How the arts can unlock a closed curriculum 

Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education brings teachers, artists, and students together in inquiry-oriented communities of creators and learners. 

Since the spring of 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered most of the nation’s public schools, countless observers have raised grave concerns about the lack of educational resources available to low-income families, the poor quality of remote instruction, the low rates of attendance and participation in online classes, and, as a result, the terrible consequences for many students. We share these concerns; however, we worry that recent debates about how schools should respond to this crisis have focused too much attention on the problem of “learning loss,” a phrase that directs attention to matters of quantity (i.e., the amount of instruction students have or haven’t received and how much of the curriculum they have or haven’t mastered), while distracting from questions about the quality of the instruction and resources our schools have provided to different student populations, both before and during the pandemic (Dorn et al., 2020).  

If learning loss were the only problem, then the best way to fix it would be to make up for what has been lost by giving students more of what we’ve always given them — more instruction, more content, more hours in the school day, more summer school classes, and so on. But as Maxine McKinney de Royston and Shirin Vossoughi (2021) point out, this would do nothing to address the inequitable policies and practices that have caused the pandemic to have such terrible consequences in the first place, with quite different effects on students from differing racial and economic backgrounds. Rather than focusing yet again on trying to fix students’ supposed deficits by giving them more of the same, they argue, now is the time to work with youth, positioning them “as knowledgeable instructional partners” and reframing “communities as learning spaces and resources.”