The challenge

The arts demonstrably stimulate children’s creative, expressive, perceptual, and analytical abilities. An analysis by the College Board showed that students who studied the arts for more than four years scored 44 points higher on the math portion and 59 points higher on the verbal section of the S.A.T. Nonetheless, for two decades, school districts have dramatically cut or eliminated arts education. In inner-city and rural communities, and communities of color especially, this failure widens the academic and cultural gap between those with access to arts education and those without.


Seeds of commitment

Arnold Aprill, a theater artist who has worked in Chicago’s public schools for 25 years, has a lengthy background in the arts. He founded and directed the City Lit Theater Company, an interracial theater company that adapted literary works for the stage, and has taught arts education courses at the graduate level at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. As the founder of the Chicago Arts Partnership in Education (CAPE), Aprill is motivated by two powerful imperatives: “the urgent need to address the shameful inequities in urban public education” and “the need to reclaim the arts as a potent force for activating participation democracy.” He believes that during times of political crisis, the integration of the arts into education becomes an even more compelling issue. An art-integrated curriculum, Aprill says, can help transform a school into a dynamic learning community in which educators and students are more likely to think critically, express themselves creatively, and respect divergent opinions.


Accomplishments

CAPE, developed by Aprill in 1993, is a pioneering arts program at 25 Chicago public schools. With over 45 artists and arts organizations under its umbrella, CAPE operates as a network of teachers, artists, parents, and community members devoted to school reform through the arts. At CAPE schools, located primarily in high poverty neighborhoods, artists and teachers design collaborative curricula that connect the arts to all academic areas. A recent study funded in part by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation revealed that sixth-graders in CAPE schools improved their scores on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills more than children in similar schools without the CAPE program.

CAPE sixth-graders also made greater gains in math than their peers citywide. According to the research, 90 percent of teachers at CAPE schools were engaged in integrating arts with academics, “a significant shift” from the past, the study said. Evaluators also found that teachers in CAPE schools felt more motivated and engaged by teaching and better prepared to work in teams and provide leadership for change in their schools.

In addition to his work in Chicago, Aprill helps communities across the nation replicate CAPE’s approach and has initiated national and international exchanges of teachers, artists, and students devoted to school improvement through the arts. Renaissance in the Classroom: Arts Integration and Meaningful Learning, written by CAPE participants, is a benchmark text for school reform through arts education, recommended by the Harvard Educational Review as required reading for educators.


His Leadership style

Central to Aprill’s leadership is the concept of “Mixed Tables,” the formation of long-term, problem-solving collaborations among concerned citizens with widely divergent skills, experiences, points of view, cultural backgrounds, and access to resources. He believes that such collaborations lead to unexpected new relationships and that this process is essential for enacting change. CAPE leaders continue to meet monthly to share ideas, meet with innovators, and reflect on their work. “One of the primary purposes of partnership is to create positive friction—to have the partners disrupt each other’s assumptions, to shake them out of ‘business as usual,’ so that new ideas and authentic new leadership can emerge,” Aprill says. “The partnerships create a ‘demilitarized zone’ for examining old ideas and actions, and an ‘exotic terrain’ for creating new ones.”

Another guiding principle to his leadership is that everyone can tell his or her own story. For the
creation of “Renaissance in the Classroom,” Aprill spent three years collecting interviews of CAPE teachers, artists, parents, principals, and students and convened advisory meetings of CAPE partners.
He is currently developing a series of courses, to teach CAPE partners to document and disseminate
their own stories. He also believes that an organization’s own story is most effectively told when it
offers the convincing results of evaluative studies. As part of his leadership role, he made sure such independent evaluations took place, demonstrating that reading and math scores go up when the arts are integrated into a school’s curriculum. “The principals need this evidence. This opens the school doors to us,” he says.


The future

Arnold Aprill is collaborating with the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) to add college students to the CAPE approach. CAPE artists are also beginning to serve as co-teachers in the College of Education at UIC. Over the next five years, plans call for creating additional CAPE models for school improvement and teacher education; increasing the involvement of artists who have their teacher certification; and moving community-based leaders in CAPE into university positions. These leaders will continue their face-to-face information exchanges with schools all over the world and develop the online capacity to reach many more. Aprill also hopes to create a center where educators and artists from around the world can explore new ways to learn and teach.


More about Arnold Aprill and CAPE

“[CAPE] was one of the first—if not the first—organization in the country that put cultural resources [into curricula] system wide to effect deep change, not just a quick fix in schools.”
— Doug Herbert, director of arts education, National Endowment for the Arts

“Supported mainly by private foundations, CAPE programs weave dance, drama, and the visual arts into classroom instruction to produce themed units of study…that often last months. It is a different tack for the schools, where outside arts groups have traditionally sent in a troupe to do a one-time performance or hosted a field trip to a matinee or exhibit.”
— Chicago Tribune, March 11, 2001