Arts Intranet

For those of us that grew up in or around the 1970’s, the most recognizable use of data was in a chewing gum commercial.

“4 out of 5 dentists surveyed recommend sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum.”

Brilliant advertising.  It was brief, easy to understand, and repeated ad nauseam …….. and so it stuck, like gum.

In the 21^st century, the world is filled with data. And the field of arts education is no different.

At a recent training session on Chicago’s South Side, I discussed the challenges and opportunities of providing arts education in CPS with a small group of arts instructors. One spoke of overcoming the violence and acting out that are a part of everyday life in her elementary school. Another shared the triumphs of their school’s out-of-school-time dance club. Access to the club, especially given the difficult circumstances these young people face, is making a difference in their lives.

Being asked to blog about operationalizing access and equity in arts education is daunting. As a museum director, we strive to make everything accessible following ADA guidelines and being open to the public on a regular basis. Here at the Delta Blues Museum we are trying to tell the stories of artists who have not always been given equity–in their lives, their professions, or even in their deaths.

In pondering what knowledge I could share about this topic, I realized that in part, our programming is not planed for a particular age, demographic or targeted audience. We plan programs about the blues for fans of the blues and persons interested in learning more about the blues. This audience is global. So, when you look at the world as your audience, you are freer to be more creative in your offerings instead of trying to create something for the audience you aren’t reaching. Nurture and feed the one you have.

To make the case for the value that pursuing equity and access to arts education provides to arts organizations themselves, I want to look at two ongoing and current topics in arts production.

The first topic is diversity in all forms. In the past three years, as part of a larger national conversation on diversity that has revolved as much around micro-aggressions and the slow grind of institutionalized discrimination as around shocking, devastating, and violent events, America’s arts communities have been challenged to examine the unwitting ways in which they maintain this status quo. With the best intentions, we produce excellent artistic work meant to have a universal appeal, and are surprised when audiences are not diverse. The discussion revolves around this question: If artistic excellence and a desire for diversity aren’t enough to eradicate the barriers that prevent our arts institutions from serving a representative audience, what more do we need to do?

The second topic is the audience of the future. Arts production seems to be hovering around perpetual invalid status, always wondering what it will take to get an infusion of new blood. As the average age of season ticket holders rises, we wonder where the next generation of arts supporters will come from. The discussion revolves around this question: If excellence isn’t enough, and marketing to young adults fails to promote long-term engagement, what can we do to reach new audiences?

With the rise in racial tension and violence in our communities, the question of how we engage our communities in meaningful civic discourse is being asked across the country—particularly how do we engage our young people and help them understand how to include their “voice” in the discussion? The arts have a long standing place in building a bridge between artistic expression and social justice. “Music and the arts are often the glue that helps hold a movement together, providing a sounding board and an emotional support structure,” says Anthony Trecek-King, Artistic Director for the Boston Children’s Chorus, BCC, during our recent discussion about BCC’s unique mission.

Equity can only be achieved if students of need can perform at the same level as their peers who have the benefit of financial access. If the end goal is artistic excellence, regardless of socio-economic status or ethnicity, we must develop a funding model that provides deep access to training for students at the onset of their arts education journey.  

Colburn’s mission is to provide performing arts education at the highest level. The organization is uniquely situated to provide access and equity because Colburn offers a complete sequential learning program in the arts for children aged 7 months through college. There are no limits to the heights at which a Colburn student can achieve.

It was a proud day the morning of November 17, 2016, as I stood around my colleague’s computer screen with a group of Armory friends watching our First Lady Michelle Obama honor one of our own teens with the most prestigious award the nation gives for an outstanding after school program. My eyes and heart filled with tears of joy as aspiring seventeen-year old photographer Dalon Poole received the award on behalf of the Armory Center for the Arts for the 2015 National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award. In that moment, I found myself reflecting upon my own journey, the last twenty seven years of service in arts education, and what brought me to the Armory in the first place, and most importantly what has kept me inspired for all these years.

For the last four years, The California Alliance for Arts Education has been pursuing its Title I Initiative, an effort to clarify confusion around the appropriate use of Title I funds for arts education programs, and to provide tools to school leaders on the ground for planning and implementation. For us, the initiative is not just about finding ways to provide more access to arts education—it’s about providing a high quality education, full stop, for every student. That high quality education must and should include the arts.

How many times have we heard people groan about taxes? Lots.

What if it’s to support arts education in public schools? That was a different story in Portland, Oregon in 2012 when residents said, “YES! We’ll vote for that.” They overwhelmingly endorsed a measure that has restored art and music teachers in all the city’s elementary schools.

An access to a theatre education is as simple as teaching acting classes in a school. It’s allowing anyone to participate in shows and extracurriculars involving the arts. It’s giving kids a space in which to creatively express themselves without judgment, and giving them a group of people who will welcome them with open arms. And most importantly, it’s telling everyone’s stories, not just one kind of person’s stories.

It’s easy to see the end goal, but it’s harder to reach it. There’s too much left to do to summarize in a blog post, but I think these three ideas are a good starting point to make the arts more accessible:

The data from the 2015 National Center for Educational Statistics report The Condition of Education had this to say about the changing demographics of students: From 2002 to 2012, the number of white students in public elementary and secondary schools decreased from 28.6 million to 25.4 million, and their share of enrollment decreased from 59 to 51 percent; Hispanic student enrollment increased from 8.6 million to 12.1 million students, and their share of enrollment increased from 18 to 24 percent; and the number of African-American students enrolled decreased from 8.3 million to 7.8 million, and their share of enrollment decreased from 17 to 16 percent.

Visionary school districts aren’t satisfied with offering music and arts education only at schools with affluent students. Leaders in these districts know the imperative of equitable access to learning in the arts.  

However, the desire to provide arts education on the part of school leaders does not always translate into the capacity or even the know-how to make it happen. In California, the curriculum contraction that began in the early 2000s along with cycles of budget cuts, reduced arts education infrastructure, and diminished teacher training pipelines have left our state’s education field unprepared for a rapid restoration of the arts in schools.

I’m going rogue. I’m an arts administration educator posting in the Arts Education blog salon. I’m here for purely selfish reasons: arts administrators LOVE engaged arts audiences. We need students to have great arts education experiences in the K-12 system, since studies show that this is an indicator of future arts participation. Arguably, fewer barriers to equity and access in arts education can help lessen the barriers that arts administrator have to help audiences overcome.  

There are quite a few barriers to equity and access in quality K-12 education. These are often structural issues that will take time to fix. I’m more interested in addressing what can be done now, while the larger and slower fixes are underway.

As a nation, we all agree that it is beneficial for every child to receive a comprehensive education, inclusive of the arts. How to operationalize this has been more elusive and challenging. Collective Impact, as shared in the Stanford Social Innovation Review article written by John Kania and Mark Kramer, outlines the conditions for broad, systemic change in social issues, and has been successfully implemented in a variety of communities across the country, including initiatives to support arts education.   

Somehow "equity" has become a huge topic of conversation in the arts and in arts education. Huge for consultants, some who are retired educators; others who've never spent a day in the classroom as an instructor. Equity, or the pursuit thereof, is also a huge topic of research. Study after study reveals much of what we knew decades ago—even before federal legislation that mandated that all children learn the same way and therefore let's evaluate them in the same robotic ways.

As a high school student, the guideline I was given to write this blog post, “operationalizing access and equity in arts education,” sounds inaccessible within itself. I won’t lie, I had to look up what equity means (it means fairness). In my life, access to arts education is something I rarely think of as an idea; it’s something I’m accustomed to. I’ve had it for so long that I often forget that I fought for it.

The term equity has been top of mind in the worlds of arts and education for quite some time now. When we talk about access, we divert to equity. We when talk about diversity, we pivot and discuss equity. When we talk about inclusion, we now talk about equity, too.

With all of this talk, our field has begun to take action. We see success stories around the country of programs using their data to identify issues with the equity in access to arts education. We see school districts take serious the deficiencies in equity and correct them with modified defunding models. We also see individuals, programs, and communities taking steps towards their own knowledge building on the issues of equity.

John Donne coined the phrase "no man is an island," emphasizing no one is self-sufficient—each of us relies on one another. As arts agencies, arts educators, and arts advocates gathered in the nation’s Capital a few weeks ago for the Arts in Education Symposium: States of Change 2016, the strength and realization of our inter connectivity couldn't have been more evident. Confronting the new landscape of the Every Student Succeeds Act, will require impactful collaborations at the state level, and deep conversations among advocates for the Arts.

Do you remember Where's Waldo? Let's play for a minute. Can you find all the pieces of technology in this picture from the 2016 States of Change Policy Symposium?

In 2008, when I started attending national arts education events, it was rare to see someone using a piece of technology. There were two of us using Twitter at that time, which made for an uninteresting backchannel. The main technology conversation was about social media and if we could use it for professional reasons or for harnessing student learning in the arts. There were many skeptics who saw educational technology as a flash in the pan.

The arts are on an upward trajectory in many places across the United States. This positive path includes states’ adoption of new arts education standards influenced by the National Core Arts Standards model released in 2014 and the flourishing STEAM movement which has STEM proponents and funders acknowledging the natural—dare we say essential—place the arts have in fostering the skills today’s students need to become tomorrow’s innovators. And, federal funding for the arts is more secure than in recent years.

These were some of the takeaways from the recent State Policy Symposium, States of Change which was produced through a partnership with the Arts Education Partnership, Americans for the Arts, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the Education Commission of the States.

I love going to meetings and trying to encapsulate what I’ve learned in major threads or realizations.  After considering the wide-ranging presentations and conversations from the Symposium a few weekends ago, I’ve arrived at five salient points.

1. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) presents huge opportunities for arts education. There is, however, no guarantee that we will be the beneficiaries of those opportunities. First, the regulation process is ongoing as the Department of Education tries to decipher nearly 400 pages of legislation and convert that into practical guidelines. Second, even when those regulations appear, the place of arts education is not ensured. Instead, two rather important phrases need to be understood.

It’s been a few months since I joined the Americans for the Arts team and I've had the opportunity to learn a lot about the interesting and diverse work that you're doing and how our tools, resources, and member network are helping you get it done.

We often share your stories in our member e-newsletter Monthly Wire, but I wanted to dig a little deeper into some of your projects and programs and really get to know your work. I'll be jumping in periodically to share what I'm learning about member activity so that you can get to know each other a little better and to find some new, creative ways to use your membership!

Maybe “to certify or not to certify” was our original question, but when in September and October last fall we convened teaching artists around the state of California, it became clear that consensus is emerging that the real question is “how to certify with integrity, flexibility and proper support”.

Nearly 200 teaching artists participated in person and in written responses in regional conversations focused specifically on the issues surrounding questions of professionally strengthening our field. One of our core strengths is the depth and diversity of pathways artists take into teaching artistry, with a continuum from self-taught, informally or formally mentored, individualized training, and formal academic training all providing valid and challenging forms of professional development. With increasing calls for teaching artists to step up and step in as partners in education, social services, social justice and community settings, our collaborative network thought it was high time we grappled head on with the challenges of documenting competence and making mastery visible.

As the March 13^th deadline approaches for the 2016 Annual Awards, we were curious about the careers and lives of some of our very first recipients. As you read about these past winners, remember you can nominate someone (or yourself!) to join their ranks.

Mary Anne Phan is the most recent winner of the NABE Foundation/Americans for the Arts Scholarship Award.

Since the age of five, I cannot remember a day where I have not held a violin in my hands. After sawing away at a wooden box for fifteen years, I’ve certainly learned some lessons beyond how to perform an informed interpretation of Bach. The inflection point of my violin career came from studying the legendary Mozart Concerto in G Major. Every violinist knows it, has played it, and has a different opinion on just about every note in the piece. Revelation came when my teacher paused and asked “What’s your plan for that first line?” As an eleven year old I had no semblance of what she meant, but her words resonate with me to this day.

This is the first of four blog posts on Americans for the Arts’ new public opinion survey.

In December 2015, Congress passed the new Every Student Succeeds Act reauthorization, with a provision that includes the arts in the definition of a “well-rounded education.” Arts advocates certainly found something to celebrate with that, but just where does the public stand on the issue? Later that same week, Americans for the Arts conducted a nationwide public opinion survey on the arts and arts education. Findings showed:

Have you ever had an experience and realized, in that very moment, that your way of thinking was changed forever? That happened to me a couple of weeks ago when I found myself at a meeting of our local STEM collaborative. Through a series of seemingly unconnected events, I was about to begin my journey toward understanding the potential of the STEM to STEAM concept but not the way you might think.

I’m really excited at work these days because Poetry Out Loud in South Dakota is in full swing. If you don’t know what Poetry Out Loud is, you should probably spend the next several days watching videos of these amazing kids at the National Finals and reading through the poetry archives and teaching resources on the website. It’s a really cool, intensely educational program available to all high school students across the nation.

The main purpose of Poetry Out Loud is to encourage the nation’s youth to learn about great poetry through memorization and recitation. This program helps students master public speaking skills, build self-confidence, and learn about their literary heritage.

We’re fiercely dedicated to Poetry Out Loud at our state arts agency because poetry is an artistic representation of life. Poetry includes everyone. It helps us understand each other and the world around us. It helps us connect the past to the present, as it’s been practiced for centuries. Poetry is a living, breathing art form that can be enlightening both on the page and off. Poetry is for everyone, and Poetry Out Loud helps students and teachers see that concept to fruition.

All across America, students and teachers are hard at work on the business of learning. Students attend classes, set goals and complete work that demonstrates what they are learning, while teachers check and double check that standards, benchmark and mastery are being met. That is, until about the 100th day of school…that’s when we all enter the shadow of…THE TEST. Everything changes in the shadow of the test, from the way teachers teach to the format of student practice, and it’s not changing for the better. Is there a better way to assess student growth than to bubble in recalled facts for a computer to score?

With one foot deep in the arts education world and the other deep in youth development and out-of-school time (OST) work, I have come to the not-so-shocking realization that arts programs easily and thoroughly align with and fulfill what experts and participants agree are the key characteristics of successful youth development programs – hurrah for Creative Youth Development!

I participate in Milwaukee’s city-wide OST network, Beyond the Bell, and recently became a trained external assessor for the Youth Program Quality Intervention (YPQI), a quality improvement process developed by the David P. Weikart Center for Youth Program Quality. The purpose of the process is to quantify the quality of a youth development program and help organizations create quality improvement plans. The Weikart Center also offers Methods Trainings focused on quality improvements relative to the measures in the tool.