Last month, City Controller Scott Stringer released a wonderfully detailed report on New York City’s creative economy. Among other revelations, the report finds that “an astonishing 12% of all creative industry jobs in the United States are located within the five boroughs — compared to less than 3% of all jobs nationally.”
The sector itself generates $110 billion a year in New York City.
Among the report’s recommendations for capitalizing on and broadening this growth is to “ensure that every New York City school has access to a full-time arts educator.” If you are familiar with the controller’s “State of the Arts” report, you’ll know that his office made a very similar recommendation in 2014, to “build schools’ capacity to provide a robust arts education by expanding outreach to potential cultural partners.”
I champion this new emphasis on ensuring students have access to an in-school, qualified arts instructor, as I believe we owe our children more than inconsistent programming and occasional visits by teaching artists.
But I have to ask: why, in the New York City public school system, are the arts still being relegated to the realm of the extracurricular? If any other industry were driving such a significant part of our economy and growing at such a rate, we’d see that reflected explicitly in the skills we teach our children, and in the schools where we send them.
As a former educator and an education advocate who sees every day how naturally children engage with the arts, it heartens me to think that creative career opportunities may exist for every single child who wants to pursue them. But how will we prepare them to take up the mantle? How can we ensure that our own residents, the youngest of whom will graduate in 2037, will be able to step in and support our robust and growing creative sector?
Take a look at the curriculum of any private school in the city and report back on the subject offerings. Then take a look at the NYC Department of Education’s own 2017–18 Arts in Schools Report, which indicates that 55% of city schools do not have a full-time certified music teacher on staff, 68% do not have a full-time certified visual arts teacher, 86% don’t have a dance teacher, and 90% don’t have a theater teacher.
This stark content gap is deeply troubling. The well-rounded, content-rich syllabus set forth by the federal Every Student Succeeds Act is achievable, but currently only by students in high-income communities. For everybody else, learning — and career — options are limited to as few subjects as their schools can afford.
In fact, the situation is so dire that many public schools are in violation of New York State law, which sets (minimal) requirements for arts instruction — including music education, which is my personal passion — at each grade level. Schools in the poorest neighborhoods offer the least amount of arts education, and this gap continues to grow as enrollment drops and budgets thin.
Looking at the demographic breakdown in the report, I am reminded again of how educational segregation perpetuates workplace and societal segregation.
“While persons of color represent 68% of the city’s total population, they account for only 34% of the workers in all creative occupations” it says. The report continues: “every single creative occupation category is majority white.”
Since 85% of the 1.1 million students currently in the NYC school system are people of color, introducing the arts as a core part of the educational curriculum seems, among the well-documented number of other benefits, an obvious way to level the playing field while also preparing all students to join a growing and evolving industry.
The creative industry is growing; that’s a fact. Our role is to ensure that our kids, no matter their zip code or income, are prepared to continue the efforts of today’s New Yorkers, capitalize on the opportunities to come, and lead the country as creative visionaries, pacesetters, and innovators.
Swift is executive director of Education Through Music.
