The Art of Learning

Right there in the school cafeteria, 11-year-old Lindsey McClanahan twirled and threw her arms wide, finishing the syncopated dance routine she’d just learned with a stylish, look-at-me flourish.

“Yeah,” she exclaimed with a wide smile, drawing the word out for punctuation, the way cool jazz musicians do.

As she stretched, skipped, kicked, pirouetted and practiced ballet moves for an hour one morning recently, Lindsey might not have been fully aware that she and her classmates are among the first to benefit from a surprising, though limited, return of the performing arts to the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Even so, the Rockdale Elementary School sixth-grader knew she was blessed. After dancing, she said, “I feel ready to do anything. It kind of gets your body in motion and you feel energy and your mind is clear.”

These days, the headlines about L.A. Unified are almost uniformly bad: overcrowding, mismanagement, a teacher shortage, low test scores and a leadership crisis. But when it comes to the arts, the 700,000-student district is in the vanguard.

After years of neglect, the arts are on the mend in many American public schools. One reason is that the strong economy is filling state coffers to overflowing, making it possible to restore music and arts specialists. Another is that researchers are finding that engaging students’ creativity enhances their performance in reading, speaking, listening and math.

Research demonstrating a connection between music lessons and math “lit a fire under parents and school boards alike to say, ‘Hey, wait a minute, maybe the arts mean more than just something aesthetic,’ ” said UCLA education professor James Catterall, a leading researcher in examining the cognitive benefits of the arts.

That enthusiasm has spilled over into other art disciplines.

Even so, L.A. Unified finds itself ahead of the trend, thanks to efforts by community arts organizations, museums and businesses as well as the district itself.

‘Exposure Is Not Enough’

Even though the state has yet to set standards for visual and performing arts, the district has created its own. It has written a 10-year plan for making those standards a reality in classrooms, increased spending on books and materials and added an arts class as a graduation requirement.

But its most visible move was to hire 21 teachers who also are accomplished dancers, actors or artists to get the program off the ground last fall.

Those specialists work with eight classrooms in 54 elementary schools, providing eight hours each of art, drama and dance instruction during the school year.

Even with those limited numbers, it marks the first time the district has provided specialized instruction in drama and dance at elementary schools.

“Exposure is not enough,” said Leah Bass-Baylis, the district’s dance advisor. “We want them to learn to dance.”

Still, that arrangement means lots of kids at each of those 54 schools, as well as children at the district’s other 370 elementary schools, are being left out. Arts instruction at middle and high schools is hit or miss as well, depending on the interest of students and the talent and availability of teachers.

“We still have ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots,’ ” said Don Doyle, who heads the arts initiative for the district.

But he’s hoping the enthusiasm of those fortunate few who are part of the program will create pressure on the district to increase the $4.8 million a year it now invests in the arts initiative, $1.5 million of which goes for the traveling teachers.

In a separate initiative, the district reestablished its elementary school music program a few years ago and now employs about 130 specialists who spend one day a week on each campus. Middle schools and high schools also have music programs.

Eventually, it is hoped, students would have all four subjects every year, from kindergarten through the eighth grade.

“As it grows, we hope people will see the arts as a central part of education, not a fun after-school reward, not frosting on the cake,” said Robin Lithgow, who is the district’s theater advisor.

But, except for music, the idea is not to hire hundreds of specialized teachers. Rather, it’s to have the classroom teachers attend classes with their students, so they can take over the lessons once the specialized teachers move on to other schools.

That’s why Jane Winch, Lindsey’s teacher, was right there in the middle of her students, bending, stretching and dancing across the floor under the direction of dance teacher Betty Gottsdanker. Winch said the dance classes and the visual arts lessons her students took last fall are paying off.

Lindsey, for example, had a painting selected for a district-wide exhibition. That gave her such a jolt of confidence that “she’s just really starting to excel in all the other areas.”

Linking Art Into the Classroom

For enthusiasm, though, it’s hard to top Susan Sanchez, a fifth-grade teacher at Fourth Street Elementary School on the Eastside. Her students worked last fall with Carol Tanzman, one of the seven theater specialists, on skits that told the myth of Oedipus meeting the Sphinx on the road to Thebes. To explain the concept of genre, Tanzman had the students perform the skits as Valley girls, Pokemon characters, cowboys and film noir detectives.

“My students ate it up, they could not wait until the next week,” Sanchez said. After each session, she had her students, many of whom are still learning English, write about it in their journals.

They used dramatic terms such as plot, exposition, conflict and climax and their writing became more sophisticated and detailed. In addition, Sanchez said, students who were so shy at the beginning of the year that they could barely look their teacher in the eye blossomed and became more confident.

Despite such strong endorsements, district arts officials are aware that L.A. Unified faces enormous pressure from the state and parents to raise test scores. The district already dictates that elementary schools spend 2 1/2 hours each morning on reading, which makes it difficult to find time for anything else.

Hooper Avenue School south of downtown, which ranked at the bottom of the state on the Academic Performance Index released last week, provides a glimpse of the dilemma. Art specialist Diane Cordingly came to Ingrid Utke’s third-grade class recently to give a lesson on the work of Mark Rothko.

She discussed the concept of “color field” painting, which Rothko pioneered. The children oohed and aahed as they mixed red and blue to make purple and yellow and blue to make green. In the past, the school did not have paint or paper.

Now, though, Utke said, what she lacks is time. “When I do art, I tie it into literature or science or math so I feel like they’re not missing something,” Utke said. “You have to justify art by connecting it to something else.”

That notion worries Laurie Schell, the executive director of the Performing Tree, an organization that is one of L.A. Unified’s partners in its arts plan. “There’s a strange dichotomy happening,” Schell said. “We are experiencing in arts education an upswing as never before in terms of press, research, visibility and viability. At the same time, there seems to be this back-to-basics movement to raise test scores.”

“I’m not sure how this is going to play out, but I’m hoping administrators and parents will connect the arts to raising student achievement,” she said.