Amy

I'm on lots of boards as part of my job.  Sometimes it feels like my life is one long meeting.  For someone who is not a joiner by nature, it has been a rather strange experience and generally speaking, it is not the most enjoyable part of my job.  There are some exceptions though.

Today I was with the board of the West Virginia Thespians at the Poky Dot Diner in Fairmont.  The board meetings in each discipline are all very different and reflect the nature of the artists, I think.  Music educators' meetings tend to be highly organized and more formal.  Art teachers are a little less linear, shall we say, and seem bored by Robert's Rules.  Dance educators seem honored and surprised that there is a meeting for them.  Then there are the theatre folk.

For those of you who do not know any theatre teachers, let me begin by saying that they are a unique breed.  "Dramatic" doesn't really capture it, nor does "theatrical," though these are certainly true.  In any event, they are rather loud as a group.  Couple this with the fact that the Thespians hold their board meeting in conjunction with the student board meeting just one table over and you start to get the picture.

After the conclusion of the meeting, one member, Eileen Miller, wanted to speak to me.  Actually, she wanted to introduce me to a student of hers who serves on the board.  I'll call her Amy.  Amy is a junior this year.  Eileen asked her to tell me what happened yesterday.

"Well," she started, "we got our WESTEST scores back.  I hate when we get them.  It's the worst day all year."  Eileen told me that Amy had been especially worried about her scores this week.  

"How were they?" I asked.

"I got mastery or above mastery in all my reading scores," she said.

"Tell Mr. Deskins why that's a big deal to you," Eileen prodded.

"I had never scored above novice before, "Amy said.

For those of you who do not spend your days speaking educationese, I'll explain.  Students taking our summative assessment, the WESTEST, are given numerical scores.  These are also designated novice, below mastery, mastery, above mastery, or distinguished.  Basically, Amy had leap-frogged one to two levels in one year.  That almost never happens.

So I said, "Wow!  That's impressive.  How did you improve?"

"Mrs. Miller," she said.  "I love theatre."

Eileen told me that she had had Amy her freshman year in Theatre and that during her sophomore year she also took Scriptwriting.  Amy is a special education student, but Eileen keeps the bar high in her class.  Amy wrote and re-wrote.  Her parents said she reads all the time now.  She likes school.  And even though they don't have a lot of money, Amy's parents wrote a $100 check to the school theatre department because they saw the good it was doing their little girl.

Eileen said she had come running into her class yesterday morning and told her, "I'm not stupid anymore."

"You never were," Mrs. Miller answered.

Students like Amy are the reason I get up everyday.  Some of them are those academic "ugly ducklings" - like the geeky girl in the 80s movie who goes to the dance without her glasses and becomes prom queen.  Some of them spend years in a system that regards them in terms of their numerical value to the adults managing it, only to find out late in their school careers that they are good dancers or sing well.  Some of them never find out.

I have heard advocates for our current testing regime argue about the necessity of data collection as if it were a moral imperative.  I guess I understand that.  We need data to make informed decisions.  Yet as an educator I'm concerned with what physicists might call the observer effect.  The very mechanism used to collect data has become the raison d'être of our educational system.  The result has been, in far too many instances, the crushing of student aspirations.

The defenders of the system say that it is not intended to be used this way, that this is the unfortunate by-product of administrators and policy makers who do not understand the correct use of data.  That may be true, but it seems analogous to giving Ginsu knives to a group of three-year-olds and not taking responsibility for the resultant carnage.

The thing that is so tragic from my chair is that it has resulted in too many Amy's in West Virginia being deprived of theatre - or dance or art or music.  This is so wrong-headed as to be infuriating.

In the first place, the arts are central to what it means to be an educated person.  Simple skills in literacy and numeracy will not suffice in the 21st century.  They never did.  Every West Virginia student deserves a comprehensive arts education.

Secondly, even for those whose only concern are test scores, we know that students who have an arts-rich curriculum outperform their peers in nearly every measure of academic achievement.  All the data ever collected seem to suggest this and just this week we have data specific to our own state.

The cohort of West Virginia students who began 9th grade in the 2005-2006 year were studied according to the arts classes they took and leading indicators of achievement.  The study found that students who took two or more arts classes, above the single required course, significantly outperformed their peers on the WESTEST 2 as well as the ACT PLAN.

The data was disaggregated for students with exceptionalities as well as students from poverty - all of West Virginia's Amy's.  The finding?  In every case the result held and in some instances, the effect was more profound for these students.  (You can read a one-page summary of the research study here - thanks Nate Hixson and Andy Whisman.)

And so, I am inspired again to keep fighting, and I hope you are, too.  In West Virginia, the arts are core and arts education is a civil right.  Demand more art.