It's
a rainy, Tuesday afternoon after normal school hours and Linda Nathan,
headmaster of the Boston Arts Academy, Boston's first public high school
for the visual and performing arts, is walking around to see what's going
on. In one small, packed auditorium, a local youth drum troupe is nearing
the end of its set. In the dance studio, a well-attended ballet class
is underway, while upstairs, a pottery class is in full swing, as evidenced
by the quiet intensity of students working on pieces.
"The students don't want to go home," says Linda, who helped start the school in 1998, when it was founded by the ProArts Consortium, an association of six local visual and performing arts, and architecture, institutions. Her school's mission is to educate students to their highest potential in the arts as well as in academic disciplines. As headmaster, Linda oversees the 400 kids in grades 9-12, all of the school's programs, as well as the extensive collaborations with the consortium. "We also have deaf students at the school, so we have interpreters for the deaf, everything, it's an incredible place, very vibrant," she says.
Linda has always had a love of education, which she partially traces to her parents, two "progressive" educators, as well as being "a child of the '60s," as she puts it, participating in Vietnam demonstrations and fighting for high school rights, inspired by contemporary social changes and such things as the Roxbury Free School Movement. Though not Catholic, she spent time at age 15 at a Catholic mission in the Appalachians serving a population in poverty, where she discovered a basic truth. "Traditional methods for teaching kids that were starving didn't work," she says. Instead, she had to figure out the kids' basic needs first. "I've always been interested in that," she says.
That
interest has led to her fight against the increasing use of standardized
testing to decide kids' and teachers' fates. She's recently been heard
on National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation" and was seen
on the PBS show Frontline's "Testing Your Schools" program.
"I'm really opposed to high-stakes testing," she says. For her,
education should be about empowerment, not competition. "I've always
taken the position that education is a right, and that adults often deny
kids that right," she says.
Linda's attitude reflects the educational choices she's made in her life, as well, such as choosing to get her Masters in Education from Cambridge College in 1982. "You don't go to Cambridge College because you want to compete with your fellow students, you go because you want to create a community with your fellow students," she says. "That's why it's a revolutionary kind of place, because it's not about holding power, it's about sharing power," she says. "When all of these people who are black and brown have degrees, let's hope it's not going to be business as usual."
Next: Marta T. Rosa