Equal opportunity?

Former CAPA dad questions audition process at prestigious school

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Mark Conner Jr. knows the lyrics to every song in “Hamilton,” and he was thrilled when the yearend performance for his musical theater class at Pittsburgh CAPA 6-12 would feature a few numbers fromthe hit musical.

But the eighth-grader and three other black students were instead consigned to the hallway to do research on the musical because they didn’t meet “memorization benchmarks” from earlier in the semester. The class, he said, had eight or 10 black or mixed-race kids out of about 30.

“Right on the other side of the door you could hear them singing and dancing. It felt really bad,” the 14-year-old said.

After a few weeks, the four rejoined the class after Mark Conner Sr. complained. His son’s experience made the former Pittsburgh Public Schools administrator wonder about the student body’s racial makeup, so he asked for information, including audition data by race. What he found was troubling, he said, and led him to help start an effort called the CAPA Enrollment and Educational Justice Project.

The prestigious Downtown creative and performing arts school, he concluded, “is only a really shiny ornament and only really

goodfor some people.”

The group will unveil the audition data it obtained through a Right to Know request at an event Tuesday at the August Wilson Center and invite attendees to share their own experiences.

Among the findings from last school year: Of the fifthgraders who applied to CAPA’s dance program, nearly half were black and just over a quarter were white. But when it came time for an audition panel to recommend students for the program, those proportions were reversed: Half of those recommended were white,and fewer than a fifth wereblack.

Of ninth-grade dance applicants, half were black and nearly a fifth were white. But white students represented about twothirds of those recommended, and no black kids got in.

In the fifth grade, across all arts disciplines that require auditions, 27 percent of the applicants were black and 49 percent were white. But of those recommended, 57 percent were white and only 14 percent were black.

For ninth-graders, the difference was starker: Black and white kids each represented 35 percent of applicants. But of those recommended, half were white and only 12 percent were black.

Black students made up about half of Pittsburgh Public’s population last year, but only 28 percent of CAPA students.

Pittsburgh Public is undergoing a review of CAPA’s admissions process, said solicitor Ira Weiss, whom the district has designated as spokesman for this matter.

“The district takes this group’s observations seriously,” he said. “I think there were concerns within the district, but this brought it to the fore.”

Audition panels at CAPA are made up of at least three people, including current adjunct teachers and, for some disciplines, community members. The school holds yearly audition preparation workshops “in an effort to recruit and support students from schools that do not have strong arts programming,” said district spokeswoman Ebony Pugh.

One concern, said Mr. Conner, is the racial makeup of the panels themselves. His son, who now attends Brashear High School, said the panels at both of his tryouts were all white.

“All panels are racially balanced where at all possible,” Ms. Pugh said. “Teachers from other departments have often been a part of other department panels to establish a diverse panel of adjudicators.”

The group is also calling for the school to explain how students will be graded before a tryout and provide detailed feedback afterward. Ms. Pugh said students who aren’t recommended for spots can get such feedback.

Part of the district’s review will examine whether the disparity the group alleges “is limited to CAPA or whether it’s a phenomenon that exists in other arts-type schools,”Mr. Weiss said.

“In an environment where there is a competitive process, where there are fewer spots than applicants, some might not get picked. I’m not trying to minimize or trivialize” the group’s efforts, he said. “I don’t think you can automatically assume that there’s a deficient process.”

Students without consistent and regular access to arts education who can’t afford private lessons are bound to be less prepared for an audition, said Sarah Tambucci, director of the Downtown-based Arts Education Collaborative and past president of the National Arts Education Association.

Setting rigorous standards for early arts education at the district level rather than leaving it up to each principal is key, she said. In Pittsburgh Public, it varies by school.

“It’s a systemic problem. I’m sure it probably exists in other places.” But she continued, “This is an access and equity issue. In other urban areas they have made policy at the board level to deal with these kinds of issues.”

The school district would not make CAPA principal Melissa Pearlman available for an interview. But Mr. Conner said she “did admit there was a problem,” and even asked for his help in finding someone to provide implicit racial bias training to those on the audition panels.

Mark Jr. said overall he “felt good” about his time at CAPA, and his father stressed that the group doesn’t “hate CAPA, we just want other kids to have an equal opportunity to experience it.”

The meeting at the August Wilson Center is set for 5 p.m. and is open to the public.