Harding Middle School students got a special visit from actor and White House staffer Kal Penn early this week. Penn is the ambassador to the school for the White House’s “Turnaround Arts Initiative,” which incorporates art-focused activities in regular courses such as math, science, and civic engagement. It was Penn’s second time checking up on the school’s progress in the program in the past year. Penn and Harding Middle School Principal Joy Linquist sat down with the Torch to talk about the program.
“We’re turning around schools that may have had experience with poverty or low student achievement, and really using arts to engage students in the learning process,” said Linquist. “The last two days has been really exciting having our guest artist, Kal, here. It really motivates kids and gets them excited about the learning. But I would say that our work is a daily process where we’re just embedding the arts into the student experience.”
Penn’s involvement in the program is to encourage the students to learn subjects in different ways, as well as to witness the program working on behalf of the White House.
“The idea was to pilot a couple of programs on poverty-stricken schools because 5 million kids in America don’t have exposure to the arts, and we wanted to change that,” said Penn. “Harding was part of the second phase of this program, and in the first phase, we saw an 89 percent drop in disciplinary action, a 29 percent increase in math scores, and a 13 percent increase in reading scores, so we use Des Moines as an example for the rest of the country.”
Penn said though statistics of test scores are important, he’s more interested in the meaning behind those scores and its relation to the impact of the “Turnaround Arts Initiative.”
“We always think of, well, the arts can improve anything academically,” said Penn. “But they also make kids more confident, more engaged, and what’s the difference between an engineer and an innovator? It’s a kid who had the arts, right? And so overall, it’s going to make us more competitive against others like China and Brazil. But it’s not like a magic solution, but it’s still pretty amazing and I’m really glad that Joy and the administrators at Harding have been so welcoming.”
Penn sat in on several classes during his time at Harding on Monday and Tuesday, including a hip-hop class, a band class, and a civics engagement course. Penn said his favorite part of the visit has been seeing students engaged and excited to learn from their teachers.
“But more importantly than that, seeing the approach that teachers are taking to learning math, physics, the sciences, all of the artistic approaches of those subjects is really exciting to me because I never had that as a kid,” said Penn. “But I think in the longer term, my goal is sustaining that excitement from teachers and students about this approach to the program overall.”
