The Champion of School Reform

If there was ever living proof that arts integration in schools works, it's Bill Strickland. In 1963, he was a bored tenth-grader at Oliver High School who wandered into the classroom of ceramics teacher Frank Ross. Ross introduced Strickland to the potter’s wheel and handed him some clay. Strickland was immediately hooked with a passion that motivated him to begin to seriously study and, with Ross’ help, he was accepted at the University of Pittsburgh in 1965. There he started teaching ceramics to kids in an abandoned Manchester row house, and the now highly regarded Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild was born. In 1972, Strickland added the Bidwell Training Center, a vocational school, to MCG. The rest is legend.

The education reformer and social entrepreneur has served on the board for the National Endowment for the Arts, and the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. He has rubbed elbows with the Clintons and both Bush presidents. He received the MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant, holds 10 honorary doctorates and is regarded by all who know him as a true force.

His latest project is a natural for him: A partnership with Pittsburgh Public Schools Superintendent Mark Roosevelt in an education initiative with Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild  and Homewood’s Helen S. Faison Arts Academy to integrate the arts into the teaching of the academic curriculum.

Staying close to his roots

Despite his notable success, Strickland, president and CEO of Manchester Bidwell Corporation, still lives and works in the humble Manchester neighborhood where he grew up, and remains committed to his original goal: reforming education in “at risk” neighborhoods in Pittsburgh and across the country.

For Strickland, this latest venture does more than merely strengthen the 30-year relationship between Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild (MCG) and Pittsburgh Public schools . It underscores his mission of school reform.

“Mark Roosevelt is taking this whole idea of school reform seriously,” he says. “He’s displaying leadership which is the key to everything in life.”

The partnership is unique because it goes beyond arts integration, says the University of Florida's Bruce Jones, Ph.D., director of the Anchin Research Center on Teacher and Educational Leadership. "The foundation for all learning is relationships,” he says. And this one is about breaking down silos between different departments. It’s about teachers, students and administrators having good relationships. When that happens, it impacts the climate of the entire school.

Jones, who will monitor the results of the program over five years, says most whole-school approaches fail because they view students as “walking test scores.” If you “grab the students around their interests,” he says, “then you have the foundation to learn.”

Or as Roosevelt said at a recent press conference, kids who get excited about the arts get better at everything.

The arts are so broad, there’s a niche for every child, says Yvona Smith, co-principal at Faison. Once kids find that niche and identify their passion, they're more likely to want to go to school so attendance problems decrease. And they're more likely to want to read and write. The critical factor? “It increases the relevance of education,” she says.

“I’m not looking for the kid who’s focused on art," says MCG's vice president of operations Joanna Papada. What she is looking for is the kid who's struggling, who hasn't show academic success. "We all learn differently," she says.

The key will be to hear from teachers what concepts the kids are having trouble with in order to focus on arts projects to help teach those concepts, she adds. “We’re not changing the curriculum; we’re aligning with the curriculum.”

For example, if students are studying tessellations (patterns) in geometry class, art teachers can reinforce it with a project in fabric design, graphic imaging or even music, says Papada, to show relevance and promote better understanding.

To integrate art and chemistry in her ceramics class she keeps the periodic table showing all the elements in bins in her classroom. “That’s how you make glazes,” she explains.

While the idea, she says, is to “get the art teacher out of the art room," the ultimate goal is to inspire kids to become life-long learners. Papada has studied collaboration between the arts and academics in high school and middle school for the past 10 years. In each study where art was incorporated, students’ GPAs and standardized test scores improved, attendance levels were high and expulsion rates dropped, she says.

This success led Papada to apply for a grant with the Pittsburgh school district. The result? A three-year $900,000 federal grant with a goal to determine if the success of arts integration can make the leap from a project basis to an entire school.

The abc's of it

MCG will train the school’s staff, and co-design art projects to reinforce concepts from other subjects. In addition, Faison teachers will have access to MCG’s artists, studios and equipment. “Ultimately, we want to be a resource to public education,” says Papada.

Today, MCG teaches art, free of charge, to 500 inner-city high school students at the center, and reaches an additional 3,200 students with its in-school art program. Bidwell Training Center is an accredited vocational school, training adults in the medical, culinary, laboratory and horticulture fields.

According to a Harvard Business School review, 80 percent of students finishing programs at MCG attend college. Strickland knows of no other program that approaches that success.

The number of kids that go on to college is Strickland’s litmus test for any program. “It’s one of the gateways to a life in this culture,” he says.

To get his message out, Strickland says he is always speaking to educators, politicians and foundation leaders. While speaking at a conference in Silicon Valley, Strickland met E-bay founder Jeff Skoll. Strickland smiles as he remembers Skoll's enthusiasm: “He told me, ‘You’re scaleable, man!’”

Skoll made the first grant to BAYCAT (Bayview Hunters Center for Arts and Technology) a replica of MCG in San Francisco, and he is now on the National Center for Arts and Technology Board, a subsidiary of Manchester Bidwell.

In addition to San Francisco, there are also Manchester Bidwell replicas in Grand Rapids and Cincinnati. In order to be successful, says Strickland, these centers must have a motivated faculty, a pleasant environment, state-of-the-art equipment and, especially, an attitude “that values people as assets, not liabilities.”

He adds, “You have to look like the solution, not the problem."

So far so good on that score. In Cincinnati, says Strickland, 80 percent of the kids who attend the center graduate from high school and 90 percent of those kids attend college. In Grand Rapids, there’s a waiting list for students after just one year of operation. Another measure of success: no center has ever experienced vandalism, violence or racial incidents. Not content to rest on his laurels, Strickland aims for more. “I want to take this idea to 100 cities,” he say with his typical passion.

In the meantime, the work continues as Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild is forging school reform right here in Pittsburgh.We want to make the world bigger for every kid at Faison and make sure they grab for it, Papada says. She is confident their work will succeed. “When your intention is truth, you can’t fail.”