At Dorothy I. Height Elementary School, a group of Baltimore City fifth graders is learning to solve math problems using African drums.
Their peers across the hall are tie-dying sectioned-off socks to represent fractions. Next door, students are acting out book characters using only their voices.
Nearly 2,500 students at eight different schools citywide are spending July boosting their math and reading skills. But the lessons come with an artsy twist.
Ana Zandarin is the executive director of SALA, a summer program run by local nonprofit Arts for Learning in partnership with Baltimore City Public Schools. City teachers are partnered with local artists to design lessons that align with district curriculum.
“And those lessons, even though the standard they’re addressing on that day is maybe the same, the lesson can look completely different because it is tied to the art form that the artist is an expert in,” Zandarin said. “So it's a step ahead of arts enrichment, because it aims at teaching the content through the art form.”
Arts for Learning has been offering free summer education to kindergarten through sixth graders for the last nine years. But this year, the U.S. Department of Education recognized their work as one of 13 examples nationwide of “high-quality out-of-school time learning opportunities for every child.”
Zandarin said SALA’s unique model “allows students to access content from a different perspective than during the school year.”
“And that makes it more accessible, more equitable, and really allows students to engage with the content in a different way,” she said.
In 2023, SALA participants increased their scores on internal math assessments by an average of 12% — and saw small gains in their district math scores from the end of the school year to the beginning of the next.
Reading scores didn’t show any statistical improvement. But SALA students did avoid the decline exhibited by their non-participating peers.
Zuri and Akem are 11-year-old students in the African-drumming-inspired class at Dorothy I. Height Elementary School. They say SALA lessons are “way more fun” than traditional schooling.
“Normal school is just trash,” Akem said with a laugh. “It’s way better, because even though we're doing academics, we're doing music.”
Kwaku Payton is a professional dancer and drummer from New York City who has spent the past four years as a teaching artist for Arts for Learning. This year, his class has made colorful graph art with answers to math problems and learned the division of whole notes and half notes.
But his most popular strategy involves creating number lines with African drum beats.
“When they get the answer, we create the rhythm from the answer,” Payton said. “We use a rhythm bar of eight. And with an answer between zero to eight, we create the music from there. It gives them other ways of putting it together in their head instead of just a regular old fashioned way.”
Students who started SALA with reading and math scores well below grade average see larger improvements after the month-long program. The same is true for students with disabilities, who increased their district reading scores by an average of 10% in 2022.
Zandarin said Arts for Learning is trying to offer more support for those students especially.
“This year, we are engaging social workers for the first time,” she said. “We have student support specialists; we have IEP specialists; we have special educators.”
SALA is also offering two sites for students who require extended school year services in their individualized education plans (IEPs) for the first time this year.
But Zandarin said program leaders are still figuring out how to holistically support all students and their families. And they are still bouncing back from pandemic-era attendance challenges.
“We used to have waitlists everywhere,” she said. “And then the pandemic hit, and we did a virtual version of it, which, of course, was not the same at all. As we went back in person, there has been a slow recovery of enrollment and attendance.”
She says summer attendance hovers around 70%.
“We are very mindful that in order for our kids to thrive, our adults who care for those children outside of the program also need to be taken care of,” Zandarin said. “So that has also been something that we have been very focused on trying to grow consistently after the pandemic.”
Arts for Learning is also working to expand their afterschool and summer model to different counties across Maryland. Zandarin says leaders have “been in talks” with other school districts — but are focused on maintaining the local feel of their programs.
