We interrupt our regularly scheduled broadcast—Part 3 of “Poochie’s Missing Chronicle”—to address…well, old news really.

I read in the New York Times yesterday, underneath a photograph of my campus, that the federal Department of Education has given schools “two weeks to eliminate race-based programs.” Schools, by their definition, include “preschool, elementary, secondary, and postsecondary educational institutions that receive federal financial assistance from the Department.” So, just those.

I’m no scholar of contemporary education policy—more of an archival microfilm guy. Much better to read what Gloria Ladson-Billings, professor emerita of urban education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, or my former Penn State colleague Kay Piña, now a lecturer of music education at Texas State, have to say about culturally relevant teaching and culturally sustaining pedagogy in our country today. As Kay and her colleague Victor Lozada point out, “We must create opportunities for all students to see their cultures, languages, and literacies valued and lovingly sustained.”

“Why?”, you ask, man in a pin-stripe suit. Debra Giambo makes the “Show me the money!” argument:

[Multilingual and multicultural education] has the potential to increase trust among diverse groups. This, in turn, can support social stability by lowering the potential for conflicts between groups. With greater social stability coupled with cultural and linguistic diversity, society can have access to…greater innovation and dissemination of novel ideas and greater production and variety of goods and services. The logical conclusion is that MME can support increased economic flourishing. But we need an economist to explain this to folks in a way they can understand the benefits to them and their families in a social and political environment that may not favor this notion.

To understand the immediate impact of the federal government’s about face on arts and education, check out fellow Substacker and journalist Nelson George, who recently shared his fresh take on the President’s takeover of the Kennedy Center board.

The Nelson George Mixtape

THE COMING ASSAULT ON THE ARTS

Now that the Super Bowl posting has passed, let's start talking about things that will actually impact our lives. If you're in the arts Trump's takeover of the Kennedy Center foreshadows upcoming moves re PBS, NPR and NEA. Within the year there will likely be a Trump believer running them with the current staff either mostly replaced and or decimated. F…

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4 months ago · 62 likes · Nelson George

The White House’s intrusion here doesn’t surprise me. I worked for the DC Youth Orchestra Program in 2016 and 2017. We led Children’s Orchestra performances of the music of Duke Ellington and James Brown at the Kennedy Center, supported by the organization Turnaround Arts and artistic partners Joshua Bell and Yo-Yo Ma. Turnaround had been overseen by First Lady Michelle Obama and the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. When a new First Lady cruised into town, the White House bailed on us. That’s when the KC stepped up to run Turnaround. In 2025, such activism will no longer be tolerated anywhere that receives federal financial assistance. What to do?

The Special Arts Project of the Emergency School Aid Act

What I do know is that the federal tug-of-war over education, integration, and the arts is nothing new. It has a long history in my community and probably yours, as well.

D. Antoinette Handy—a music professor and administrator at Virginia State College (VSC) and flutist with the Richmond Symphony—was named Richmond Public Schools’ first artist-in-residence in 1976 through the Special Arts Project of the Emergency School Aid Act (ESAA) and brought jazz luminaries such as Marian McPartland, L. Sharon Freeman, Janice Robinson, Mary Lou Williams, and Terri Lyne Carrington to town in the late 1970s and early 1980s to teach jazz workshops for area public school and university students and teachers. Handy’s Virginia years include the genesis of her administrative career in schools as Project Director of VSC’s Special Services for Disadvantaged Students program and Coordinator of the TRIO program including Special Services, Talent Search, and Upward Bound (funded by the Office of Education). Handy went on to direct the Music division of the National Endowment for the Arts during the Reagan and Bush eras.

The ESAA began percolating on March 24, 1970, when then President Nixon released “a long-awaited, 8,000-word statement on school desegregation, in which he first proposed the funds that eventually became the Emergency School Aid Act” (Hodge, 2018). The statement became a contentious piece of legislation and the bill finally passed in 1972, shepherded by liberal senators who excised Nixon’s anti-busing provisions from the final law.

Mary Lou Merrill, writing for Music Educators Journal in February 1976 pointed out the role of the Special Arts Projects in “easing integration,” noting that—as school districts’ budgets were strained by the costs of desegregation (e.g., hiring more bus drivers, realigning school boundaries)—art projects “can ease the personal distress that students and teachers feel and so promote learning in all disciplines.” Impressed with “the overall pattern of the results,” a report from the 1983 System Development Corporation found “a slight but favorable impact on student intergroup relations and affect” and called for further studies.

By the end of the 1970s, however, a move away from equity-based reforms was underway and the 1983 publication of A Nation at Risk focused the education debate on international competitiveness rather than social justice. Although the targeted federal grants had demonstrated success, in 1981 the ESAA was incorporated into Reagan’s Education Consolidation and Improvement Act (ECIA) and by 1982 major cuts in Federal funding to schools—funding that previously had largely favored desegregation, human relations programs, and special arts projects in poor, urban communities—“effectively ending the program” (Hodge, 2018). Funds previously earmarked for specific desegregation or arts programs in poor communities would now be consolidated into block grants distributed on the basis of state population.

Over the course of the following decades, the federal government’s educational investments shifted from basic grant mechanisms for improving educational opportunities (like the ESAA Special Arts Project in Richmond Public Schools) to heavy use of accountability systems focused on academic performance.

“Someday it will come in handy.”

D. Antoinette Handy’s work in the majority-Black Richmond Public Schools in the late ‘70s helped to uphold the artistic status and cultural integrity of all forms of Black music. Handy acted as a liaison connecting jazz masters with significant outside-of-school experience to young people still in schools.

The 1980s was an existential turning point for jazz preservation. Famed jazz composer, arranger, and pianist Mary Lou Williams taught Richmond students and teachers on numerous occasions in 1979 (December) and 1980 (April and May). She told Handy, “It seems that these young people don’t know anything about jazz.” Williams created her famous “HISTORY of JAZZ” tree illustration in 1977 (with David Stone Martin). Handy noted that, “All children in the Richmond public schools got a copy,” and told Williams, “As one little fellow was balling up his copy, I heard a teacher say to him, ‘Hold on to that young man; someday it will come in handy.’” No pun intended.

Shortly after the demise of the Special Arts Project, Handy left Richmond to lead the Music division at the NEA, first as assistant director in 1984 and eventually as director from 1989 to 1993. Handy continued to support the expansion of jazz education in Richmond through her burgeoning scholarship (authoring Black Conductors—which included portraits of Richmonders like Leon Thompson, Paul Douglass Freeman, and Isaiah Jackson alongside the great jazz bandleaders like Ellington, Basie, and Hampton—and Jazz Man’s Journey, a biography of fellow New Orleanian Ellis Marsalis, Jr., then a tenured professor and Coordinator of Jazz Studies at VCU); guest lectures for the Richmond Jazz Society; and management of granting panels at the NEA that supported the RJS, jazz programs at Richmond-area public schools and universities, the Richmond Jazz Festival, and individual Richmond jazz musicians.

The influence of Handy’s ESAA-funded artist-in-residence activities in RPS goes beyond her own subsequent activities. Following workshop visits to Richmond at Handy’s behest in 1977 and 1978, famed jazz pianist and NPR show host Marian McPartland started Piano Jazz in 1979, which aired for decades and went on to become NPR’s longest-running syndicated program. McPartland was named an NEA Jazz Master in 2000. Richmonder B.J. Brown, who participated in the RPS workshops, became a co-founder of the Richmond Jazz Society and is currently the organization’s executive director. Richmonder James “Saxmo” Gates, who participated in the workshop with Terri Lyne Carrington and went on to study alongside Branford Marsalis at Berklee College of Music, returned to Richmond and is currently director of Jazz Studies at Virginia State University. Terri Lyne Carrington, who led jazz workshops in RPS and at VSC in 1979 when she was only fourteen years old, is currently a professor at Berklee, the only woman ever to win a Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Album, and the founding director of Berklee’s Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice.

I guess what I’m saying is, Handy didn’t quit. She made “much greater efforts.”1

Educators know that ignorance sprouts up again every year in forms both new and old. Sometimes even among our students! Educators respond time and time again with empathy, curiosity, and guidance that is culturally sustaining.

“Dear Colleague”? Hmm…my colleagues are educators. Y’all are just triflin’.

Selected References

Giambo (2023). Multilingual and Multicultural Education Need a Good Economist. Journal for Multicultural Education, 17(2), 139-145.

Hodge (2018). School Desegregation and Federal Inducement: Lessons From the Emergency School Aid Act of 1972. Educational Policy, 32(1), 86–116.

Longshore (1983). The Impact of the Emergency School Aid Act on Human Relations in Desegregated Elementary Schools. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 5(1), 415.