Jazz Breaks Up D.C.'s Arts Dirge

The announcement, made with great fanfare from the stage of the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, was dramatic: This spring marks "the return of music to the D.C. public schools," said Deputy Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson.

Applause swept the sold-out hall, and the great jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis offered his praise. By embracing music education and turning away from the test-driven narrowing of the curriculum that has so deadened too many classrooms, the District has found "the way for us to reclaim our soul in this country," Marsalis said.

But has music really returned to the D.C. schools?

What the Washington Performing Arts Society and D.C. schools officials celebrated last week was a pilot program that began in February at three middle schools and may reach more schools in coming years. The Capitol Jazz Project, a $200,000 effort by the Performing Arts Society to resurrect jazz instruction, has engaged 250 students at Hart, Hardy and Merritt middle schools in classes based on Marsalis's Jazz for Young People curriculum. The students are learning from the system's music teachers and from professional ensembles that visit each school every few weeks. And about 450 students will enroll in one-week music day camps this summer.

The Performing Arts Society is also working with the school system on music and arts curriculum standards -- a basic building block the D.C. schools have lacked for many years. "With the new standards, every child in the system will get music instruction," says Carol Bogash, the society's education director and creator of the Jazz Project. "Of course, to do that, DCPS will have to put music teachers in every school."

That's where things get a little dicey. Chancellor Michelle Rhee's 2009 budget contained $44 million for new social workers, art and music teachers, literacy coaches and extracurricular activities. But the D.C. Council, led by Chairman Vincent Gray, is countering with a proposal that would cut $18 million -- a hit Rhee says would threaten the art and music component of her plan.

This sort of budget gamesmanship is par for the course; in this annual script, schools leaders delight in listing the pretty new programs they'd have to kill if they're forced to cut spending.

But the fact remains that many D.C. schools offer little or no music or art instruction. It wouldn't take much money to change that. The Jazz Project is showing the way with richer content, while Rhee and her band of reformers work on more efficient structures.

At Hardy Middle School, music teacher Yusef Chisholm says he was stunned to receive new instruments this year for the first time in many years. "I see the turn now," he says. "In the past, we got nothing from the system. We had to get parents to rent instruments." This year, all sixth- and seventh-graders at Hardy are getting music instruction three times a week.

Hart music teacher Ovetta Lewis, a 22-year veteran, can teach only a little more than 100 of the school's 540 students, so kids must be lucky enough to be randomly assigned to music class. She, too, was startled and pleased to get new instruments, but says: "It's still a struggle. I feel an interest from the new" administrators but not yet a firm commitment to arts education.

Even if each school gets a music teacher, the arts program has a long way to go. Hart Principal Willie Bennett says children who don't luck into a music class have no arts alternative. The school has no visual arts teacher, no drama teacher.

"The budget constraints just don't allow it," he says. "It's too bad, because I see how Ms. Lewis gets some of those behavior-challenged kids, and they really do calm down in music class."

At the Kennedy Center, the kids soak up the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra's thrilling improvisations and bask in the applause of an audience visibly relieved to hear good news about the D.C. schools.

When the band plays reedman Ted Nash's aural portrait of the American artist Jackson Pollock, the D.C. kids revel in the splashing, nearly cacophonous waves of notes. But when Marsalis introduces the number by naming Pollock and adding, "So you know what that's like," many of the kids haven't a clue.

How long before that changes?