LAUSD censored my American history musicals — now – Latest News
It was a typical college day in December 1995. I used to be educating fifth grade. The matter was the Constitutional Convention.
Fifteen minutes into the lesson, it was clear that I used to be shedding my viewers. Too many names. Too a lot speak. Too many summary ideas in regards to the machinery of authorities.
It was then that I had the epiphany. Make it a musical. Get the youngsters up and transferring. Let them sing, dance, and debate their manner by means of essentially the most consequential summer time in American history.
The theatrical parts had been all there: one room, a solid of well-known characters, heaps of battle, enormous stakes.
Illustration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Getty Images
Armed with my history degree, my piano coaching and my lifelong curiosity in musical theater, I started writing the guide and lyrics. I recruited my piano trainer, Bill Augustine, to put in writing the music.
By April 1996, we had a draft. The principal accredited a pilot program with my class of 30 college students. With Booster Club funds, I employed a choreographer from a native dance studio. We rehearsed for 90 minutes on Thursday mornings.
“Miracle in Philadelphia” had its first efficiency in early June 1996. It went over so nicely that, the following college 12 months, this system was expanded to incorporate all 4 fifth-grade lessons, every with its own solid and its own efficiency date. Parents acquired concerned, some serving to with props, backdrops, costumes and the bake sale at intermission. Others who performed devices joined me within the show band. Among them had been a number of studio musicians and the harpist for the LA Philharmonic.
The pleasure and the training generated by the performances made me surprise, “Why limit this kind of teaching to just one historical event?”
Two years later, Bill and I wrote a second show, “Hello Louisiana,” in regards to the Lewis and Clark expedition. And two years after that, we wrote a third musical, “Water and Power,” in regards to the industrial revolution within the cotton mills of Lowell, Massachusetts. For the Marquez fifth-graders, it was a college 12 months in contrast to every other, one by which the music by no means stopped.
Sign up for the California Morning Report publication
California’s prime information, sports activities and leisure delivered to your inbox day by day.
Thanks for signing up!
To me and the opposite fifth-grade academics, it appeared clear that the musicals helped our college students take up and retain a vital quantity of content material. Our instincts had been validated in 2002 after a staff of UCLA researchers discovered that, a full 12 months after leaving fifth grade, Marquez college students scored more than twice as high on a standardized US history check in comparison with sixth-graders from 72 different elementary faculties — a hole that held up even after researchers managed for the colleges’ common educational check scores.
When I retired from full-time educating in 2016, the Marquez dad and mom wished the Performing History program to proceed. So, for the previous 10 years (besides during the COVID-19 pandemic) I’ve gone back to campus in the future a week to help the youngsters with their songs and dialogue.
In the spring of 2024, simply two years shy of our thirtieth anniversary manufacturing, this story took an surprising flip.
I used to be summoned to a Zoom assembly with six directors from the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). Hmmm. Was LAUSD lastly going to scale this system? Were toe-tapping tunes about to resound from a whole bunch of Los Angeles school rooms? Hardly.
The Los Angeles Unified School District Headquarters’ board room. Jonathan Alcorn For CA Post
Instead, I used to be questioned by curriculum specialists from the “American Indian/Alaskan Native and Indigenous Education Program.”
Was I Native American, they wished to know.
“No.”
“Did you consult with people within the tribal nations depicted in the ‘Hello Louisiana’ script?”
“No.”
“Does your script include references to tribal websites?”
What was this about? Well, apparently, a lady from South Dakota had known as the Marquez principal, stated she had seen a YouTube video of a dance quantity from “Hello Louisiana,” and he or she was sure the costumes of our Lakota Sioux weren’t genuine.
Download The California Post App, observe us on social, and subscribe to our newsletters
California Post News: Facebook, Instagram, TikTookay, X, YouTube, WhatsApp, LinkedIn
California Post Sports Facebook, Instagram, TikTookay, YouTube, X
California Post Opinion
California Post Newsletters: Sign up right here!
California Post App: Download right here!
Home supply: Sign up right here!
Page Six Hollywood: Sign up right here!
Instead of coping with this matter in-house, the principal reported the criticism to the downtown workplace.
At the tip of a 70-minute grilling, the chief interrogator requested me to submit all three scripts for review.
Several months later, I heard from the present fifth-grade academics that the directors had been demanding vital cuts and rewrites.
“Are they going to tell me what they want changed and why?” I requested.
“No.”
I used to be to not be included within the rewrite course of, as a result of I used to be no longer employed by the college district. My colleagues would do the rewriting. Also, I used to be barred from the Marquez campus till the rewrites had been accredited.
This course of took so long that the category of 2026 had solely enough time to carry out two of the three exhibits. Missing out on “Water and Power” meant lacking out on the battle of the mill ladies, one of the few documented girl-power episodes in early American history.
But right here the story takes one other surprising flip.
I obtained a cellphone call from Mike Morath, the Texas commissioner of schooling.
“I’d like to buy your IP,” he stated.
“IP?”
“Intellectual property. Your musicals.”
“All of them?” I requested.
“Yes.”
I questioned how he had heard about this system. But I didn’t ask.
“Really? Wow! Tell me the next step.”
Mike put me in contact with one of his regional superintendents who walked me by means of the Texas procurement course of. In July of this 12 months, I signed a contract.
Toe-tapping tunes will quickly be resounding from fifth-grade school rooms in Midland, Austin and Dallas.
Censored in Los Angeles. Welcomed in Texas. Go determine.
Jeff Lantos is a retired trainer and composer based mostly in LA.
