Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
August 18, 2004 Wednesday
Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section B; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk; Education Page; ON EDUCATION;
Pg. 7
LENGTH: 1071 words
HEADLINE: To Fire Up Troubled Students, A Program Turns to the Classics
BYLINE: By Samuel G. Freedman.
E-mail: sgfreedman@nytimes.com
DATELINE: PROVIDENCE, R.I.
BODY:When Kurt Wootton was fresh out of graduate school and brimming with idealism,
he took a job here teaching English at Hope High School. He was white, his students
were black, and so he assumed the best way to reach them was through relevancy.
He assigned Richard Wright's autobiography, ''Black Boy,'' and he put on jazz
CD's by John Coltrane.
Few pupils, as it turned out, saw many parallels between their lives and young
Wright's. After Coltrane blew his last note, one boy asked, ''Why don't you play
some of our music?'' Hope High, so improbably named, recorded a dropout rate in
the vicinity of 50 percent.
Almost a decade later, Mr. Wootton remains every bit as convinced of education's
power to transform stunted lives. He has changed his tool of choice, however,
from a mirror in which students see only reflections of themselves to a window
that opens onto the rest of the world. The program he devised and directs, ArtsLit,
teaches literacy to children in some of Rhode Island's most troubled schools though
performances of texts, many of them classics of the Western literary canon.
They come, his students, from the neighborhoods and cities ruined by the flight
of the textile industry, forgotten places like Cranston and Pawtucket, names out
of the Industrial Revolution. They come most of all from Central Falls, where
abandoned brick mills bear keystones dated 1882 or 1918, where a state prison
sits beside the high school football field, where the public school system has
been in state receivership for a dozen years.
Some 160 teenagers spent this summer at ArtsLit reading, analyzing and then adapting
for the stage Rudolfo Anaya's coming-of-age novel, ''Bless Me, Ultima.'' While
that particular book is a staple of modern multicultural literature, Mr. Wootton
has done the same in previous years with Shakespeare's ''Othello,'' Lorca's ''Blood
Wedding'' and Ovid's ''Metamorphoses.''
It is no accident that he has drawn from the greatest-hits chart of Dead White
European Males, no more of an accident than ArtsLit's location on the verdant
and venerable campus of Brown University. Like immigrants of earlier generations
-- the Italian stonecutter tuning his radio to opera, the Irish stevedore reciting
Yeats in a tavern, the Jewish tailor viewing a Yiddish production of ''King Lear''
-- Mr. Wootton sees high culture not as the oppressor of the lowly but as an agent
of their liberation.
''We want to give kids access to the ideas and the texts they'll need to understand
to attend a university like Brown,'' he said in an interview. ''Performance provides
the immediate gratification, the sense of energy and engagement. But the real
goal is to read the text and to use it to understand your own life. There's a
sense of accomplishment these students feel to know 'Othello,' to feel how it
connects to them.''
Realistically, few if any of ArtsLit's students will leap straight into the Ivy
League. Still, their horizons can surely grow. In Central Falls, barely one-third
of seniors even take the SAT, and the average combined score of 812 trails the
statewide number by nearly 200 points; ambition means applying to community college
or enlisting in the military. The notion of a future beyond the next paycheck
or welfare check is revelatory.
Toward that end, ArtsLit puts a professional actor or director, a teacher and
two assistants into a classroom with every 15 students. Meeting four hours each
weekday for a month, the students came to know ''Bless Me, Ultima'' intimately
enough to script and rehearse scenes. They also reacted personally to the novel,
keeping journals in one class, writing poetry in another, essentially conversing
with the text about its themes of family and heritage. It was not hard, encountering
those words, to imagine literature as a lifeline.
''My family is a family of people who failed in life,'' wrote one 15-year-old
girl from Providence. ''High school dropouts, alcoholics, heavy smokers, rehab
or your daily crackheads. Not that I'm ashamed of them. Family is family, and
I love them a lot, no matter how they messed up their lives.''
Richard Kinslow, one of several Central Falls teachers who works in ArtsLit, discovered
the program's worth in a similarly wrenching way. Two years ago, he used the ArtsLit
method to have his English as a Second Language class develop a production of
''Macbeth.'' One of his students was suspended, the latest in a string of nearly
40 suspensions during the year (and it was only March). The boy would sneak back
into high school every day for the 90-minute rehearsals.
''These kids had never been actively involved in any part of school except gym
and art,'' Mr. Kinslow said. ''Doing Shakespeare honored them. If you want to
talk about self-respect and pride, it made a big difference.''
The regard for ArtsLit extends beyond its participants, who, naturally enough,
have a self-interest in praising it. The program has received nearly $1.6 million
in aid from the federal Department of Education under the Bush administration.
It has also outdone hundreds of competitors in winning grants for arts in education
($750,000 over three years) and in cultural partnerships for at-risk youth ($861,000
over three years).
Mr. Wootton, a disciple of the progressive educator Theodore Sizer, admits that
it ''feel strange in some ways'' to have fared so well with an administration
that emphasizes standardized testing and traditional pedagogy in its education
policy. In part, federal officials say, ArtsLit has done well because of qualitative
evidence that it has raised students' interest in reading and improved their public-speaking
skills.
More important in the current climate of statistics and accountability, the program
agreed to have its record measured by an outside researcher, who will determine
if ArtsLit participants performed better than their classmates based on subjective
assessments of their cognitive skills and, ultimately, numerical measures of their
performance on standardized reading tests. That data will not be compiled until
2005, at the earliest.
''This is an arts program focusing on many classic texts, which we certainly like,''
said Michael Petrilli, the Department of Education's associate deputy under secretary
for innovation and improvement. ''And it has a rigorous evaluation in place. So
we'll find out if the methodology works. And if it does, then we'll have a program
we can share.''
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GRAPHIC: Drawing (Drawing by David Suter)
LOAD-DATE: August 18, 2004