The Music Class

With school funding slashed from coast to coast, a new program is aiming to do for music education what the Peace Corps did for international service. We visited New Orleans to see how the experiment is going.

Twenty third-graders file into a brightly lit classroom at Langston Hughes Academy in the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans. Though it is just one of the dozens of charter schools that now enroll 60 percent of the city's students, the just-completed $27-million academy is the first new school to be built in the city since Hurricane Katrina. The gleaming glass-and-brick structure towers over the modest single-family homes that line the streets of the still-recovering area.

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