ABSTRACT
We have been witness to an unusual development: arts-based school reform. For some 12 years, we have watched and studied an educational reform effort that violates all types of usual understandings about school reform and about learning. School reforms have become packages which are purchased and are to be implemented with fidelity. Schools adapt to them rather than adapt the reform to their needs. Further, in an era of accountability, most educators have come to believe that focusing on the tests, on skills, on discrete answers to questions, and on test taking itself is what they must do. Learning has become conflated with the measures used rather than the processes used to acquire and deploy substantive knowledge. It may come as no surprise that the artistically inclined would break out of the common understanding and seek innovative approaches to educational reform, creating a different model of reform and of teaching and learning. Like all artistic endeavors, the A+ Schools Program both draws from that which comes before it and breaks from those traditions. Unlike some forms of art, which seek to separate themselves from everyday life, the A+ Schools Program sought to engage everyday schools in creating an unusual reform initiative. This unusual development had powerful effects on the schools involved, and this book is intended to examine these effects. We will do so by relating what we learned through evaluating and researching the program and these schools. The lessons are many and are complex. Implementing and sustaining school reform is not easy. Schools wax and wane in their efforts to educate children, often as the result of factors outside their control. Yet the story we will tell in this book is largely a success story, even with the issues that continue to confront the A+ schools and the critiques we will offer. Telling a complex story, however, requires some grounding. Creekside Elementary School, as a case example from the A+ Schools Program, did this for our research team; and we believe it will allow the reader to see what A+ was all about. So, we start the book with a case study. To set that case in a larger context, we also provide a brief history of the A+ Schools Program. Those sections provide the backdrop for what will be accomplished in this book-a nuanced story of reforming schools with the arts.
