Arts academies inspire rare political unity on school choice

Yesterday, the New York Times published a profile of an illustrious public arts academy in Miami-Dade County.

It suggests magnet schools like New World School of the Arts can unify different camps in the often-fraught school choice debate.

Though Democrats and Republicans are at sharp odds over the direction, funding and effectiveness of public education and school choice, schools of the arts often bridge the partisan divide.

Many of them are magnet schools, which grew out of a hard-fought battle: desegregation. The hope was that by removing geographic barriers to admission, magnet schools would attract students with a special interest, be it science and technology or the arts, from both high-performing and underperforming schools.

Miami-Dade County Public Schools have long pushed to expand options. Their superintendent once memorably declared his intent to ride the "tsunami of choice," rather than fight it. And there's some oft-overlooked overlap between school choice advocates and advocates for arts education.But it's worth noting the Times' description of New World's demographics.

Most of the schools accept large numbers of minority and low-income students. Of New World’s approximately 500 students, about 60 percent are Hispanic and 13 percent black, generally reflecting the makeup of Miami. Thirty-six percent are poor enough for free or reduced-price lunch.

The racial and ethnic makeup come pretty close to the Miami-Dade district as a whole. It's roughly 70 percent Hispanic and 21 percent black. But more than 70 percent of Miami-Dade students qualify for free or reduced-priced lunch — almost twice the rate at New World.

The Times refers to an episode this spring. The arts magnet receives extra funding from the state budget, on top of its normal public-school allocation. But lawmakers moved to cut those grants last legislative session. They promptly found funding, however, after the school's prominent alumni — whose ranks include Oscar and Tony winners — inveighed against the cuts on social media.

That outcome brought good news for arts education. However, it's worth noting dozens of other public schools angle for similar extra funding. Many of them enroll far greater rates of disadvantaged children. And many of them are too new to boast famous alumni who can mobilize fans on their behalf. They include single-gender public charter schools, district-run community schools that offer wraparound services, the Florida's first charter school run by a prominent national operator and the state's only public charter boarding school.

Hopefully these options aimed at low-income students can inspire similar political unity.


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BY Travis Pillow

Travis Pillow is Director of Thought Leadership at Step Up For Students and editor of NextSteps. He lives in Sanford, Fla. with his wife and two children. A former Tallahassee statehouse reporter, he most recently worked at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a research organization at Arizona State University, where he studied community-led learning innovation and school systems' responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. He can be reached at tpillow (at) sufs.org.