS 320 and IS 111, are slated to close.
Today, some states and the federal government are coming up with other solutions.
Florida Governor Jeb Bush, for example, has called for giving vouchers to students in that state's failing schools that they could use to pay tuition at private schools. The plan resembles existing programs that cover tuition in private programs for students with disabilities who cannot receive an appropriate education in public school. A suit has been filed against the Florida plan.
In 1994 a New York State task force recommended a similar plan to help students who have been forced to attend failing schools. But vouchers have been a volatile issue throughout the country, particularly in New York. Advocates say that giving vouchers to students in bad schools would rescue students from educational neglect and provide public school systems with a clear financial incentive to improve failing schools. Opponents believe vouchers will only make a bad situation worse, taking money and talented students our of the public schools.
Earlier this year, Congress rejected giving private school vouchers to students, but other methods to deal with failing schools, including providing students with a choice of public schools and issuing vouchers for private tutoring, could be included in legislation later this year.
Though the Senate and House proposals differ, bills in both houses give schools between 10 and 12 years to meet state-designated goals for all students. Progress would be assessed yearly. If schools fail to meet the targets for any student after the agreed upon time period, they would be closed.
Both bills also require schools to report on students' performance targets and call for results to be broken out by income, race and ethnicity. Advocates for poor and minority students have called for this kind of reporting on the grounds that lumping all results together can disguise discrepancies in performance and inequities in the allocation of resources. For example, 73 percent of white state public school fourth graders meet the standards in math and reading, while only 39 percent of black and Hispanic students do.
As school systems rush to meet the new reporting and performance targets, some educators fear that states may set meaningless standards, thus ensuring that all schools can meet them. As one New York State Education Department official said, the overwhelming temptation will be to "game the system and drop the standards."
Another concern is that annual high-stakes tests could drive minority students in failing schools (and elsewhere) to repeat grades and eventually drop out. New York City has already seen a rise in its dropout rate, New York having one of the worst high-school graduation rates among major cities in the country, according to a recent report. Only 54 percent of city public school students graduated on time. Many attribute the high dropout rate to the state's new emphasis on tests for promotion and graduation.
These approaches all address the problem after it has occurred. It would clearly be better to prevent students and entire schools from falling below standards in the first place. To accomplish this, according to a range of studies, superintendents and principals must be alert to the needs of at risk students, so classes should be smaller in kindergarten through third grade. Schools should use proven instructional programs such as Reading Recovery to aid students who need extra help.
Because principals can lose their jobs if their schools consistently fail, studies suggest they should have greater discretion in hiring and firing teachers. Superintendents, too, should have greater discretion to move teachers in and out of schools, much as other government agencies can transfer staff.
As the only people in the system who can make the needed changes, principals need higher salaries, along with the ability to assemble a similarly well-compensated team. And they must be evaluated on how well their students learn, not on whether the youngsters simply mastered some short-term test-taking strategies.
The solution to the problem of low-performing schools has been summed up in three words by Adelaide Sanford, the vice chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents. There must be, she says, "outrage, resources, and action."
Several thoughtful reports, in addition to those cited in the text, offer solutions to the problem of low-performing schools.
David C. Bloomfield is an associate professor of educational administration at Brooklyn College, CUNY. He was a member of the New York State Regents Visiting and Advisory Committees on Low Performing Schools.