Arts report paints 'distorted' picture

By Kate Pastor

The city Department of Education recently released its second annual “Arts in School” report, part of its effort to provide greater accountability for arts education.

That means the newest document provides the first year-to-year comparison of arts education in the city’s public schools. Right?

Not according to some local principals who report the information is sometimes distorted or even just downright wrong.

PS 81 Principal Melodie Mashel said her school’s report was mixed up with another school’s last year. When she reported the problem to the DOE, the information was corrected, but this year’s report also came back with errors.

According to the parent coordinator there, Nina Velazquez, the report shows that pre-kindergarten students got dance and music instruction, but the school has no pre- K classes. She also said that, “according to this, only kids in fourth grade got art but that’s not correct.”

IN-Tech Academy, MS/HS 368 Principal Rose Fairweather- Clunie said she saw errors glaring back at her in this year’s report, too.

“There’s information that’s not correct in here,” she said, disputing the report’s findings that 47 percent of seventh-graders and 38 percent of eighthgraders participated in arts programs. Furthermore, she said that all of the children who graduated from the school in June 2008 took at least one halfunit in an arts discipline and a second half-unit in another over the course of seventh and eighth grade, not the 86 percent mentioned in the report.

Although her assistant principal filled out the report’s questionnaire, she said the questions she answered asked for a yes or no response, and the DOE then calculated percentages in error.

The report had “many discrepancies,” she said.

For other principals, the problem was not imprecision, it was the way the questions were asked.

The “Arts in School” report is based on a voluntary survey filled out by principals about art in their schools, but its questions do not necessarily take into account the full range of explanations of how arts education is conducted.

Renee Cloutier, principal of PS 7, said that she filled out the survey last year, but this year she instead wrote an email to the DOE, expressing her concern that the questions were inadequate to accurately portray how art is being taught at her school.

The survey asks, among other things, how many dedicated or equipped art rooms the school has, and Ms. Cloutier said she had wanted to answer 30 — all of the classrooms in the school — since art is integrated into each classroom there, but there was no room for her answer.

Last year, the report, which is posted online on each school’s Web site, said her school had zero dedicated classrooms for the arts, which she felt left the wrong impression for parents or other observers who might view it.

“It’s difficult when surveys are given in that way and there’s no room to answer how we do things this year,” she said.

A spokeswoman for the DOE, Maibe Gonzalez, said the survey is the work of a taskforce, composed of community, cultural and arts organizations, as well as school principals. While she admitted that there may be errors on individual schools’ reports, she said, “Every school was sent a report in advance and was a given a period of time, from Sept. 11 until Oct. 1, to review the report.” During that period, she said, they could be reopened and corrections could be made.

“If there are problems with the reporting we obviously would like to redo it,” she said, but the DOE would need to hear from the schools affected.

Marvin Shelton, president of District 10’s Community Education Council and a PS 24 parent, said the lesson to come from confusing or inaccurate reports is that, “Any parent is well served to just directly ask [the school].”

A visit to a school’s classrooms, a look at their bulletin boards, or a conversation with their teachers might be the best way to determine how much arts education a child will get there.

This is part of the October 30, 2008 online edition of The Riverdale Press.

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