February 18, 2009 State of Education: The Arts Advantage Play video

(Peter Howe, NECN) - You might be surprised how much else -- besides arts -- kids at the Winship School in Boston's Brighton neighborhood learn in their arts classes.

In Jessica Masiello's kindergarten movement class: math, Spanish (counting to 10), biology (what's a lion?), and science (the colors of the rainbow, red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet). In Virginia Yazsbeck's 5th grade art class, where they are learning calligraphy, she's working in geometry -- how slanting the pen at a 45-degree angle affects the lettering -- and history, passing around a copy of President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address rendered in calligraphy. In John Breen's 3rd grade music class, he's teaching his students about civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks and her role in the Birmingham, Alabama, bus boycott through a song: "Come on up to the front of the bus; I'll be riding up there.''

Winship School Principal Antonio Barbosa infuses arts -- along with science -- throughout the school's curriculum. In that, he's got great support from his ultimate boss: Boston School Superintendent Dr. Carol R. Johnson. "Students who engage in the arts,'' Johnson says, "are more likely to be engaged in school, more motivated to come to school, and students have told me that over and over again.''

Howe: Unfortunately, the kind of rich, comprehensive arts education that the 240 students at Winship School are enjoying is far from the norm around the city's public school system. That's the

Laura Perille, executive director of Investors, was co-author of "The Arts Advantage" study. "When you look at the aggregate of kids, there are 32,000 kids through grade 8 in Boston, and 9,500 of them are not getting arts on a regular consistent basis right now,'' Perille says.

The study found 30 percent of Boston public school students get no arts instruction in school, including 19 to 24 percent in elementary school, depending on whether they go to K-5 or K-8 schools. Just one quarter of Boston public high schools offer arts to more than 25 percent of their students.

"Money isn't everything,'' Boston Foundation CEO Paul S. Grogan says. "Under very similar resource constraints, the study reveals wide variations in what individual schools are doing. What that suggests to me is the role of leadership is absolutely indispensable ... the leadership and the mindset that this is absolutely crucial, and a way must be found.''

Specialists working with Winship students agree that arts education has far-reaching benefits. Corinne Zimmerman, Boston regional director for a group called Visual Thinking Strategies that trains teachers to lead classes in which students scrutinize and discuss photographs and works of art, says: "Observing, observing closely, supporting ideas with evidence, digging deeper, looking beneath the surface -- these are skills that are transferable to other subject areas.'' Nicole Agois of VSA Arts of Massachusetts, which works to include students with disabilities in arts education, says, "You can learn skills from the arts that can help you learn across the academic curriculum.''

The Boston Foundation report recommends the city aim to get 100 percent of K-through-8 students into once-a-week arts classes by 2012. It also calls for raising $1.5 million to $3 million for a city "arts expansion fund," of which $1.1 million has already been raised.

Adds Grogan: "It is absolutely pointless and destructive to continue the arts-versus-standards-and-testing debate that still goes on in this community. We've got to have standards and testing, and we've got to have the arts. One of the solutions is: more time,'' as many charter and pilot schools in Boston can offer. Concludes Grogan: "We've got to go to a longer school day.''

Howe: The study also found how surprisingly difficult it is for museums and arts organizations to make connections with schools that would welcome volunteer enrichment help from staff and supporters of nonprofits and museums.

"It takes a very entrepreneurial principal or a very driven nonprofit to find each other,'' says Ann McQueen of The Boston Foundation, co-author with Perille of the report.

Johnson agrees that the city's school system needs to do a better job of "making sure that we reach out and connect to partners and make it not so hard to connect to us. It may be just easier to go out and work with [suburban] Randolph or Brookline [school systems] because they're organized, they're receptive, they're smaller.'' The foundation recommends beefing up the school system office that makes those connections, and creating an advisory board chaired by Johnson. "Something that smooths those partnerships could leverage,'' Perille says, "easily 50 percent more than what we already have in terms of nonprofit/school partnerships, and that seems like an easy victory and an easy win.''

McQueen says, "It is an awkward moment to start talking about expansion, but there are in fact private resources that are available for our schools [that could] leverage additional dollars from federal and state sources as well as national funders.''

It is of course a tough budget year just to maintain, much less expand. "We know,'' Johnson says, "that schools are really hurting now, and we've got to find additional resources to make it possible for them to keep their art teacher, their music teacher, and the wonderful, exciting programs that are helping students to succeed. We haven't given up hope yet.''

Elias Harris, from Boston's Dorchester neighborhood, is a 12th grader at Boston Arts Academy who is headed to Bucknell University next year. He was invited along with Watson to speak at The Boston Foundation event. "If we start funding the arts now, I do believe that we'll not only close the achievement gap but we'll reach a new level of achievement,'' Harris says. "I credit art to making me a receptive individual, an individual who can look at the world, take in everything, sort through it, and still love it for what it is.''

Elias hopes other students will find their lives transformed by art, as his life has been -- a gift that's just beginning to unfold for the littlest ones in Ms. Masiello's kindergarten movement class at Winship School ... and those other Boston students lucky enough to be reached by art.

State of Education: Arts Ed in Boston Schools

State of Education: Does Mass. need arts mandates?

State of Education: Boston's Children's Chorus

State of Education: The Arts Advantage

State of Education: Winning over skeptics

State of Education: Moving arts ed forward