Lights! Camera! Build The Theatre Action!
In 2003, when Shanita Hill was a wide-eyed freshman at the new Bronx Theatre High School, she was instructed to convert a heap of trash into a set for the play Oedipus Rex. She found herself painting the city of Thebes on a pile of used furniture boxes.
“We didn’t have anything,” said Hill, 18. “Honestly, at the time, I went home to my mom and said, ‘I don’t know about this school. They’re making sets out of boxes. This is crazy.’ “
But Hill watched the set and the entire school rise elegantly from that rubble. Partnered with New York’s Roundabout Theatre Company, the small urban public high school eventually acquired a black-box theatre, sewing machines, and a set design room. Students attended Broadway shows and enjoyed the expertise of professionals from Roundabout. A student body of 410, almost entirely African-American and Hispanic students from the Bronx, was soon required — and thrilled — to take classes in set design, costume design, acting, theatre business, and dance. Their productions ranged from The Journey of Enkidu and Gilgamesh to The Laramie Project. Though cramped in their seventh-floor wing of John F. Kennedy High School, a large, underperforming school that was divided into five smaller schools, the Bronx Theatre students were thriving.
With such progress and inspiration afoot, Hill quickly dropped her reservations and became the nascent school’s class president, yearbook editor, and resident optimist.
“At Bronx Theatre, I was too busy with plays and meetings to fall into drugs and gangs like many people in my community,” she said. “It was a healthy substitute for all the b.s.”
Bronx Theatre is one of 15 arts-themed public schools in New York that have opened since 2003 and is part of the city’s New Century High Schools Initiative, which converts large failing schools into smaller schools with themes ranging from the arts to finance to aeronautics. It is also part of a national trend. The Coalition of Essential Schools, a nonprofit school reform organization in Oakland, Calif., has affiliated performing-arts schools in New York and Massachusetts. The Ánimo Film & Theater Arts Charter High School was opened in Los Angeles in 2006 by Green Dot Public Schools.
Public Schools, Private Money
However, these arts-related schools are often the work of private initiatives, funded largely by philanthropic organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has helped set up such institutions around the world. Meantime, cyclical downturns in the economy can sometimes force schools to cut programs (such as athletics and the arts) outside of core subjects. Combined with increased pressure for students to perform well on standardized tests, a comprehensive arts education for all public school students remains elusive — even though studies over the past decade seem to show that its benefits extend beyond an increased facility for acting, singing, and dancing.
In 1998, a study conducted in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. Department of Justice found significant decreases in crime among at-risk, low-income students who were involved with arts programs. These students also showed an “increased ability to work on tasks from start to finish, which is vital for both educational and vocational success,” according to the study, the YouthARTS Development Project.
A 1999 study, Champions of Change: The Impact of the Arts on Learning, found that a grounding in the arts is particularly beneficial for students in low-income groups. For example, more than 41 percent of 10th-graders who had “high arts involvement” scored in the top two quartiles on standardized tests for both reading and history/citizenship/geography; for 10th-graders with “low arts involvement,” only 28 percent of those students did as well on those tests.
A 2005 analysis by the College Board seems to indicate that arts education, especially in drama, gives students an advantage: On average, those who had four years of study in arts and music scored 49 points higher on the verbal portion of the SAT and 39 points higher on the math portion than those who had none. For those with any experience with acting or theatre, students scored, on average, 65 points higher on the verbal test than those who had none. Last, among arts and music students, those with experience in acting or theatre had the highest average verbal score and tied with music students for highest average combined score.
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