At P.S. 198, on 98th Street on the border of East Harlem, the test scores in reading and math are way too low and the numbers of children who need free lunch are way too high. But throughout the day, kids gather to dance, paint, and make music with working artists in a program so rich and alive that it draws the respect and admiration of a steady stream of visiting teachers.

In a classroom crowded with 30 students, the most antsy child in the class sits next to a visiting artist, transfixed, for ten minutes straight. And a withdrawn third grader writes a wrenching poem about her father, whom she first met when she was six, two weeks before he was killed.

On 81st Street at P.S. 6, eighteen blocks south and a stone's throw from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, parents accustomed to expecting the best nonetheless rated the arts low on their priority list a few years ago. Teachers once viewed the arts specialists as offering an "extra" that freed up a planning period, not something with value for everyone in the school.

But now, kids from the two schools team up for joint visits to the Met, and write about what they experience there. Parents are asking for more sessions with Arts-Connection dancer Jessica Nicoll, who got fourth graders from both schools working successfully on tempo and rhythm, concentration and performance skills. And teachers from P.S. 6 routinely confer with their uptown colleagues on ways to heighten children's learning -- not just of dance but of math, reading, writing, science, history -- by educating them in the arts.

Can schools, like people, transform themselves through the arts? How would we know if it did happen? Though simple, these questions go to the heart of the three broad-based arts projects the Annenberg Challenge funds: one in New York City, one in Minneapolis, and one that links six sites nationwide in a consortium jointly funded by Annenberg and the Getty Education Institute for the Arts.

With a combined total of $20 million in funds from Ambassador Walter Annenberg, who has cherished a lifelong passion for the arts, each project approaches the questions differently, but each still bears a distinctive Challenge stamp.

In New York City, 61 schools in all five boroughs -- bolstered by a hefty boost in city funding that arose from the Annenberg gift -- have partnered with arts organizations to help bring students closer to the learning outcomes they hold dear. "First we ask what makes a good education," says director Hollis Headrick. "Then we ask how our city -- this motherlode of culture in which we sit -- can help us get there."

In Minnesota, a state agency has teamed up with a major urban district's reform effort to create a coherent policy environment, which treats the arts as not only a vital part of other academic subjects but a core learning area itself, complete with standards-based assessments. "We know we can do this at the classroom level," says David O'Fallon, who directs the state effort. "Now we aim to learn from Minneapolis how to align our whole system so it connects the arts with academic achievement."

The third project, known as Transforming Education Through the Arts Challenge (TETAC), grows out of a decade of Getty-funded "discipline-based arts education" by asking 36 demonstration schools from six regions to infuse arts appreciation, history, analysis, and creation into the broader curriculum, as a means to change the whole school's way of teaching and learning.

So how do these ambitious ideas look -- and how well do they work -- when they hit the real world of people, structures, and policies in which schools operate?

But just as significant, Challenge schools immersed in the arts are beginning to find what O'Fallon calls "a whole new neural network" of powerful outcomes, perhaps possible only through this path.

Teachers of every subject are learning to identify and nurture the artistic potential of students they once regarded as without much aptitude for learning.

By working directly with local artists, students and teachers both are awakening to a new sense of the vital shared purposes of schools and their communities.

In the classroom, teachers can now describe and assess the expressive sand paintings of third graders inspired by Picasso's work in the museum down the street.

And they are registering the intellectual excitement of once-bored high school students as they translate great themes from literature or central concepts of physics into dance, drama, music, or art.

"They have to get their x and y coordinates just right for it to work," says Ash, who has seen his students' grasp of Cartesian coordinates increase markedly once they begin using paintings to explore the dimensions of planes. Using the work of Piet Mondrian as a model, they created their own abstract works using subjects like a bedroom closet, or the face of a friend. Ash even unveiled his own first-ever creation for the class, a depiction of the city's downtown he called "Tallahassee Boogie-Woogie" after Mondrian's painting "Broadway Boogie-Woogie," which he encountered in a summer Tetac Regional Institute.

Or ask Mike, a young student at one of Minneapolis's poorest elementary schools, who glimpsed a piece of his own life in Ed and Nancy Kienholz's installation "The Pedicord Apartments" at the Weisman Art Museum. "The piece is frightening -- a long, dark, musty, low-ceilinged hallway with apartment doors on each side," said Judy Hornbacher, who was the museum docent that day and who heads the city's Arts and Education Partnership. "If you lean on the doors you can hear fights, television, lovemaking from inside."

The children were to write a story taking off from the work, and Hornbacher watched as Mike matter-of-factly offered that it felt just like his own home. "But he had a hard time getting started writing," she said. "He just couldn't take his eyes off the shiny pink and black motorcycle outside the apartment. Finally I said, 'Why don't you be the person who just came home on that motorcycle?' His eyes lit up in his small thin face, and he began to write."