Guest Blogger–David Shookhoff, on Widening Perspective to Narrow the Gap

I am
thrilled to present my first guest blogger on Dewey21c: David Shookhoff.

His biography appears at the bottom of this post, but I want to add my own
quick thought about David: I can’t think of any one person in the very large
arts education community in New York
City that has been more influential with more people
than David Shookhoff. So, I thought it was quite fitting that he be the first
guest blogger.

Widening Perspective to Narrow the
Gap

By David Shookhoff

Last week
Arts Journal hosted a debate on the question, “Will our culture suffer if we
don’t do more to teach the arts?” 
Sixteen distinguished figures from the worlds of the arts and arts
education were invited to blog on the topic over five days.  Given the size and vagueness of the question
(next time better and more definitions, please?), the posts were in turn
enlightening, exasperating, informative, incomprehensible, thoughtful, and
provocative. 

 

What struck
me was that the unacknowledged subject of much of the discussion had little to
do with the arts.  Many of the posts were
in effect addressing the under-resourcing of urban public schools, not just in
the arts but in every area.  To be sure,
this idea surfaced from time to time during the discussion, as when bloggers
like Jane Remer and Richard Kessler talked about disparities in equity
and access between urban and suburban school districts.  In a comment, researcher Rob Horowitz alluded
to an arts education apartheid. 

 

Anyone who
spends anything like equal amounts of time in city, private, and suburban
schools, as I do, cannot help be struck by the disparities.  It’s more tedious than difficult to cite striking,
depressing instances.  Here’s one:

 

One of my
teaching artists is doing musical theatre residencies at two high schools.  One is a long-established, well-regarded
small school serving “at-risk” students on New York’s Lower East Side; the
other is New Rochelle High School, serving a middle and working-class community
about a half hour’s commute from midtown Manhattan.  My artist requested an electronic keyboard at
both schools.  At the NYC school, the
principal and teacher — caring, concerned, smart, and supportive — scratched
their heads and said “I think we have one, maybe in the custodian’s closet, but
the battery’s dead and we lost the power cord several years ago.”  At New
Rochelle, the reply was “What model would you like?  A CTK 5000, a WK 3800, or our Roland
E-09?”    

 

And as Bob
Morrison put it in a comment, “The economic condition of a community [is] not a
factor” in predicting the degree of support for the arts, an assertion
confirmed by my experience in New Rochelle HS; its student body is far from
affluent (unlike its more famous neighboring schools in Scarsdale and
Mamaroneck), but it nonetheless saw fit to build a two-story state-of-the-art
performing and visual arts wing a few years ago, replete with dark rooms,
kilns, a sculpture studio, a black box theater with flexible seating and a computer-controlled
light board, etc., etc. 

 

Again, the
disparities in arts resources and classes are only one small part of the
story.  All you have to do is show up at
the respective front doors and the differences leap out: the paint jobs inside
and outside the buildings, the state of the physical plants, the food in the
cafeterias, the amenities in the teachers’ lounges, the gyms (good luck finding
one in far too many of the city’s schools). 
An article in today’s New York Times
about applying to high school points out that while any decent private school
will have an admissions staff of at least three, even in New York‘s most elite public high schools,
the admissions office … does not exist.

 

Here’s the real
point: as the dramatic disparities between city and suburban and private
schools are not confined to the arts, so we must frame the issues in a much
wider context.  We in the arts education
field tend to view everything through the lens of our own practice and
immediate concerns.  But as Sonnet Takahisa,
a former city principal with an art museum background, reminded a conference of
arts education practitioners, “It’s not about the arts.  It’s about the kids.” 

 

We have to
view the disparities between suburban and private education on the one hand and
the city schools on the other, not as an arts education problem but as an
education problem.  It seems much too
parochial, even trivial, to worry about whether the inadequacy of teaching and
learning in the arts will negatively affect “our culture,” when in fact American
society is imperiled by so many other factors as well, most in some way related
to the deficiencies in so many urban schools. 

 

As David
O’Fallon and Dennie Palmer Wolf suggested in thoughtful comments to the blog,
we need to consider these issues in terms of the fundamental purposes of
education.  We have to be thinking about how
to enable kids to develop the capacities they need to participate fully in a
democratic society:  to evaluate
information and opinions, to construct a logical argument, to imagine things as
they might be otherwise, to invent, to be alert and attentive, to make
connections and observe patterns, and to take pleasure in all that our culture
has to offer, including the arts in whatever forms they choose to encounter
them.  To those ends, we need to think
about how to equitably allocate resources, human and material, of all kinds to
all our children, wherever they happen to live.

About David Shookhoff

As Education Director of Manhattan Theatre Club since
1988, David Shookhoff has designed
and implemented a range of programs that annually serve 5,000 students,
teachers, and families in the New York
City area and around the nation. A leader in the field
of arts education, Mr. Shookhoff chairs the New York City Arts in Education Roundtable, serves on the Chancellor’s
Task Force on Arts Education and on the Boards of Directors of the Center for
Arts Education and Opus 118–Harlem School
for Music, has chaired the Arts-in-Education
Panel of the New York State Council on the Arts, and has been a panelist for
the National Endowment for the Arts.  He
serves on the Education Committee of
the Broadway League and on a special task force on learning assessment for the
Theatre Communications Group.  He has
been a consultant to the Lincoln Center Institute, the Theatre Development
Fund, and many other arts organization in New York and around the country. He has
directed numerous theatre and opera productions at theatres in New York City
and nationwide, and has taught acting and directing at Carnegie Mellon
University, Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University Teachers College, the
University of Pennsylvania, and the Mannes School of Music.  Mr. Shookhoff holds a BA cum laude from Stanford University and an MFA in Directing from
the Yale School of Drama.