At Voice Charter School in Queens, Students Have Outperformed Their Peers Academically
The
principal, unsmiling in his jacket and tie, launched himself into the air,
jumping up and down at the back of the gymnasium, waving frantically at more
than 100 first graders as they rehearsed for their holiday concert.
Franklin Headley, the
principal, was bouncing around to prepare the children for a room full of
grinning, waving adults who would come to watch them perform the next day, and
he asked the students not to wave back. A few giggles bubbled up from gaptoothed
faces, but the students, partway through a cheery rendition of “I Got Rhythm,”
kept on singing.
Calendars
are awash this time of year in holiday-themed pageants, but the mainly
straight-faced students crooning in that gym are much better prepared for the
season than most. They are pupils at Voice Charter School in Queens, where students
learn to read music, execute complicated harmonies and play a little piano in
the music classes they attend at least once a day, and where, far more than in
other general education schools, they learn to sing, sing, sing.
At the Voice Charter School in Queens, students sing every day.
It’s part of a curriculum that combines arts education and choral
singing.
Video
by Natalia V. Osipova and Ashley Maas on Publish
Date December 19, 2014. Photo by Bryan Thomas for The New York Times.
The gym was
standing room only for the performance the next night.
“Please don’t wave at your
children,” Mr. Headley said to a room packed with whispered Spanish, head
scarves and the occasional bindi. “We want them to be trained, competent
musicians.”
Nonetheless, one first-grade boy,
stage left during the performance of “I Got Rhythm,” waved furtively. And it
would not be an event full of small children if someone did not throw up.
Someone did.
Ultimately, these little
disturbances were just fine, because Voice is not trying to train aspiring
professionals.
“They learn how to be really good
at something,” Mr. Headley said. “We believe that then translates into
everything else.”
In an era of dwindling attention
to the arts in public schools, Voice is now in its seventh year. Mr. Headley
founded the school after learning that music and movement might improve language
acquisition, he said, a concept he came across while he was studying at a
principal training program called New
Leaders. Voice started with kindergarten and has added one new
grade each year; it expects to reach its full complement of kindergarten through
eighth grade in the fall.
Today, the school has just shy of
600 students spread between two buildings in Long Island City; one of them used
to be a Catholic school. Bells from St. Rita’s Roman Catholic Church, right next
door, chime throughout the day. Seventy percent of the students qualified for
free lunch last year, according to city data. Like other New York charter schools, which are
publicly funded but privately run, it admits students through a lottery. No one
auditions.
Academically, students at Voice
did significantly better than the city average on New York State math exams last
year, with 70 percent of its students passing, compared with 39 percent
citywide. Their English performance was less impressive, but with 39 percent
passing, it still beat the citywide average of 30 percent.
The
children, each in a uniform of a sky-blue shirt and navy skirt or slacks, are
instructed to be quiet in the hallways and asked not to shriek during gym class,
to protect order as well as their voices. But what really distinguishes the
school are the sounds. Songs in English, Spanish, Japanese and German drift
through the buildings, pens rhythmically tap against any convenient hard
surface, and little bursts of music surface even where they are not meant to
be.
“There’s a
lot of humming, especially right after choir class,” Kate Athens, a fourth-grade
teacher, said. “They’re not doing it to be disruptive; it’s just stuck in their
heads.”
Humming aside, Ms. Athens, a
fourth-year teacher who has never taught elsewhere, said the students appeared
to learn skills in their music lessons that translated to her classroom.
“They learn to stick with
something hard and breaking things down into steps,” she said. “And work
together as a group at such a young age.”
All this
pops especially brightly against the drab state of the arts in New York City
public schools at large, where a report by the comptroller
this spring found that spending on arts supplies and equipment fell by 84
percent from 2006 to 2013. The report also found that 20 percent of public
schools had no arts teachers at all, and that the dearth in arts education was
especially dire in low-income areas. The administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio
has since increased arts funding and
pledged to hire 120 new arts teachers in middle and high schools, where state
law requires arts instruction.
Younger students at Voice usually
have music twice a day, and older students once, on average. But so much time
spent on music is not without its price. To make room for those courses, the
school day is unusually long, from 7:55 a.m. to 4:25 p.m., which can be hard for
small children (as a nonunion school, it has more power to set its own
hours).
“The hardest part about school, I
think, is that there are so many hours in the day, because after a while,
everyone seems to get a little more tired, on edge,” said Delaiah Robinson, 11.
“I live kind of far away from the school, so I get home pretty late.”
Karina Sinche, whose son Xavier,
6, is in first grade, said her son had no particular interest in music before
applying to Voice, but after visiting the neighborhood public school — where the
detail that most stuck in her mind was of a security guard napping — she decided
to apply to Voice and several other charter schools.
“Now, when he’s walking around the
grocery store, he starts singing,” Ms. Sinche said.
Like Xavier, most of the students
at Voice do not come to the school specifically for its most defining feature,
and some of them, Mr. Headley said, seem to stumble on the school entirely by
accident.
“They’ll say, ‘Oh, I thought this
was free music lessons.’
“They weren’t looking for us, but
they found us,” he added. “Every year.”
The
New York Times
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