| The arts and at-risk kids
"I don't know if the correlation has been studied scientifically, but as arts programming has been vanishing from the schools, the dropout rate has been going up." That's Ruth Mankin talking. She's the local education director of a nationwide outfit called Young Audiences, which books artists into schools. Actually, Ruth, those studies exist. Experience proves that the arts are indeed a powerful tool for pulling at-risk kids back from the edge. These are the kids getting rotten grades, flirting with drugs, hovering around gangs, cutting class, and generally sliding toward the chute that empties into a life of poverty punctuated by prison. The government says there are more than 4 million at-risk children in America. Teenagers and preteens account for 18 percent of all violent crime in the United States. We spend $7 billion a year incarcerating young offenders. What are we going to do about all this? Ideas abound. At one extreme is the "juvenile boot camp" concept: Put the bad seeds in an army-camp setting, make them get up at dawn and work hard all day, and punish them if they don't follow orders. Surprisingly (to me), this approach seems to work with some kids. Seems and some, however, are key words. Kindler, gentler plans such as "midnight basketball" score better numbers. But the hands-down winners of the numbers game are "community-based arts education programs," which have been popping up around the country recently. For example: The Ulster-BOCES Alternative School in Tillson, New York, is a "last chance" school for truants and dropouts--kids who just won't go to school. In 1992 this school added an aggressive arts education program to its curriculum. Since then the school's graduation rate has nearly doubled--to 83 percent. In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild provides a program in which professional artists offer classes in ceramics, music, and photography for at-risk kids. Eighty percent of the kids who attend these classes go on to college. In Fort Myers, Florida, the courts route some at-risk preteens into an arts education program called STARS. The kids take classes in dance, singing, and creative writing. It costs the taxpayers $850 per year per kid. Exorbitant, you say? Compare and save: The typical "juvenile boot camp" costs about $28,000 per kid. When you consider that communities served by STARS have seen a 27 percent drop in juvenile crime, that's a downright bargain. Preventive medicine If art is such good medicine downstream from the schools, where the dropouts accumulate like flotsam against the gratings of prisons and probation programs, why not plug in some arts upstream, in the schools themselves? It's happening, in a scattered way. San Francisco has a School of the Arts. So does Denver. Washington, D.C., has something similar. These are all schools in which arts and academics are interwoven. Guilford County, in North Carolina, has added arts back into the curriculum at its 14 high schools, and they've found that students who participated in the cultural arts programs had higher GPAs, better attendance records, and a dropout rate of zero. Students who had no involvement in the arts had lower everything and a dropout rate of 7.2 percent. So why aren't educators scrambling to get the arts into the core curriculum? I think it's because the arts sound like too much fun, so they get no respect. It's the old if-it-tastes-good-how-can-it-be-medicine syndrome. I was talking to a guy named Vaughn about arts programs for juvenile offenders. He would have none of it. "If a kid steals a car," he said, "that's grand theft auto and the kid should be punished. Don't tell me an eleven-year-old doesn't know it's wrong to steal a car. And the punishment has to be swift and automatic, like getting burned if you touch a hot stove. Otherwise, the kid grows up thinking that's how it works: If you steal a car, you get to play with clay." Point taken. Now the counterpoint. Suppose two kids steal a car on the same day. Kid A goes to prison for two years; kid B goes into a two-year arts program. Kid A spends his two years sullenly pumping iron in the prison yard and feeling angry at the world. Kid B spends his time learning to play piano and painting murals. Now two years have passed, and both kids are out. You're on a dark street in a big city at night. Someone is strolling in your direction. It's one of those two kids. Which one do you hope it is? ~Home~ |