Good afternoon Members of the Committee. My name is Sarah Dougherty. As Visual Arts Curriculum
Coordinator and Turnaround Arts Program Director for the Des Moines Public Schools, I am responsible
for the arts education of the 33,000 students in our capital city. I am pleased to be before the
committee today, testifying to the power of the arts to effect real and measurable academic success for
our students and our state.
Previous to my current role, I served the students and families of Findley Elementary on Des Moines’
north side as the art teacher for seven years. Findley, performing in the bottom five percent in the state,
was designated a Tier I Persistently Lowest-Achieving School in 2011. The only thing more dismal than
the designation was the climate, culture, and overall sense of hopelessness that pervaded the hallways.
Teachers in the building worked hard, but without a common framework or sense of success. Parents
avoided the school, referrals for behavior were frequent, and the mobility rate (the rate that kids move
in and out of the school) was over 30%. Then, as now, almost every single student at Findley Elementary
qualified for free or reduced lunch and breakfast.
As part of our improvement model, Findley (with the support of district leadership) applied for and was
accepted into a national pilot program for eight under-achieving schools: the Turnaround Arts Initiative.
Turnaround Arts is a public-private partnership that uses the arts to help narrow the achievement gap,
increase student engagement, and improve culture and climate in the country’s highest poverty schools.
Led by the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, Findley was able to use the arts not
only as a flower, but as a wrench to move the system and create positive change.
Findley’s teachers united around a common drama-based classroom management strategy. Over the
two years of implementation, the school reduced out-of-school suspensions by 57% and behavior
referrals overall by 35%. Average daily attendance rose to 96%. The mobility rate dropped dramatically
from 31% to 12%. All of this means more students in classrooms learning all year long.
The arts were the reason they stayed. A drama club was started and was an instant hit with 80 of the
300 students participating. Concerts and arts displays became a building-wide effort, not just the work
of the art or music teacher. Painting, singing, dancing, and acting weren’t only relegated to special times
or events. The arts were actively integrated in the classrooms of 95% of Findley teachers. This innovative
and ambitious instructional strategy, known as arts integration, meant that kids were learning how
atoms interact by creating dances, students were acting out text passages to increase comprehension,
and learning how to problem solve in math using art processes. Over the course of two years, Findley
students improved their math proficiency by 11.4% and gained 2.5% in reading proficiency rates. In the
final report, compiled by the University of Chicago and Booz Allen Hamilton, 100% of teachers at Findley
agreed that the arts contributed to heightened ambition of instruction and overall improvement of the
school environment.
That school environment now included parents, who were eager to see their children perform and
celebrated in a way that hadn’t been a part of building culture. Parents, who had come into the building
to experience a performance or exhibit, were now less apprehensive when it came time to meet with
teachers or administrators about other student needs. Attendance at parent teacher conferences
increased from 82% to 98% since implementing arts-based school improvement strategies. Walking in
the building now you can see, hear, and feel an arts rich environment. The school has become an
embedded part of the neighborhood culture, and we can only expect these improvements to continue.
The successes seen at Findley have made it possible for Des Moines Public Schools to grow programming
to four more schools, with plans for continued expansion. We, as the largest educator of Iowa students,
have taken this on because both local and national research point to the arts having real muscle where
student learning and school success are concerned. Too often educational policy has marginalized the
arts as extras, specials, or totally unnecessary, even as study after study points in exactly the opposite
direction. High-stakes testing has created an artificial hierarchy where math and literacy are isolated
from the other areas of learning that help our students understand the world around them.
Research shows that…
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Arts-engaged students are 3x more likely to have excellent attendance records and 4x more
likely to be recognized for academic achievement
At-risk students site arts engagement as a reason for staying in school.
High-poverty arts-engaged eighth graders score higher on reading and science assessments than
those who aren’t engaged in the arts.
Students in the arts outperform their non-arts peers on the SAT by 91 points
And of particular interest to your profession: arts engaged student are more likely to participate
in civic engagement and community-building.
These figures and the clear and compelling evidence from Findley and the other schools involved deeply
in arts programming show that the arts matter for our students, our families, and our state. Thank you
for your time today.