“Talent” or Inequity?
By: X Vazquez
When I auditioned to get into art school, I didn’t realize I was benefitting from inequity. I assumed, like most people do, that I got in based on my talent. My years of San Francisco Children’s Musical Theater, private voice lessons, and drama camps before the age of 12 made me stand out among the hundred or more sixth graders also competing for a seventh grade spot in the theatre department. I had never lived in Oakland, let alone the East Bay, and my mom worked in tech. I had an advantage over the demographics of students Oakland School for the Arts set out to serve, but my admission was by no means unique.
By my senior year, the school had begun the process of abolishing auditions. The district had threatened to remove OSA from the district because of its audition requirement that skewed the student body to be more affluent, more white, and coming from outside of the district. The rate of students on free and reduced lunch were substantially lower than the district’s average. Oakland residents decried the school’s elitism, remaining open while charter school after charter school shut down throughout the city, leaving more and more underserved students without accessible education. OSA had to change if it wanted to remain public and funded.
The school began to shift away from their audition model, changing to a public lottery open to students of the Oakland Unified School District. While I was still a student, many members of the community, from students to parents to teachers, bemoaned the quality of the school declining because we weren’t bringing in “talent” anymore. They would get quiet or defensive when I and other knowledgeable students countered their complaints with the fact that we were installing a more equitable system meant to serve students who historically lack access to arts education. Shouldn’t a public arts school be a place for students to learn art, or discover an interest or passion across our various departments? “Talent” largely meant access to prior training and resources, and urging the school to prioritize “talent” over accessibility is a fundamentally elitist argument, and frankly, racist. Having a student body better reflect the demographics of its district shouldn’t feel like a threat.
I’ve gone back to visit OSA since I graduated in 2022, and not only is talent still plentiful, but diversity is an ever increasing strength of the school. More students who didn’t have the same access I had to arts enrichment are getting to blossom into their creative selves regardless of socioeconomic circumstances. One of the biggest concerns of diversifying the student body were concerns of a loss in parent funding, since state funding only goes so far. Why should a public arts charter school be relying on community donations to stay afloat? All of our public schools should be fully funded. Arts schools are a public good that deserve abundant state and local funding in order to cultivate talent rather than strain for it.