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Why Arts High Schools Are Phenomenally Successful With Students

“Performing and visual arts high schools like New World inspire a fierce devotion among students and graduates. It is no wonder. Many serve as springboards to the professional world. Just as important, graduation and college attendance rates are typically high (100 and 96 percent for New World), particularly impressive considering the schools’ urban setting. The best of these schools offer a conservatory-style training ground that helps budding artists win admission to an undergraduate arts program — training that is expensive, requiring a cadre of specialized teachers and money for student performances.”

Paula Vogel’s ‘Indecent’ And The Challenges Of Liberalism

“In Indecent, Vogel has made a piece of art that’s about nothing more or less than Art’s survival in a world a lot like our own: a historical test case of the possibility of representing the reality of human multiplicity in a culture filled with competing singularities. What’s more, she’s done this by following the experiences of the group for whom the stakes surrounding that possibility have historically been highest, secular Jews.”

Philippe de Montebello On What’s Ailing The Met Museum

“The messages that are sent out have a completely unbalanced emphasis on contemporary art, as if somehow the crowds that come to the Metropolitan Museum on Fifth Avenue—where people go to see Egyptian, Greek, and Islamic Art and great European paintings—are suddenly going to come to see contemporary art. This when there are a thousand commercial galleries all over New York, and how many museums with contemporary art? It’s nonsense.”

Why Is The U.S. So Bad At Teaching Students Foreign Languages?

“As an expert on language and literacy development in children, I’ve talked to many immigrant parents who expect their children to grow up bilingual, only to be surprised that they end up as monolingual English speakers. Meanwhile, foreign language learning opportunities for English speakers are limited. Why is the U.S. so bad at producing bilinguals?” Harvard education professor Catherine Snow suggests three reasons, and argues that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Why American Schoolkids Aren’t Learning How To Write Properly – And How To Fix That

“Three-quarters of both 12th and 8th graders lack proficiency in writing, according to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress. And 40 percent of those who took the ACT writing exam in the high school class of 2016 lacked the reading and writing skills necessary to successfully complete a college-level English composition class.” The Common Core and No Child Left Behind were supposed to address this, and it hasn’t worked. Dana Goldstein looks at the reasons why – and at the argument over the two ways to teach writing now in use.

Why I Want To Build An Art Museum For Las Vegas

Condo developer Uri Vaknin: “Already a world-renowned dining, entertainment and shopping capital, our city is now becoming a cultural hub. The openings of The Smith Center for the Performing Arts, The Mob Museum and the Neon Museum signals a clear move in that direction. Yet, I remain dumbfounded that Las Vegas lacks a world-class art museum.”

Patti Smith Remembers Her Buddy, Sam Shepard, And How She Helped Him Finish His Last Manuscript

“Going over a passage describing the Western landscape, he suddenly looked up and said, ‘I’m sorry I can’t take you there.’ I just smiled, for somehow he had already done just that. Without a word, eyes closed, we tramped through the American desert that rolled out a carpet of many colors – saffron dust, then russet, even the color of green glass, golden greens, and then, suddenly, an almost inhuman blue. Blue sand, I said, filled with wonder. Blue everything, he said, and the songs we sang had a color of their own.”