From the Executive Director

Back-to-School Musings

By Teresa Eyring

My September American Theatre column is always due during the heat of July. This year, New York City is swallowed up in record temperatures, the mayor has called for emergency cooling centers, and brand-new parks have opened on the river, making our scorched island city seem even more nautical. The days are getting shorter. We're on the march toward fall, toward the opening of theatre seasons, toward the rush of politicians into the halls of Congress and the rancor of campaigning. Toward pumpkins and Free Night of Theater USA.

Fall's real hallmark is the resurgence of educational institutions large and small—and the implicit promise of an increasingly educated citizenry who will one day drive our economy and our inventiveness, who will make our communities better places to live.

This summer, certain policies have emerged that could deeply impact the future of public education. As a nation, we find ourselves on the brink of embracing educational strategies that could put the U.S. either further ahead or behind the rest of the world—strategies that may move us to a more progressive or a more archaic place in the educational discourse.

President Obama has announced the recipients in the first round of his Race to the Top program, an unprecedented federal investment in education reform. The program includes $4 billion for statewide reform grants and $350 million to support states working together to improve the quality of their education assessments. Concurrently, Congress and the administration are negotiating to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, until recently known as No Child Left Behind. In a weekly video address back in March, the President talked about how the U.S. is falling behind the rest of the world in math and science scores and in numbers of college graduates. Meanwhile, other countries are investing more heavily in education in order to become more competitive globally. As the President puts it, "The countries that out-educate us today will out-compete us tomorrow."

In fact, according to research conducted in 36 developed nations and released by the College Board, the U.S. has fallen from first place to twelfth place in the number of college graduates between the ages of 25 and 34. That decline began in the 1990s. About 7 out of 10 high school grads in the U.S. enroll in college within two years of graduating, and just 57 percent of students graduate with some sort of college degree within six years. A scant 20 percent of Latinos and 30 percent of African Americans have college level or associate degrees.

Does higher education matter? The U.S. Census Bureau reports that college graduates earn on average 45 percent more than those with a high school degree. It's clear that the level of a person's education continues to influence the amount and quality of opportunity available. Research has also shown that it affects a person's tendency to participate in the arts.

For its part, the College Board recommended improvements in education from pre-kindergarten through age 16; more state-financed preschool programs; better college counseling; dropout prevention; alignment with international curricular standards; and improved teacher quality.

Another compelling point was made recently in a Newsweek article: that the "creativity index" of American children has fallen dramatically. This decline also began in the early 1990s and is most noticeable in children ages K-6. Researchers tracking student performance based on the widely used Torrance Test, which measures idea generation and creative problem-solving, determined that high scores early in life are clear predictors of creative accomplishments later—such as becoming entrepreneurs, inventors, doctors or diplomats. As a predictor of future success, this creativity index outpaces the IQ test. In this same article, research from IBM revealed that 1,500 CEOs marked creativity as the number-one leadership competency for the future.

For those of us in theatre and theatre education, it's important to remember that being creative does not necessarily require arts participation, though artistry typically engages creative muscles. And if there is a way to systematically bring creativity training into the classroom, art—especially a cooperative activity such as theatre—can only help. That is the good work so many of our theatres have done over the years.

One of the most impactful programs I have seen is at Florida Studio Theatre in Sarasota. FST's Young Playwrights Festival and Write a Play program solicits plays from around the world—and it received 4,000 submissions this year. First-place winners and honorable mentions were fêted at a ceremony in which they were given medals of honor. I heard that one student had decided to write plays instead of watching television. She submitted over 30 scripts.

TCG's recent National Conference in Chicago (read Rob Weinert-Kendt's report about it here) began with a series of pre-conference meetings. At one of those meetings, a group of theatre education directors worked on an innovative TCG project called Building a National TEAM: Theatre Education Assessment Models. This tool is intended to help theatres measure the impact of their programs on student learning so that a case for theatre education can be made.

This initiative and the thinking and planning it has generated are timely, given President Obama's current public education stance—and research that keeps pointing toward the positive impact of the arts on educational quality. That's a cause not only for this long hot summer but for all seasons.

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