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Policy Statements
District of Columbia State Board of Education
Hearing on Global Education
Testimony Presented by Louise Kennelly, Executive Director
DC Arts and Humanities Education Collaborative
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Thank you for the opportunity to provide testimony on behalf of the DC Arts & Humanities Education Collaborative in support of global education for DC students and educators. The DC Arts & Humanities Education Collaborative represents approximately 60 arts and humanities organizations, many of which help students hone the skills necessary to being productive global citizens, introducing them to world cultures and perspectives. As a collective voice, members of the DC Collaborative work together to ensure that DC students and educators have more equitable access to the city’s rich array of arts and cultural opportunities.
I’d like to share with you today some of our work related to the field of global education, and how it directly relates to our specific work in the field of arts and humanities education.
We provide arts and humanities experiences to more than 20,000 students a year and support schools in integrating arts across the curriculum. In so many ways, arts education advances the skills necessary to successfully navigate and lead in a global economy, including creativity, innovation, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, flexibility and adaptability.
A world-cultures perspective is inherent in much of our work. Many of our members offer student arts experiences grounded in traditions of other countries and cultures. As an example, the In Series produces an interactive program that teaches students about the history, geography, music and dance of Spain and Latin America. Other examples include “Experience India” at the Gandhi Memorial Center, “Clothes of Many Cultures,” or “Let’s Read about Africa” at the National Museum of African Art. In addition, our members offer workshops for teachers to enrich their classroom lessons using the art and traditions of other countries. The Freer and Sackler Museum and the Textile Museum regularly offer educator workshops and resources based on their world-renown collections or travelling exhibits, and the Washington National Opera annually offers educator workshops to better understand the languages and structure of opera. The depth and breadth of globally focused arts and cultural experiences offered by our membership here in DC provide DCPS and DC charter school students with the potential for an incredibly unique set of learning opportunities.
Every year, the DC Collaborative also partners with the Kids Euro Festival, the nation’s largest festival of professional children’s performers from Europe. All 27 EU countries participate in the festival. Our experience with the Kids Euro Festival has demonstrated to us that arts education, and education itself, has no borders. Artistic expressions of the human experience enhance our understanding of the world around us. This year alone, the DC Collaborative sent nearly 3,000 DC public and chartered public school students to Kids Euro Festival events. In addition to general excitement about the opportunity to experience arts from other countries, many schools found connections to classroom content. As examples, educators from two Spanish immersion programs and from one French immersion program were thrilled to take their students to events featuring the languages they were studying, creating an engaging, authentic learning experience, and an authentic assessment opportunity. What better way to determine if your students have developed both language and cultural understanding than by directly experiencing the culture; and how fortunate to be able to experience that culture right in their own backyard.
Many of our member organizations, individual members, and arts education colleagues also discuss the importance of culturally responsive education. Every day, educators and arts partners work with students from a myriad of countries and backgrounds. Being able to understand and relate to these young people is crucial to success. But it is also crucial that our young people are able to understand and relate to their peers from different cultures and traditions. Global education not only supports understanding, but also reduces conflict, because it breeds understanding and empathy, allowing for opportunities to demonstrate similarities and celebrate differences. This creates a positive learning environment for everyone; and it enables young people from other cultures to feel successful as students and learners. The work of our member organization, the Young Playwrights’ Theater, is an example of this. YPT works with students at the Columbia Heights Education Campus, to use playwriting and production not only as a tool for understanding, but also as a means of being understood. Many of their students are native Spanish-speakers, and for them, the YPT experience is an opportunity to communicate and express themselves more fully than they can during their school day. A more robust global education component would create more opportunities such as this for our foreign-born students, and would also allow for their peers to more quickly and more soundly understand the unique perspectives, gifts, and contributions of their classmates.
Another member organization, the Washington Performing Arts Society, has a long-standing and highly successful program, the Embassy Adoption Program which I am sure you’ll hear more about from them today. In partnership with DCPS, the Embassy Adoption program annually connects 1,500 fifth and sixth grade students in all wards with 52 embassies. What a unique and wonderful resource for our schools! This program has inspired many DCPS students to continue exploring world-cultures as they matriculate through the DC Public School system.
We encourage the DC State Board of Education to continue the conversation about the importance of global education and to identify new ways global education can be delivered comprehensively to DC students. We would like to be a partner with the schools in helping to deliver on the promise of a comprehensive approach to global education, thereby advancing toward our collective goal of creating a world-class education experience for the District’s students. Graduates will be increasingly called upon to demonstrate the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in a global economy. Adoption of global education standards and a comprehensive global education plan, with arts and humanities being integral to such a plan, will help to support students in meeting those standards and will help students succeed within the context of the increasingly inter-related areas of economy, environment, health, communications, and energy, among others. In the meantime, infusing our efforts to support students in meeting the common core standards with both global education and arts education strategies will advance our progress toward those standards as well.
I thank the members of DC State Board of Education for your continued commitment to DC’s students and educators and for this opportunity to provide testimony today.
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Testimony DC Arts and Humanities Education Collaborative DCPS FY12 Budget Hearing
Good Evening,
My name is Louise Kennelly and I am the Executive Director of the DC Arts and Humanities Education Collaborative. We are a collective voice of 60 arts and cultural organizations from across the DC metropolitan area. Our mission is to provide DCPS students access to high-quality arts and humanities education for the growth of the whole student.
I’d like to thank DCPS leaders for the opportunity to provide a statement at this hearing tonight.
Arts education plays a central and vital role in our students’ education not only as a source of enrichment but as a strategy to engage and retain students and to advance academic learning in other core disciplines. Students with high levels of arts involvement are less likely to drop out by grade 10 and arts students outperform non-arts students on the SAT. These are just some of the research findings that make a strong case for an increased investment in arts education.
And a robust and comprehensive arts education is essential to the future prosperity and vibrancy of DC.
We strongly believe that a quality arts education curriculum, combined with the other core subject areas, will best prepare our children for the future. As we continue to take steps to revitalize DC’s economy, it is crucial that we are able to offer the best education that will equip students with the creative skills that will help fuel innovation in today’s competitive and evolving workforce. The creative economy is a growth industry for DC and as we prepare tomorrow’s college graduates, workforce members, and leaders for the careers that will await them, it will be imperative that we provide high-quality arts education.
Washington, DC, is uniquely suited to deliver on the promise of arts education. Because of the many high-quality arts and humanities institutions in the city we can supplement the arts education provided within schools. But our schools must provide the investment in the arts education framework that will allow us to make the most of all available resources on behalf of our students. Supporting equitable access to high-quality, consistent, sequential standards-based arts education for all students is key. Ensuring every student from pre-K through 12 has arts education as part of the core curriculum in their education is critical.
Schools that promote an authentic presence in the arts disciplines within accountability systems; implement survey data on arts education in all schools; support in-service training for integrating arts across the curriculum; ensure adequate funding for professional development for arts educators to ensure they are prepared to meet federal and state-level standards consistently and appropriately; ensure that all students have access to highly qualified arts teachers; invest in scheduling for arts access as well as materials and maintenance; identify benchmarks and guidance for meeting standards; and conduct evaluation -- will go a long way in meeting academic goals across the board, and ready students for college, careers and lifelong success.
Exploring collaborative arts education delivery models like the one provided by the DC Collaborative’s Arts for Every Student program will further the reach of any investments made in arts education. At the DC Collaborative our tagline is Arts Access Leads to Student Success and the research shows this is especially true of at-risk students. The DC Collaborative provides 20,000 field trips a year to member arts and humanities institutions. Principals, teachers and students respond very enthusiastically to this program but we are challenged to keep up with the increasing demand. I was recently on one of our AFES trips with the Bach Consort production of Bach in Time where students learned the elements of music and it was incredibly inspiring to see the joy and delight among the students who energized and inspired the production as much as the production inspired them.
DCPS has made great strides towards ensuring all students have arts education and we encourage you to devise an even more coherent and well-supported system for arts education. DCPS is committed to becoming a world-class education system and the arts are an essential part of realizing that vision. DC’s arts and humanities institutions are among the greatest in the world and it is important that we give these institutions, with their strong education departments, an even more central role in helping DCPS realize its dream.
We look toward DCPS, our longtime partner, to identify ways that together we can respond to the increasing demand for arts and humanities education, including an increase in fieldtrip budgets, in-school arts residency allocations, and support for appropriate professional development and collaborative planning time.
Thank you very much for the opportunity to provide this testimonial.
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DC Arts and Humanities Education Collaborative Supports Increased Role
for the Arts in Voluntary State Common Core Standards Initiative
April 1, 2010
Washington, D.C- The D.C. Arts and Humanities Education Collaborative called for an expanded role for the arts in the Voluntary State Common Core Standards Initiative but noted the current draft represents an important step forward for the integral role of arts in education.
The standards suggest the ways in which language mastery involves knowledge of other subjects such as art and music, in addition to literature, and indicates that these subjects should be included in class time devoted to literacy.
The proposed Common Core State Standards coordinated by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, state that the standards "must be complemented by a well-developed, content-rich curriculum, including a rich blend of stories, drama, and poetry as well as informational texts from a range of content areas."
The D.C. Arts and Humanities Education Collaborative has long advocated for rigorous standards in the arts as a core academic subject and is committed to advancing the role of the arts in transforming learning so that it is engaging and challenging and contributes to the healthy development of the whole student.
"We look forward to the voluntary adoption of a set of rigorous standards for all of the arts and trust that any development of accompanying sample curriculum or assessments developed by the States Common Core Initiative will demonstrate the key role arts can play in accelerating learning in all subjects," said Jeff Travers, president of the D.C. Arts and Humanities Education Collaborative.
"We have seen a narrowing of the curriculum over the last decade at a time when the demands of an information-based economy call for a well-rounded graduate with a grasp of academic literacy across the curriculum, a goal that arts infusion in education can help achieve," he said.
Arts in education can have a particularly positive impact on students most at risk, playing an important role in helping to close the achievement gap, and it is therefore essential that they are accessible to all students. The adoption of a common core that stresses high levels of arts education will help accomplish this goal.
The current draft of the common core standards reflects a recognition that higher-order thinking skills and content mastery, both supported by arts in education, are not mutually exclusive but are inter-dependent and both critical to a high standards-based education. In addition, the D.C. Collaborative encourages an expanded list of illustrative texts that is even more inclusive of a variety of perspectives from multiple cultures.
Because learning takes place among students both inside and outside of the classroom, increasingly involving technology enhanced media featuring video, audio and design components, it makes sense for policymakers, administrators, and practitioners to share a set of standards across multiple artistic mediums as soon as possible in their goal to support learning.
About the DC Collaborative
The DC Collaborative’s mission is to strengthen and promote the arts and humanities as basic and integral to a high-quality education for all students in DC public and chartered public schools. The DC Collaborative believes the arts – inclusive of dance, music, theater, and visual arts – and the humanities are essential to the education of every student. The organization is a collective voice of more than 80 members from the local arts and cultural community, promoting quality arts and humanities education for all DC public and chartered public schools for the growth of the whole child.
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