Struggling schools hope arts focus can provide a boost

WASHINGTON — The last time Aleya McBride visited the White House, she was following around a tour guide during a class field trip. On Wednesday, the wiry 10-year-old with the unruly poof of black hair was going to dance for first lady Michelle Obama.

A fourth-grader at nearby Noyes Elementary School, Aleya was scheduled to perform with classmates as part of a nationally representative showcase of students from a select group of public schools. Advocates hope the schools — nearly 50 but with more to come — will get an unlikely academic boost from an infusion of the arts.

The White House was expected to announce Wednesday a strategic partnership with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts that will help underwrite “Turnaround Arts” schools for the next several years, well past the 2017 sunset of the Obama administration.

Michelle Obama was also expected to announce that the group of 49 Turnaround Arts schools will grow next fall to 68.

Noyes, located about three miles northeast of the White House, was selected last year to take part in the pilot program, which uses music, dance, drama and other arts to boost low-performing schools.

The move comes as educators for the first time in more than a decade begin thinking in different ways about what it takes to shrink the historic achievement gap between struggling public schools and others. As the 2002 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law expires and the new Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) replaces it, schools are beginning to shift their vision, said Megan Beyer, executive director of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.

Schools have long focused on improving the standardized test scores of low-income and minority students in subjects such as reading and math, she said. But as they’ve focused on these narrow subjects, they’ve stripped the arts from the school days of millions of children. “Every study shows you they are the ones who can most benefit” from the arts, she said.

Making the case that the arts should be central, and not just an afterthought, “has been a tough argument to make because the arts have been for so long considered an add-on, that something extra when you have extra money,” Beyer said.

But she and others said new flexibility in the ESSA law, which President Obama signed in December 2015, opens the door for schools to use the arts, among other approaches, to improve results. They're also encouraged by Education Secretary John King's recent push to make U.S. public schools more well-rounded.

MIXED RESULTS ON IMPROVEMENT

Schools could certainly use another way to improve, the data suggest. After decades of trying to change the fortunes of the USA’s most struggling schools, frustrated educators have gotten mixed results, even with the 2009 infusion of $3.5 billion in federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) cash to turn around the 5,000 lowest-performing schools.

In many cases, schools improved only marginally. In others, changes in personnel, required by the federal grants, were either “chaotic or nonexistent,” according to a 2012 study from the Seattle-based Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington. The study, which looked at SIG results in Washington state schools, found that in nearly every case, school districts used the money “as incremental additions to ongoing activities, rather than as a tool for completely reimagining what’s possible for students.”

In an earlier study, the center looked at how schools in an unnamed state spent their initial federal grants. One of the authors, Sara Yatsko, told the education website The Notebook that schools demonstrated a tendency to "throw everything at the problem at once," including extended day programs, mentors and group learning, without a clear vision. “It was a recipe for disaster," she said.

A 2012 Stanford University study noted, “Stories of turnaround schools are rare.”

Andy Smarick, a partner at Bellwether Education Partners, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit consulting firm, said the arts focus is "really exciting," but the history of turnarounds is "just so depressing.”

What educators have learned, he said, especially in the past five years, is that school district bureaucracies often limit schools' potential. Unless they can break away from districts and operate independently as charter schools, their results will often be disappointing.

“You have to separate the school from the district that’s led it to its low performance,” he said. “All the new funding, all the new programming, all the new renaming of the school just doesn’t get at the problem, which is a dysfunction of the organization.”

SOME ARE CHARTER SCHOOLS

A few of the Turnaround Arts schools are charter schools, though most remain district schools. Advocates say their tight focus on incorporating the arts into instruction could prove key. A 2015 evaluation of the program’s first three years found modest-if-promising results: improvements in academic achievement and attendance and a reduction in disciplinary referrals. Researchers found that Turnaround Arts schools had slightly better math results, compared with other SIG schools, but that reading improvements were about twice as big.

Half of the Turnaround Arts schools improved attendance rates “significantly” from 2011 to 2014, while more than half reduced in-school and out-of-school suspensions, some by as much as 89%, researchers found.

They also said it was evident that Turnaround Arts schools boasted “a much broader and deeper selection of arts education programming than one would expect” from comparable high-poverty, low-performing schools, and a higher-than-average allocation of arts educators. Overall, teachers were working hard to incorporate the arts into the schools’ overall philosophy, not just treating it as enrichment or an add-on.

The schools also get a little taste of star power, as well-known artists "adopt" each school. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma has visited Noyes as well as other D.C. Turnaround Arts schools. Other artists who have played a role include actors Kerry Washington, Sarah Jessica Parker, Forest Whitaker, Edward Norton and Alfre Woodard; musicians Elton John, Marc Anthony, Jason Mraz, Jack Johnson and Esperanza Spalding; painter Chuck Close, and dancer Misty Copeland.

Noyes Principal Winston Cox said the arts focus played a role in a huge jump this year in student satisfaction: 93% in 2016, compared with 64% last year.

A native D.C. resident who has worked at Noyes since 2011, Cox said he has “seen reform efforts come and go,” often with little progress. In D.C., pressures to make schools more accountable have directly impacted Noyes: in the 2007-08 school year, test security officials flagged six classrooms for high wrong-to-right erasure rates on standardized tests, suggesting that teachers or administrators had erased students’ incorrect answers and replaced them with correct ones. The pattern was repeated in the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years, when 80% of Noyes classrooms were flagged by its testing contractor, McGraw-Hill.

Noyes’ then-principal was eventually reassigned.

MAKING A DIFFERENCE

Testing woes aside, Cox said, education has a bigger problem: trying to motivate kids not just to show up at school, but to work hard no matter what emotional or physical needs they bring each morning.

“They walk into the building and … we say, ‘Well, you’d better get into line. You’ve got to be cookie-cutter,’” he said. “Without intentionally and conscientiously approaching those needs, you’re not going to have success.”

The arts focus, he said, has helped many of his students shake off the stress of their lives. Each school day begins with a “morning meeting” that includes brain games, discussions and exercises in kinesthetic movement, designed to help children clear their heads and focus on school.

“I’ve seen the difference that it makes,” he said. “I’ve watched children come in with grimaces on their face. … And then to see that child, by the time we’re transitioning to their first period, smiling and activated, it’s palpable. You can really see that, and that’s an amazing transformation.”

Music teacher Ashlee Smith has gotten students to come to school early to be part of a drum circle and stay late for a school-wide production of the musical Annie. In between, she started a lunchtime Pokémon club, in which students trade the popular Japanese game cards. She has heard reports of parents using the club as a way to get kids to finish their homework.

The shift to an arts focus has also given many families a different way to think about school, Smith said. She remembered conversations she has had with parents who have said, “I want to see my kid onstage in Annie. And then we can talk about their math scores.”

Wednesday, Aleya and her classmates were scheduled to perform a hip-hop dance to a song from the Broadway hit Hamilton. Intercepted as she made her way to a waiting charter bus for a Tuesday dress rehearsal at the Kennedy Center, she said the arts focus “makes me want to come to school more.”

“Now I want to come to school, because I know it gives me an opportunity to see first lady Michelle Obama and Barack Obama, but you have to meet the expectation,” she said. “And now it makes me want to meet the expectation.”

Follow Greg Toppo on Twitter: @gtoppo