Dear Commons Community,
Over the past fifteen years, the New York City Department of Education closed 69 large high schools and replaced them with smaller schools in an effort to improve graduation rates. To a degree, this policy has been successful but what has been lost are specialized programs like music. Below is an excerpt from a New York Times article describing the changes that have occurred in music education:
“When Carmen Laboy taught music at Christopher Columbus High School in the Bronx, beginning in 1985, there were three concert bands. The pep band blasted “Malagueña” and Sousa marches on the sidelines at basketball games, and floated down Morris Park Avenue during the Columbus Day parade. The jazz band entertained crowds at the Ninth Avenue Food Festival, and even warmed the room at a Citizens Budget Commission awards dinner at the Waldorf Astoria.
Today, Columbus no longer exists. In its former building, which now houses five small high schools, a music teacher struggles to fill a single fledgling concert band. Working out of Ms. Laboy’s old band room in the basement, Steven Oquendo recruits students for a sole period of band class from his school, Pelham Preparatory Academy, and the others on campus, with their different bell schedules and conflicting academic priorities.
“It does make it much more difficult to teach,” he said. “But we always find a way of making it happen.”
Between 2002 and 2013, New York City closed 69 high schools, most of them large schools with thousands of students, and in their place opened new, smaller schools. Academically, these new schools inarguably serve students better. In 2009, the year before the city began closing Columbus, the school had a graduation rate of 37 percent. In 2017, the five small schools that occupy its former campus had a cumulative graduation rate of 81 percent.
But one downside of the new, small schools is that it is much harder for them to offer specialized programs, whether advanced classes, sports teams, or art or music classes, than it was for the large schools that they replaced. In the case of music, a robust program requires a large student body, and the money that comes with it, to offer a sequence of classes that allows students to progress from level to level, ultimately playing in a large ensemble where they will learn a challenging repertoire and get a taste of what it would be like to play in college or professionally.
In a large concert band, “you’re not the only trumpet player sitting there — there’s seven of you,” said Maria Schwab, a teacher at Public School 84 in Astoria, Queens, who is also a judge at festivals organized by the New York State School Music Association. “And you’re not the only clarinetist, but there’s a contingent of 10. In that large group, there’s a lot of repertoire open to you that would not be open to smaller bands.”
The new schools chancellor, Richard A. Carranza, himself a mariachi musician, has said that he plans to focus on the arts, which can especially benefit low-income or socioeconomically disadvantaged students, according to the National Endowment of the Arts. A 2012 analysis of longitudinal studies found that eighth graders who had been involved in the arts had higher test scores in science and writing than their counterparts, while high school students who earned arts credits had higher overall G.P.A.s and were far more likely to graduate and attend college….
… Steven Schopp, the executive director of the New York State School Music Association, said students could expect that “there will be a band for them to play in all the way up through high school. When they go to middle school, there’ll be a band program. When they go to high school, there’ll be a band program.”
That’s not true in New York City, he said.
In 2014, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced $23 million in new funding for arts programs in schools, which included money for 100 new middle school arts teachers and for an “arts continuum project” aimed at connecting arts curriculums in elementary and middle schools. Since then, 26 middle schools citywide have hired music teachers, and 24 pairs of elementary and middle schools have landed a year of shared music instruction from local nonprofits and arts centers, according to the Education Department.
Educators say the key to maintaining a robust music program on small school campuses is collaboration. To succeed, principals must coordinate bell schedules, share classroom space and even split teacher salaries.”
Let’s hope that Chancellor Carranza can follow through on his plans to expand arts education in the city schools.
Tony
