Among the six, Mariela is in a category all her own: special education. She could not even take theater classes until her senior year because her schedule was loaded up with remedial math and English and courses in study and life skills.
Her learning issues have a known cause: chemotherapy, administered in high doses, to treat childhood leukemia. She was diagnosed at three years old. The drug regimen diminished her ability to retain and sort large batches of information. It is a common consequence, written about in the medical literature under such titles as “Cognitive Effects of Childhood Leukemia Therapy” and “Disruption of Learning Processes by Chemotherapeutic Agents.” One such study, in the Journal of Cancer, states: “Childhood survivors [of acute lymphoblastic leukemia] exhibit academic difficulties and are more likely to be placed in a special education program. Behavioral evidence has highlighted impairments in the areas of attention, working memory, and processing speed, leading to a decrease in full scale IQ.”
Mariela is a perfectly fluid reader, but numbers trip her up. She has been taught what is sometimes called tic-tac-toe math, a different way of figuring algebra and other higher-level math for learning-disabled students. “I can get the right answers,” she explains. “But what takes other people an hour takes me three or four hours.”
Theater is where Mariela feels capable. “I’m not supposed to be able to remember things, but I found out that when I’m doing a play, I can memorize dialogue,” she says. All the stages of a production come clear to her in a way nothing else ever has. “In theater, everything is staged and organized. It goes in order and fits together. I’ve seen how Mr. Volpe is so brilliant at that, and it’s helped me organize my life in the same way.”
As with anyone who has acted successfully, the experience gives Mariela both a thrill and a jolt of confidence—but for her, it confers an additional meaning and benefit. “Being onstage makes you feel like you have so much power, because you’re persuading the audience you’re someone you’re not. You have them in the palm of your hand. I really needed that. It makes me be able to look at myself and say, ‘Here’s something I do well.’ I never felt that way before.”
• • •
Artists and others involved in the humanities are sometimes the first to declare that the value of what they do cannot be measured. They know it is intrinsic to what makes us human—who are we without our greatest paintings, poems, music, and literature?—but are sure that none of it can easily be put through the filter of economists, social scientists, and educational theorists.
“Everything now has to be fully accountable,” Peter Plagens, a New York painter and art critic, told the online magazine Salon in a 2012 story on the declining status of the artistic classes in America. “An English department has to show it brings in enough money, that it holds its own with the business side. Public schools are held accountable in various bean-counting ways. The senator can point to the ‘pointy-headed professor’ teaching poetry and ask, ‘Is this doing any good? Can we measure this?’ It’s a culture now measured by quantities rather than qualities.”
Jonathan Lethem, the novelist, lamented in the same story, “These days everything has to have a clear market value, a proven use for mercantile culture. Well, art doesn’t pass that test very naturally. You can make the art gesture into something the marketplace values. But it’s always distorting and grotesque.”
In April 2012, The New York Times published a heart-wrenching essay by Claire Needell Hollander, a middle school English teacher in the New York City public schools. Under the headline “Teach the Books, Touch the Heart,” she began with an anecdote about teaching John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. As her class read the end together out loud in class, her “toughest boy,” she wrote, “wept a little, and so did I.” A girl in the class edged out of her chair to get a closer look and asked Hollander if she was crying. “I am,” she said, “and the funny thing is I’ve read it many times.”
Hollander, a reading enrichment teacher, shaped her lessons around robust literature—her classes met in small groups and talked informally about what they had read. Her students did not “read from the expected perspective,” as she described it. They concluded (not unreasonably) that Holden Caulfield “was a punk, unfairly dismissive of parents who had given him every advantage.” One student read Lady Macbeth’s soliloquies as raps. Another, having been inspired by Of Mice and Men, went on to read The Grapes of Wrath on his own and told Hollander how amazed he was that “all these people hate each other, and they’re all white.”
She knew that these classes were enhancing her students’ reading levels, their understanding of the world, their souls. But she had to stop offering them to all but her highest-achieving eighth-graders. Everyone else had to take instruction specifically targeted to boost their standardized test scores.
Hollander felt she had no choice. Reading scores on standardized tests in her school had gone up in the years she maintained her reading group, but not consistently enough. “Until recently, given the students’ enthusiasm for the reading groups, I was able to play down that data,” she wrote. “But last year, for the first time since I can remember, our test scores declined in relation to comparable schools in the city. Because I play a leadership role in the English department, I felt increased pressure to bring this year’s scores up. All the teachers are increasing their number of test-preparation sessions and practice tests, so I have done the same, cutting two of my three classic book groups and replacing them with a test preparation tutorial program.”
Instead of Steinbeck and Shakespeare, her students read “watered-down news articles or biographies, bastardized novels, memos or brochures.” They studied vocabulary words, drilled on how to write sentences, and practiced taking multiple-choice tests. The overall impact of such instruction, Hollander said, is to “bleed our English classes dry.”
So far, forty-six states and the District of Columbia have signed on to what is called the Common Core set of standards. Under its guidelines, by fourth grade, students will devote half their reading time to nonfiction, including historical documents, maps, and other “informational texts”—even such materials as train schedules and recipes. By twelfth grade, 70 percent of reading is to consist of nonfiction. The intent is to reflect “the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers.”
In defending these new standards, David Coleman, president of the College Board and one of the architects of the Common Core, seemed to equate reading and writing that is not purely fact-based with self-indulgence. Speaking to education administrators in New York state in 2011, he said, “It is rare in a working environment that someone says, ‘Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday, but before that, I need a compelling account of your childhood.” In the same speech, he said, “As you grow up in this world, you realize people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.”
Coleman is a classicist who studied at Oxford and a former consultant for McKinsey & Company who clearly enjoys his role as a provocateur. There is plenty of truth in what he says—people often don’t give a shit about what you think—though I’d argue that a young person might first encounter that bit of wisdom by reading fiction.
Defenders of Coleman and the Common Core argue that nonfiction reading need not be dry and that high school students might, for example, read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, narrative histories by authors like Doris Kearns Goodwin, or nonfiction stories in The New Yorker by, say, Malcolm Gladwell. But our education system is two-tiered in unintended and damaging ways, and the new standards and emphasis on accountability often make it more so. Where students are most in need of help is where the most stripped-down, deadening material is put in front of them. Under the Common Core rubric, students in, say, Chicago’s tony northern suburbs might read New Yorker pieces—on the South Side, they’ll get train schedules.
I witnessed perhaps the ulti
mate in bloodless curriculum while researching a magazine story several years ago—a robotic teaching method known as Direct Instruction. I. M. Terrell Elementary School in Fort Worth, Texas, is perched on a hillside and surrounded by interstate highways. The area is called the Island. The only other thing on the Island is a housing project of more than fifty two-story apartment buildings, from which Terrell draws its entire student body. Using thick “presentation books” that scripted each word, teachers at the school signaled commands by snapping their fingers, clapping, or pounding on a book or desk, so the lessons were fast-paced and rhythmic. In a fifth-grade “reading for comprehension” lesson, students read a short passage and then were prompted to mine facts and define vocabulary words. In one of the lessons I watched, the word drain occurred in a chunk of text.
“The part of a sink that the water goes down is called a drain,” the teacher said, reading from her script.
Her students then repeated, “The part of a sink that the water goes down is called a drain.”
She then asked, “What is the part of a sink that the water goes down?”
“A drain!” the students shouted.
Few middle-class parents would stand for their children’s being subjected to this method of teaching. Thomas Tocco, who was then the superintendent of schools in the city of Fort Worth, told me he was persuaded to try Direct Instruction because research showed that it worked—i.e., it acted like rocket fuel on test scores—and, basically, because he was desperate. “We had too many kids who were just nowhere in terms of reading,” he said. The state of Texas was soon to toughen its test requirements, and Fort Worth was in danger of having as many as seventy schools classified as failing. “If that were the case,” Tocco said, “you wouldn’t have been able to sell a cemetery plot in this town, let alone a house or a business.”
Near the end of my visit to Terrell, a sign in a third-floor corridor caught my eye. It said WRITER’S GALLERY. I wandered over to see what the children of Terrell Elementary had written. Would I learn what it was like to live on the Island, to strap your backpack on every morning and walk up the hill to this place? But there were no stories on the wall. Instead, in neat rows, were the certificates of students who had passed the Fourth Grade Spring Benchmark Writing Test, a section of the Texas state exams.
• • •
Hollander’s essay and the comments of Lethem and Plagens cede ground and seem to grant that art and literature are too soft to withstand scientific examination. That if put to the test, the humanities fail. Certainly, the current system can seem rigged to produce that result. An effective test-prep class—one that drills students repeatedly on the kinds of questions they will encounter on a specific test—can, in a given year, send test scores skyrocketing. No music, theater, visual arts, or literature class will ever be able to compete with that.
There is nothing, however, soft about Volpe’s theater classes and drama program. Even though theater is part of the “arts,” an airy term, the time students spend with him is actually the least abstract part of their day—certainly less theoretical than a math, science, or history class. With each production, they set an incredibly high goal and go about building something. The process is more like work than play, and at the end, they are left with a tangible thing, as close to perfection as they could make it.
Much of what I observe in Volpe’s theater program fits comfortably within the muscular language of education reform, with its emphasis on problem solving, high standards, “reaching for the top,” and accountability. More broadly, scientific research does exist that supports the value of teaching the arts and humanities—and the perils of de-emphasizing them.
Children who get sustained musical education have long been assumed to reap educational benefits in areas other than music. For years, the notion was unproven, somewhere in the realm of received wisdom or suburban myth. (“Put them in music and they’ll ace algebra!”) But an expanding body of research—social science that looks at the performance of cohorts of students and brain science that uses imaging to look at the firing of neurons in response to stimuli—supports music’s benefits. Instruction and practice in music can “fundamentally shape” brain circuitry and enhance performance on a wide range of tasks, including reading comprehension, Nina Kraus, a Northwestern University neurobiologist, said in a presentation at the 2010 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Much of the research on cognitive benefits of arts education focuses on a concept known as “transfer”—the brain’s ability to map information acquired for one task or set of tasks and put it to use for some different purpose. Creative thinking is high-order reasoning that requires memory storage and the ability to understand context. Theater training—as well as music and the visual arts—takes place in what educators call “language-rich environments.” The theory is that the whole multistep process required to create art expands the brain’s capabilities.
A major study from 1999, backed by the MacArthur Foundation, tracked outcomes for large cohorts of high school students, divided between children who received extensive arts education and those who did not. One part of the study looked specifically at the impact on students involved in theater. Between ninth and twelfth grades, their reading levels increased at a rate of 20 percent more than a cohort of similar students—as measured by academic ability and socioeconomics—who were not getting arts education. The authors theorized that the theater students benefited by spending time “reading and learning lines as actors, and possibly reading to carry out research about characters and their settings.”
In 2011, the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, first established in the Reagan administration, highlighted current scientific research and issued a call for greater emphasis on arts education. “The brain prioritizes emotionally tinged information for conversion to long-term memory,” the authors wrote, citing music and theater education as examples of disciplines with the potential to “cause an actual change in the physical structure of neurons.”
But the presidential panel’s report, “Reinvesting in Arts Education: Winning America’s Future Through Creative Schools,” gingerly stepped around some policy issues. Even some of President Obama’s most ardent supporters in Hollywood and New York’s creative corridors would not be able to read it without stumbling over language that is couched in politics, if not outright hypocrisy. “In this climate of heightened accountability, some believe that schools will give instructional time only to subjects that are included in high-stakes testing,” it states.
Some believe that? Does anyone seriously believe otherwise? Drawing on a range of research studies and surveys, the report does go on to delineate the sorry state of arts education in America: Schools identified as “needing improvement” and those with the highest percentage of minority students are the ones most likely to eliminate arts education. According to the authors, arts instruction has declined by 49 percent since the 1980s for black children and 40 percent for Latinos. In New York City, public schools in the bottom third in graduation rates (less than 50 percent) offered the least access to arts education—“fewer certified arts teachers per student, fewer dedicated arts spaces, [and] fewer arts and culture partnerships.”
The source for the New York statistic was a 2009 report by the Center for Arts Education, which stated: “In New York City, the cultural capital of the world, public school students do not enjoy equal access to an arts education . . . Where the arts could have the greatest impact, students have the least opportunity to participate in arts learning.”
California’s Education Code, the set of laws and regulations that govern K–12 education in the nation’s most populous state, calls on all schools to offer courses in four arts disciplines: music, visual, theater, and dance. But a study funded by the Ford Foundation and other private donors found that nearly 30 percent of California public schools provide no courses at all in the arts. Si
xty-one percent had no full-time certified arts teacher.
School administrators in California reported two barriers to teaching art, neither of them surprising: inadequate funding and high-stakes testing that requires them to focus on mathematics and reading to the near exclusion of all other subjects. The presidential commission noted that the research in California and New York was conducted in 2010. “The situation is undoubtedly bleaker now,” they wrote.
Nowhere in the No Child Left Behind Act, passed by Congress in the first term of President George W. Bush, does it say to slash arts education. Nor does President Obama’s Race to the Top program—a competition for $4.35 billion in federal grants to states that meet various educational benchmarks—make any such recommendation. But the federal initiatives are centerpieces of a decade-long trend of increased emphasis on high-stakes testing—meaning tests with consequences that fall on educators.
In almost all cases, the tests measure strictly math and reading skills, so even science and history have been de-emphasized. Study after study shows that the leanest curriculums are being offered in the highest-poverty areas, despite ample evidence that this is exactly the wrong thing to do. Many educators believe that the Race to the Top, with its strictly defined inducements and penalties, will do even more to constrict curriculums than No Child Left Behind.
In more than a dozen states, student performance on standardized tests accounts for 50 percent of a teacher’s rating. Across the nation, test scores figure into educators’ compensation. So when school administrators pare down curriculums and teachers teach to the test, it is usually not out of ignorance—but is a matter of professional and financial survival. They have been, as it is said in business, “incentivized” to do so. “If their very livelihood depends on it, what do you think they’re going to do?” says Mariale Hardiman, a longtime principal and now an assistant dean for interdisciplinary studies at Johns Hopkins University. “Everything they put in front of the kids is going to look like the next standardized test they’ve got coming up.”
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