Arts at the Center of Boston Arts Academy

The Institute for Education and the Arts is sharing this article about a public school with arts at the center of its educational mission.

Cross Training

Edutopia, October 2006

”The arts often are sidelined these days in an educational landscape of soaring expenses and standardized exams. As school officials across the country take the red pen to their arts budgets, they generally reason, ‘How do we justify the time and expense of music, dance, or drawing when we have federal benchmarks to meet and little money to spend?’ At the Boston Arts Academy, however, there's nothing dispensable about singing -- or dancing, acting, drawing, and painting. The arts at this public school are central to the mission of educating students in math, science, and the humanities. What could singing lessons possibly have to do with science class? As teachers here see it, tough training in the arts is training for everything important, and it's a kind of preparation teenagers passionately want and need. ‘There's a deep-seated belief here that art allows young people to develop a creative and entrepreneurial understanding of the world,’ says headmaster Linda Nathan, who helped found the school. ‘In arts, kids learn there's not just one right answer. They learn that judgment counts. They learn to connect.’ Using a carefully calibrated mix of rigorous high school academics and classical arts training, this seven-year-old academy aims to help 415 teens become capable, creative men and women -- artists and scholars with a faculty for self-reflection and the drive to continually refine their work. Students, many of whom enter ninth grade with no prior artistic training, choose a major from among theater, dance, instrumental music, vocal music, and visual art. Arts and academics are not separate endeavors here; they are deeply connected disciplines, and teachers draw on the rigors of one to feed another. The results are impressive, reports Grace Rubenstein.”

Read more here.

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