I Like Art (and Art Education) But

What do the New York Yankees and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg have in common? My answer is at the end of this column.

I like art, music, theater, and dance. I believe they enrich our lives. I believe they belong in the schools at every grade level because they stimulate children to think about, explain, replicate, and understand the world around them in imaginative ways. I love watching my five-year-old grandchildren Gideon and Sadia sing, bang, move, draw, paint, tell stories, and act. Their creativities reflect their different personalities. Sadia likes getting everything just so. Gideon, in art and life, plays everything outside the lines. Art supports their emerging literacy. As they draw letters and pictures and tell stories about what they drew they are learning to read.

All this being said, claims made in a recent report by the Center for Arts Education crediting the arts in school with promoting higher graduation rates are an exaggeration and misleading ("Staying in School: Arts Education and New York City High School Graduation Rates," October 2009). Their claims underscore what happens when a statistical correlation is used to suggest causality - you end up with a logically ridiculous argument. For example, if boys prefer chocolate ice cream and girls prefer vanilla ice cream and boys run faster, it does not mean chocolate ice cream makes you run faster. I have been gorging on chocolate ice cream for years and it just does not happen.

The study reports that "High schools in the top third of graduation rates had almost 40 percent more certified arts teachers per student than schools in the bottom third" and had "25 percent more partnerships with arts and cultural organizations than schools in the bottom third."

What the study actually demonstrates is that in schools serving students from middle class and professional families, students get to do art rather than reading remediation and test prep. These students are not performing well because they take art, but get a chance to take art because their parents demand it and because they are already performing well.

Unfortunately, invalid claims like these, using correlations to suggest causality, are constantly being made by politicians on the local, state, and national levels about education so they do not have to address the real underlying causes of educational and social inequality.

For example, the Bloomberg administration's claims that leaving kids back enhances learning, improves their performance in school, and offers them possibilities for the future, is based on minimal gains on standardized tests. But unfortunately the higher scores don't really measure any of these things. They only prove that when students take "practice" tests over and over again, and the practice test turns out to be a test, they score higher.

If we really want to improve education for young people, we need to stop manipulating statistics to pretend we have the miracle solution to all educational problems. Unfortunately there are no miracles.

In the meantime, it would be nice to have art in the schools just for its own sake.

What do the New York Yankees and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg have in common?

I am a lifelong baseball and New York Yankee fan. I was born in The Bronx and lived about ten blocks from Yankee Stadium. I started going to Yankee games on "Ladies Day" with my mother when I was eight years old. I need readers to forgive me my allegiances. On the other hand, readers of my blogs know I really dislike Michael "Mayor Moneybags" Bloomberg.

The victories by the Yankees and Bloomberg illustrate the problem with confusing correlations with causes. The simplest correlation is that they both won because they were the "best".

But that conclusion obscures what actually was going on. What the Yankees and Bloomberg have in common is not just that they recently won (the World Series and the mayoralty), but that they used their great personal wealth to purchase victory. The Yankee payroll is at least 30% higher than the payroll of any other major league baseball team, while Bloomberg outspent his leading opponent by about 10 to 1. While both the Yankees and Bloomberg played by the rules, I don't think anyone doubts that outcomes would have been different if the games were played on a level "spending" field.

 

Comments

[pabloM]

What is truly shocking is the inability of the Department of Education in all lower income schools throughout this nation to admit that the real problem isn't necessarily the teachers, parents, kids or a combination of all of them but utter despair in these communities. Money is an issue and until the elected officials of this nation accept that fact all of the tricks and number manipulations that they concoct will only be a reshuffling of the deck. While the arts are an important part of a child’s intellectual and emotional growth it is not a direct affect of it but the people in charge will use any news as good news and the poor will remain a permanent underclass. As always Singer makes a great point its too bad that the powers that be arent paying attention.

[digoweli]

Often the Arts and Sports programs in the Ghetto and on Indian Reservations are the only thing that saves the lives of the children. Patterning,. patterning discrimination and pattern control are the foundations of IQ. Patterning is found in the Arts just as physical conditioning and psychological control, and system cleansing is found in physical exercise. I grew up on the Quapaw reservation in the lead and zinc mine fields. Lead poison was so prevalent that the U.S. government (EPA) closed the community last year. And yet, in the twelve years of my schooling (1947- 1959) the Arts and Sports programs produced people who have succeeded far beyond what medical science says we should have. I am convinced the reason was not academics, which were mediocre, but the strong performing arts and sports base. Mickey Mantle came out of the sports as did many others. Section leader Burl Lane in the Chicago Symphony and composer Louis Ballard graduated a year ahead of me. Don Johnson of the Modine Corporation was in my class. Many teachers, lawyers, doctors, businessmen and performing artists were graduated in those years when they had a strong coherent Arts and Physical Education program. The school went from the lower 15% in the nation to full accreditation and the upper 88% in just 12 years. Once the management changed it returned to the regular curriculum and last year the town was shut down because of the lead poison that damaged people's lives and children's abilities.

[digoweli]

Too bad the DANA Foundation is proving, in their brain studies, that the arts are causative of better thinking rather than correlative. After Safire and other conservatives had made the correlative argument for years they did an about face and Safire even associated himself with DANA before he died. David Koch gave all of that money to City Opera when his flat tax would kill the Arts funding in America. "Hedging his bets?" Today, we don't need liberals like Lavitin and Sacks to prove it. Even the conservatives are looking at the data and wanting to be on the right side of history on this one.

It should just be logical that what develops patterning skills (aesthetics) and personal virtuosity (the Arts) in the young child would underlie everything that comes afterward but we get Maher and Singer and others taking this "we don't need perceptual skills" argument that makes no sense. : >)) Was Marcel Mauss the last social scientist who "Got" the purpose of the Arts in society? The kicker here is that serious art is rarely "nice". That's why the conservatives were against the NEA before the read they brain studies.