Los Ni Ni are everywhere.  Ni estudia ni trabaja: young people who neither study nor work.  Both in Latin America and in the U.S. these young people represent an endless recruitment source of cheap lives for drug traffickers.  Looking at these kids one can't help but wonder if we missed our opportunity to engage them by our ever-increasing preoccupation with test scores and need to Race to the Top.   What if I'm just somewhere in the middle?  Or a misfit?  An outcast?  Or just Different?

I remember sitting at the back of the classroom with my homeboys and feeling the awkward and very real pressure not to be into school (I was, secretly - I wanted to be a scientist.).  It was part of a system that had nothing to do with us, we thought.  Oye, do they really expect me to speak English like that?  Race to the Top of what?  A system that doesn't look like me and has nothing to do with me?  The program's very name already has me feeling like I'm left out and behind the eight-ball.

Meanwhile, Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan is handing out some really big checks.  With the recent announcement of states awarded a share of the $3.4 billion in federal financing in the Race to the Top competition, the latest and greatest iteration of how we will fix our schools begins. 

Secretary Duncan has spent time on some of Chicago's toughest streets so we might expect he knows the difference between flavor-of-the-decade pedagogy and achieving real results in struggling communities like Chicago's South Side, L.A.'s Westlake/Pico-Union, and San Francisco's Tenderloin.   Still, it's worth remembering the fanfare surrounding the announcement of No Child Left Behind, as well as the results: drop-out rates for Latinos and African-American students hovered above 40% when the program began.  Drop-out rates hovered above 40% when the program ended.     

This brings to mind Ta-Nehisi Coates' insightful account on how even bright kids can struggle in conventional classrooms.   Now a successful journalist, Ta-Nehisi tries to make sense of his failure in school:

Music teachers are reading teachers.    This sounds a lot like what Carey Perloff, Artistic Director of American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.), was describing when we met a few months ago.  As I listened to Carey speak passionately about drama education I understood she was also talking about teaching youth literacy and civic values.   Drama teachers are reading and civic education teachers.  It occurred to me that what A.C.T.'s drama classes were offering was a broadening of the entryway to success.

Sitting in the main office at Alonzo King Lines Ballet you can't help but notice the posters of company dancers whose bodies fall outside the conventional norm associated with ballet.   When asked about it, Ann Marie Nemanich, the company's executive director, explains a philosophy of making room for all people, not just those that meet the narrowly defined model.  And when you sign-up for a dance class at Alonzo King Lines Ballet, you're encouraged to engage in "independent thinking and problem solving."  Dance teachers are critical thinking teachers.

Moving from dance and drama to the software arts world, we have a different educational dynamic at play during one of Gray Area Foundation for the Arts Creative Coding workshops, also known as Programming for Poets.  Here's a student's review of the class:

What do we make of this one?  Poetry teachers are computer programming teachers?  Or is it the other way around?  I'm not sure (I should take the class), but designing sound and interactive experiences sounds like a sure entryway to success in our entrepreneurial apps-for iPad-economy. 

Looking at A.C.T., Alonzo King Lines Ballet, and Gray Area makes a strong argument for moving past the silo approach to teaching reading and math.  We can complement the classroom by supporting learning outside of the classroom: finally recognize that reading and other essential academic/life skills are integral to art programs and weave art programs into everyday life. 

About a year ago a good friend helped me organize a visit to the FoxTheatre/Oakland School for the Arts development in downtown Oakland, a fantastic project that delivers both economic revitalization and educational benefits to a long-distressed part of downtown Oakland.  Shortly after this fact-finding visit we learned that there was a long-term effort to move San Francisco's highly-regarded School of the Arts (SOTA) to a downtown location.  Well, I thought, why not lobby for the Tenderloin as the downtown home of SOTA?   We have the real estate: hundreds of thousands of underutilized and vacant square feet within two blocks of major mass transit stations.  We have a diverse and fantastic art ecosystem[1] of neighborhood galleries, theater companies, dance companies, and youth programs engaged in the arts.  Our program offerings are eclectic, multi-disciplinary, and entrepreneurial.

You have to be willing to be laughed at and endure looks of incredulity when doing this kind of work, and I certainly got my share of that when I suggested we talk to the school district about building a new SOTA in the Tenderloin.   But I maintain this is where SOTA belongs, and it belongs in the Mission, and in Bayview-Hunters Point.  Indeed, there should be SOTAs in every community where we're fighting to save young lives before they become our next generation of Los Ni Ni.     

Someone should tell the current generation of Los Ni Ni selling crack on the corner of Turk & Taylor about Race to the Top.  On the other hand maybe they already know about it and have concluded that they've seen it all before.   If only these kids had the chance to participate in a rehearsal of an August Wilson play or study with a choreographer for an Alonzo King piece, maybe it would have worked out better for some.  Maybe the difference is in how the arts give us an experiential approach to the essential learning Professor Willingham was talking about.  Maybe it's a simple matter of offering a different, and arguably far more inclusive, path to learning and success.  Sitting behind a desk almost all day, every day, maintaining focus and staying on task for years doesn't work for a lot of our students (I still can't do it!).  Many of us are just wired differently. 

Duncan and Obama and all of us are in a serious competition with the streets, and Race to the Top seems like more of the same that results in almost half of our inner-city kids dropping-out.  I'm not arguing that music, dance and drama classes are going to save all the kids on the corner of Turk & Taylor, but if we break outside the confines of the school walls, develop collaborations with our school districts and invest in the A.C.T.s, Alonzo Kings and Gray Areas out there I bet we could reach many more of them.

We have to inspire them.      

Cheers, 

Elvin

Addendum:  There are numerous and wonderful examples of the arts inspiring/educating/rescuing at-risk young people in distressed communities all over the world - the most famous, El Sistema in the slums of Caracas, Venezuela, inspired me to think about a SOTA in the Tenderloin.  There's also El Colegio del Cuerpo (dance) in Cartagena, Columbia and al-Kamandjati (music) in Palestine.  Here in the states there's Bill Strickland's brilliant Manchester Craftsmans' Guild in Pittsburgh.  In Los Angeles there's Tia Chucha's Centro Cultural, where kids who would otherwise drop-out of school remain engaged through music and poetry.  Check out the Shop Girls, Las Artes and other fantastic programs offered by ISDA in the Sonoran Desert. And in the Tenderloin we are fortunate to have Roaddawgz, the Boys & Girls Club, the Vietnamese Youth Development Center, and the Shih Yu-Lang Central YMCA.