[CSPS] arts and schools

[Jonathan Coopersmith]

fyi for the arts

Veletta Lill: Growing young artists

... And good students. Dallas ArtsPartners finds that culture and education 
go hand in hand
http://www.dallasnews.com/s/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/022805dnedilill.2f112.html
07:17 PM CST on Sunday, February 27, 2005

At the TACA Neiman Marcus Silver Cup Awards Luncheon this week, we will 
celebrate the arts in Dallas and two community leaders who help keep them 
thriving.

Lynn Flint Shaw and Howard Rachofsky are the deserving recipients of this 
year's prestigious honor. They are two among the thousands who have worked 
countless hours helping make Dallas a richer place to live. The work is 
paying off.

Dallas has a blooming reputation as a national center for creativity. The 
first Creative Industries Study, released last summer by Americans for the 
Arts, analyzed the locations and numbers of arts-related businesses, 
institutions and organizations in the country's top 20 metropolitan areas. 
Dallas-Fort Worth ranked sixth, behind New York and Chicago, but ahead of 
Boston and Seattle.

Recent articles in The New York Times and The Independent also have lauded 
the variety of art and culture our city has to offer. The new Dallas Center 
for the Performing Arts will only raise our profile.

Another quieter, but equally dazzling, cultural shift is taking place in 
our city. The national spotlight has also trained its beam on our city's 
classrooms, largely because of the work of Dallas ArtsPartners. This 
innovative 7-year-old initiative is one of the nation's most successful 
arts-in-education programs. Its groundbreaking work has won national grants 
and recognition from the U.S. Department of Education, the National 
Endowment for the Arts and the Ford Foundation.

The philosophy behind ArtsPartners is simple: It ensures that every public 
elementary school child and teacher benefits from our city's vast cultural 
resources. This work is accomplished through a public-private partnership 
among the Dallas Independent School District, the city of Dallas, the 
nonprofit learning partnership Big Thought and more than 60 arts and 
cultural organizations.

Through ArtsPartners, Dallas students take part in performances, artist 
residencies, master classes, workshops and guided tours that incorporate 
dozens of arts and cultural disciplines. ArtsPartners also educates every 
DISD elementary teacher in how to use the programs to boost student 
academic achievement in all subjects.

Few dispute the intrinsic value of arts education. But for years, evidence 
has been mounting about the importance of the arts in learning other 
academic subjects as well. In the Jan. 26 issue of Education Week, former 
Secretary of Education Rod Paige co-authored a commentary with Mike 
Huckabee, the governor of Arkansas and chairman of the Education Commission 
of the States. They pointed out the 2004 course data collected by the 
College Board that indicate, as they have for years, that students of the 
arts outperformed their non-arts peers on the Scholastic Aptitude Test.

Likewise, an analysis of U.S. Department of Education data on 25,000 middle 
and high school students found that those who were highly involved in the 
arts performed better on a variety of academic measures than other students.

Dallas ArtsPartners has its own data. This spring, the group will publish 
the results of its three-year study, led by nationally recognized 
researcher Dennie Palmer Wolf of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform. 
The study investigates the effects of ArtsPartners on students, schools, 
teachers and cultural organizations, determining whether the initiative has 
a sustained, cumulative impact on learning.

The results look good. They indicate that arts and cultural education can 
serve to promote and improve many types of learning for students of all 
backgrounds and abilities.

Dallas ArtsPartners is planting the seeds of art appreciation and academic 
learning that will nurture our city for years to come. The children this 
program feeds will grow to be our next generation of fine artists, city 
planners, graphic designers and journalists. They'll teach our 
grandchildren, build our homes and pursue cures for diseases.

And if we're really lucky, they'll be working hard to keep Dallas arts 
flourishing, competing against hundreds for that coveted Silver Cup.

Veletta Lill is a Dallas City Council member. Her e-mail address is 
vlill at mail.ci.dallas.tx.us.


Jonathan Coopersmith
Associate Professor
Dept. of History
MS 4236
Texas A&M University
College Station, Texas  77843
979.845.8584
979.862.4314 fax

Secretary
History & Philosophy of Science Section (L)
American Association for the Advancement of Science
aaas.org 
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