Arts Instruction to Make Comeback in Schools

After decades of drift in teaching of the arts, Los Angeles schools at last have been given a clear mission to imbue every student with the knowledge of music, dance, drama and visual expression.

Riding a nationwide wave of renewed interest in arts instruction, the Board of Education adopted standards last week that will incorporate the arts at all grade levels with testing to ensure that students learn.

As a condition of graduation, every student--including those who are not artistically inclined--would have to demonstrate an ability to interpret art and to create it.

It will be at least three years before the standards are fully in force, and school district staffers have yet to estimate the cost of building an instructional program. They are expected to submit an implementation plan to the school board in about two months.

Board member Valerie Fields, who made the restoration of arts instruction a theme of her campaign for election to the board last spring, said she hopes to start with a full-blown proposal that can be trimmed if necessary.

“We’re not going to be able to do it all at once,” she said.

In a unanimous vote approving the standards last week, the often divisive board expressed determination to make the plan work.

“We’ll find the money,” said board member Barbara Boudreaux.

The standards set benchmarks for the knowledge and skill that students should have in the fourth, eighth and 10th grades and upon graduation.

At each benchmark grade, there is a theoretical and a practical component. Fourth-graders would be required to use the terminology of dance, music, theater and visual arts and to identify connections between the arts and lifelong learning skills.

On the practical side, they would use the body to express the elements of time, space and force. They would also read and write simple musical notation, create improvisational dramatizations and create original works of visual art in a variety of media.

In the secondary grades, the requirements would be similar but more demanding. Eighth-graders, for example, would be expected to analyze the artistic and social characteristics and functions of art in various cultures and historical periods.

They would be expected to describe the use of melody, harmony, rhythm, form, tempo, dynamics and tone color when reading or listening to music.

High school students would be able to focus on only one of the four disciplines, but with ever greater facility.

In dance, for example, they would have to design, perform and critique dance sequences.

Considerable help in teacher training is expected from the bountiful arts organizations of Los Angeles, whose elite leaders appeared before the board to show their support.

“All of us stand ready to serve as your partner in making these new arts learning standards come alive for students and teachers,” said Harold Williams, president emeritus of the Getty Trust and the chairman of a district arts education committee convened by Fields to help develop standards. “But we cannot do your job for you. The core of arts education in Los Angeles Unified School District must be high-quality instruction as part of the basic curriculum in the regular school day.”

Members of the arts education committee--among them leaders of large corporations, the major city and county arts agencies and several arts groups--have reviewed the standards and will help district staff develop curriculum, lessons and, finally, testing procedures.

Adoption of the new standards places Los Angeles Unified ahead of the curve in California, which will soon have statewide guidelines on what public school students should learn about art.

Saying that a revitalized commitment to the arts can help strengthen California’s economy, state Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin vowed in November to make visual and performing arts education a priority in public schools.

“The lack of attention to arts education has been the silent crisis in California schools for too long,” Eastin said during a visit to Hollywood High School, which is a performing arts magnet campus. “It is time to turn that crisis into a renaissance.”

Because the district’s standards were based on a national model created under the Goals 2000: Educate America Act, Don Dustin, the district’s director of performing and visual arts, said he is confident that they will meld with the state’s eventual standards.

Because of the dearth of qualified instructors after two decades of neglect, the most difficult hurdle will be training teachers in all the district’s 660 schools, Dustin said.

“If you were to look at the available arts teachers today and project what’s coming out of universities, it would take too long to hire enough teachers to do the standards in all four disciplines,” Dustin said.

The teaching of art has been diminished by several changes in the educational landscape, beginning with Proposition 13, the 1978 property tax limitation that sapped funds from school districts.

Equally damaging, Dustin said, was subsequent legislation that put a limit on class size, inadvertently curtailing the practice of pooling classrooms to free a teacher for programs such as music and drama.

The movement to toughen graduation requirements has also made it more difficult for students to take art electives, Dustin said.

Under the current graduation requirements, students choose between one course in art and one course in a foreign language.

Yet, despite the widespread perception that Los Angeles schools are devoid of arts instruction, the number of students enrolled in art classes has climbed significantly in the past decade.

About 106,000 middle and high school students--more than a third of the total--are enrolled in visual or performing arts classes, a 7% increase from a decade ago, Dustin said.

The problem is that with too few art teachers to go around, too many schools lack a program.

“It’s a scatter-gun approach,” Fields said.

She said she learned that while working with a nonprofit group that offered free jazz classes to high school students at the Music Center.

“Master teachers complained to me that these high school children were not where they should be because most had not been exposed to music education in elementary or middle school.”

Although most high schools and many middle schools have teachers who specialize in art, lower-grade teachers will have to be taught how to weave the lessons into the general curriculum, Dustin said.

“In elementary we need to give teachers confidence to teach art on their own, the way they teach language and math,” he said.