A Creative Way of Keeping the Arts in Education

Year after year, in a spacious rehearsal room in downtown Los Angeles, teachers from the county and beyond try to revive long-forgotten traditions.

They dance the “Sarve Kashmir” of Persian women selling bread on the streets of Zahedan. They sing the songs of mariachis from Mexican states. They tell stories in the tradition of Asian, Latino and African cultures.

They do it to keep the arts in public school education alive.

Many teachers leave the weeklong artistic retreat armed with renewed enthusiasm for the arts.

Some return to schools where students hear classical music during lunch and recess. But many more go back to campuses where arts education amounts to little more than sessions with construction paper and crayons.

Since 1979, after funding cuts all but excised arts from the public school curriculum, the Music Center has, in a creative way, fought back. It exposes teachers to plays, visual art, dance and music and shows them how to use the arts in the classroom.

Now its programs are in increasing demand as the arts gain ground in public education. The Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, has invested $30 million since 1999 in a new arts instruction program. The greater problem now is a shortage of qualified instructors.

At the Music Center, teachers or their schools pay up to $465 for the five-day summer seminar and receive lesson plans along with videotaped performances to help them teach students throughout the school year.

During a recent session, Rose Margolis, an eighth-grade teacher from Harrison School in East Los Angeles, sat cross-legged on a table filling out work sheets. In the columns, she wrote comparisons of the Armenian and Persian dances she and the other teachers had watched that morning.

She studied the lines, arrows and circles illustrating a dance called “Kamancha.” The sketch resembled football plays more than the graceful movements of the performers.

Later, Margolis and the others formed groups and, with outstretched arms and tiptoe twirls, choreographed their own dances.

The Music Center also offers programs that send artists into schools to teach or bring students into the center to study.

“We set out to create the finest arts education program in the country and take it to the schools and bring the schools to us,” said Music Center spokeswoman Ann Bradley. “When there was nothing, there was us.”

Since the 1970s, the arts have dwindled nationwide because of lack of resources. Some art teachers, unable to find employment, pursued other careers.

But in the last decade, study after study has linked arts education to improved problem-solving skills and increased self-confidence. Administrators around the country started to retool their curricula accordingly.

“There were a lot of us die-hard types who just would not give up and [school administrators] saw that it was making a difference with their children,” said Melinda Williams, director of education for the Music Center.

As school districts statewide renew interest in arts education, the Music Center’s services are all the more in demand.

Although Los Angeles Unified and other districts in the county have created plans to boost arts education, some arts supporters say the small pool of arts specialists has made this renaissance more difficult than anticipated.

“We’ve won the battle in terms of convincing people that arts education has a real positive effect on test scores and other subject matters,” said Laura Zucker, executive director of the Los Angeles County Arts Commission. “But if everyone believes in it, why isn’t it happening?”

For 20 years, state education policies essentially excluded the arts, Zucker said. Though music and visual arts teachers may earn credentials, California does not require regular classroom teachers to have any credentials in the arts.

At the Music Center, most of the teachers either specialized in subjects other than the arts or taught multiple subjects at a specific elementary grade level. The participants came from elementary, middle and high schools.

And for the 150,000 working artists in the county--painters, musicians, dancers and the like--who want to teach, linking up with schools can be difficult.

Organizations like the Music Center provide some services, but there is no central place for artists to earn teaching certificates and connect with schools who need instructors.

Another concern, Zucker said, is the absence of arts requirements on state standardized tests.

“If [a subject] is not tested, at this point, it’s not taught” as a separate course, said Elizabeth Reuss, a second-grade teacher at Multnomah Elementary School. “The emphasis has been to integrate art into the curriculum.”

But for classroom instructors consumed with the daily demands of teaching reading, writing and math, integrating art sometimes takes a back seat.

“I’m not going to integrate any Persian dance into my math class,” said Ron Carroll, an eighth-grade math and science teacher from Corvallis Middle School in Norwalk who attended the summer institute.

Time is the primary factor limiting arts instruction in the classroom, according to a recent study from the county arts commission. The next most cited factor is lack of teacher experience.

“You can’t expect the classroom teacher to reach that goal without additional training or a partnership with someone who is an artist,” Reuss said. “It is a less-than-perfect model, but I’m enthusiastic about it. It’s been such a dry well for so many years.”

The ratio of arts instructors to students in Los Angeles County is a grim 1 to 1,221, said Zucker.

Los Angeles Unified officials said it is too early to tell what impact these shortages will have on the goals of their 10-year plan to improve arts education.

“We are straining at the seams trying to create a program that will provide instruction to 740,000 students in all four art forms, all the time. That’s why the plan is [stretched over] 10 years,” said Richard Burrows, director of arts education for Los Angeles Unified.

In the three years since the plan was implemented, the district has created standards for instruction and has launched programs in 135 of 400 elementary schools that both integrate art into the curriculum and teach it as a discrete subject.

For schools and districts that must wait for arts programs to take hold, the Music Center continues to fill in the gaps.

After a week that included dancing across a hardwood floor to symbolize earth, wind and fire and creating 6-foot self-portraits with markers and colored paper, even the least artistically inclined of the 100 teachers attending the institute began to think creatively.

“Theater arts, visual arts . . . this is what our kids are deprived of even though we live in a culturally rich city,” said Esfir Lebovich, an English teacher at Berendo Middle School. “If I can bring these ensembles we’ve seen this week to English and other classes . . . that would make my day.”