Nicole Greenfield and Valerie Jablow: DCPS, please don’t destroy Duke Ellington School of the Arts
For nearly 50 years, Duke Ellington School of the Arts has provided a world-class pre-professional arts education to thousands of DC Public Schools (DCPS) students through instruction by professional artists. This is key to fulfilling the school’s mission: to provide the best of the arts to students who might otherwise never have access.
But soon, it could all end.
In February 2022, DCPS announced it would take over operations of the school, which has operated for years with autonomy. Almost a year later, discussions continue over implementation.
Early on, officials downtown apparently refused to consider continuing to employ the 83 arts professionals who provide the school’s unique focus on pre-professional arts training. Instead, according to school officials, DCPS repeatedly indicated that only its certified academic teachers would be allowed to teach the intensely focused arts classes available to our Duke Ellington children. As a result, there would be PE teachers teaching classical ballet, not professional ballet dancers as now; English teachers teaching how to write film treatments, not working film script writers as now; and music teachers teaching opera singing, not professional opera singers as now.
That meant DCPS came to the table seeing no need to retain or hire arts professionals, while considering DCPS’s certified teachers qualified to teach pre-professional arts classes.
The school system’s thinking would absolutely diminish Duke Ellington’s pre-professional arts training program, while treating our arts teachers as unnecessary in one of the country’s only arts schools with a focus on the Black experience in the arts.
This is insulting and unacceptable on so many levels — yet that was what DCPS apparently did as it began negotiating renewal of its contract with the nonprofit that actually runs the school.
That nonprofit, the Duke Ellington School of the Arts Project (DESAP), hires the school’s teachers as well as the working arts professionals who teach in the school’s eight arts departments. DESAP also creates the school’s unique curriculum and, at graduation, grants our students an arts certificate to recognize their successful completion of the more than 500 hours of pre-professional arts training our students receive each school year at Duke Ellington. That arts training makes for a very long school day, such that students arrive at 8:30 a.m. and leave at 5 p.m., spending 15 or more hours each week pursuing their arts study.
Indeed, Duke Ellington’s current curriculum is what has allowed its graduates across five decades to gain acceptance at top arts institutions nationally and internationally. Beyond the school’s famous graduates like Denyce Graves and Dave Chappelle are thousands more who work in top ballet companies, orchestras, museums and creative venues around the world. Representation matters. And Duke Ellington has long taken the lead in ensuring that DC students — and the Black experience in the arts — are right there in the heart of the mix, among the best in the world in performance, technical design, writing, singing, visual arts, ballet and theater.
No other school even comes close to that record. And Duke Ellington far exceeds the average DC public school in terms of graduation rates and college acceptances — even though prospective students audition for admission based on their artistic abilities, not academics.
Yet, despite the school’s history of excellent outcomes, DCPS stopped funding Duke Ellington adequately in 2011. That was when, amid budget cuts, DCPS began funding Duke Ellington as just another high school, basing the school’s budget allocation on its academic teachers, with a smaller lump sum added for arts instruction. This lump sum — which has varied inexplicably from year to year — is insufficient to cover the school’s arts programming. While DESAP is able to make up some of the difference through fundraising, a funding gap remains. The school’s stop-gap solution has been to combine all the funding and stretch it to cover all teaching positions, resulting in its teachers being paid considerably less than their peers at other DCPS schools.
This reality has been demoralizing for many years; with the school system now looking to take over operations of Duke Ellington, it remains a huge problem, as DCPS apparently is still refusing to increase funding to cover that pay gap. An ongoing shortfall potentially signals the end of the road for many of our arts teachers and, possibly, entire arts departments.
This in turn raises a lot of other questions: What will happen to current students at Duke Ellington once DCPS takes over? Will the school’s excellent academic track record, with a 98% graduation rate and college acceptance greater than 90%, continue for its pre-professional arts students? Will current students get to graduate with their programming intact and their arts work appropriately credited? And how can DCPS accurately portray to current and future applicants an arts school whose mission and structure are in question?
Just the fact that we must ask these questions is awful. For nearly half a century, tens of thousands of students from all over DC and the Washington region have auditioned for the privilege of being a student at Duke Ellington. Thousands have been admitted on the basis of their artistic interests and abilities while also pursuing academic excellence.
While negotiations continue, and have actually progressed, it is still unclear whether DCPS is fully committed to Duke Ellington’s current programming and whether it understands or values the arts instruction Duke Ellington provides — much less what it takes to run an arts high school.
Because of the ongoing and unresolved contract negotiation, the DC Council stepped in to ask that both DCPS and DESAP put forth versions of their own proposed contracts, in what appears to be an effort to negotiate some agreement.
This is welcome news — but if Duke Ellington is to be saved as a true arts high school, it must be able to have the autonomy to create its curriculum, hire its principal and arts teachers with professional arts experience, conduct student auditions, and ensure that its arts programming remains robust and comprehensive. This kind of flexibility is not unheard of in DC. Right now, for instance, the DC Office of the State Superintendent of Education has standards clearly set for non-certified teachers in DC’s publicly funded schools — like the arts professionals currently employed by DESAP.
DCPS urgently needs to understand that Duke Ellington is an arts school first and foremost, unlike any other school in the DC region, yet also has an excellent academic track record. Its unique focus on access to the arts is truly a vital pipeline for working Black artists around the world. Protecting all of this is the only way to ensure DC’s only public arts pre-professional high school flourishes for decades more.
Nicole Greenfield and Valerie Jablow are parents of students at Duke Ellington School of the Arts.
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