Arts Intranet

Victoria Plettner-Saunders

I'm a consultant in San Diego who specializes in capacity building for nonprofit arts organizations and the people who run them. I also do a fair amount of work in the realm of arts education, including currently serving as chair of the Arts Education Council at Americans for the Arts and the co-founder and chair of the San Diego Alliance for Arts Education.

It was with my "arts education hat" on that I attended a one-day symposium in San Diego called “Powering Innovation Economies” last week. One of the sessions was about the role of arts education, innovation, and the workforce.

Sarah Murr (my fellow blogger/Boeing's Global Corporate Citizenship community investor responsible for corporate giving to the arts in Southern California) was invited to be one of the panel members. Murr is well known in Southern California’s arts education community for the huge investment she’s made on Boeing’s behalf in supporting arts education in the Orange County area. She is also an active board member of the California Alliance for Arts Education.

Unfortunately, she was ultimately unable to participate and I got an email asking if I knew of someone in the local corporate community who could take her place.

As I sat there thinking about which local corporations support arts education as part of their community investment policy for strengthening workforce development, I came up empty handed.

Sarah Murr

In Tony Wagner’s book The Global Achievement Gap, he writes that “the Global Achievement Gap is the gap between what our best schools are teaching and testing versus the skills that all students will need for careers, college, and citizenship in the 21st century.”

Wagner based this book on extensive interviews not with educators, but with corporations.

Those interviews led Wagner to develop the “Seven Survival Skills...people need in order to discuss, understand, and offer leadership to solve some of the most pressing issues we face as a democracy in the 21st century":

1.    Critical thinking and problem solving
2.    Collaboration across networks and leading by influence
3.    Agility and adaptability
4.    Initiative and entrepreneurship
5.    Effective oral and written communication
6.    Accessing and analyzing information
7.    Curiosity and imagination

Emily Peck

What is the role of business in ensuring that our educational system provides the workforce that they need?

Businesses have been addressing this concern in a number of ways including forming partnerships with arts organizations and creating signature arts education programs to prepare students from elementary school through college to be successful in careers in both the for-profit and nonprofit world.

Training the Future Workforce to be Creative and Innovative

Businesses have a vested interest in ensuring that the future workforce is prepared for jobs that might not even exist yet and one of the top skills this workforce needs is creativity. 1,500 CEOs interviewed by IBM picked creativity as the most important leadership attribute.

According to the study, “creative leaders invite disruptive innovation, encourage others to drop outdated approaches and take balanced risks. They are open-minded and inventive in expanding their management and communication styles.”

Some businesses have taken on the challenge of building the workforce that we need and created signature corporate philanthropy programs that are training the next generation of employees in creativity and innovation through the arts. Here are two examples but there are many more:

Mark Slavkin

As advocates for arts education, we try to stay flexible and timely in our rationale and arguments. We want to be current and relevant about the latest studies and trends.

If “21st century skills” are in vogue, we can show the relevance of arts learning. If the talk is about the primacy of science, technology, engineering, and math, we are quick to suggest we add the arts and make STEM become STEAM. And if the focus is on the economy and jobs, we stand ready to make the case for how learning in the arts prepares young people for a wealth of future job opportunities.

I worry that our advocacy and rhetoric may get ahead of the reality of our practice. Are we really delivering on all the benefits we promise?

While advocacy is essential, I wish we devoted as much time to sharing with each other about the nuts and bolts of classroom practice. Perhaps we could even display some humility about what we can deliver and what is not quite ready for prime time.

This brings me to the topic of careers in the arts. Our advocacy often refers to an economic imperative for arts education. Here in California we talk about the direct application of skills learned in arts education to jobs in the arts and the broader creative economy.

We also suggest that arts education cultivates a range of skills that will be valuable across all economic sectors, such as creativity, collaboration, and innovation.

Rob Schultz

I have this sneaking suspicion that if you ask a typical high school student to tell you what career choices exist in the arts, they would give “artist,” and “art teacher” as their two, and possibly only two, examples. Unfortunately, I think that too many young people are unaware of the myriad career options that center on the arts.

So, here’s a plug for enlightenment.

In my own experience, I’d never considered such a career until my bachelor’s degree days. A full-time student in need of multiple part-time jobs, I found a “student assistant” position in the office of my university’s art department helping professors and the dean, answering phones, handling routine administrative tasks, and doing word processing on a primitive, mid-1980s computer platform.

This initial foray led to a lengthy and satisfying career in arts administration.

This career has benefitted me in many ways, not the least of which comes from wonderful opportunities to work and interact with a wide variety of arts professionals. Many of these jobs I never dreamed existed back in my school days.

Take government work, for starters.

Sally Gaskill

At the end of September, over 300,000 arts graduates across the U.S. and Canada will be eligible to complete the 2011 SNAAP survey.

SNAAP is the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project – an annual survey and data collection project that investigates both the educational experiences and career paths of arts graduates. The project–the biggest of its kind ever attempted–is based at Indiana University in collaboration with the Curb Center at Vanderbilt, and I serve as project manager.

The arts graduates who will be surveyed this fall come from 67 varied institutions, including specialized art schools, liberal arts colleges, large research universities, and even arts high schools.

Earlier this year, SNAAP released its first annual report, based on the responses of 13,500 arts alumni from all over the country who responded to the 2010 survey. You can see some nifty graphics that summarize some of our more interesting findings – we call it the SnaapShot.

So, what do we know about arts alumni?  Here are some nuggets gleaned from SNAAP 2010:

•    Arts graduates aren’t starving and bitter. They are in fact largely employed, satisfied with their careers, and would go to arts school again if they had it to do over.

Sarah Murr

While research studies show that Intelligence Quotient (IQ) continues to increase with each new generation, creativity scores are decreasing. This fact should alarm everyone.

In fact, it has already gotten the attention of American business that desperately wants to – needs to – hire the brightest and the best to generate the next innovative ideas for products or services that will keep our businesses competitive in a global marketplace.

You may ask, "why are creativity scores decreasing?"

One possible answer comes from Sandra Ruppert, director of the Arts Education Partnership, a national coalition of arts, business, education, philanthropic, and government organizations who said, “We have a whole generation of teachers and parents who have not had the advantage of arts in their own education.”

So what does being creative have to do with an innovative workforce?

IBM's 2010 survey of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the number one leadership competency for the workforce of the 21st century. However, tight state budgets and a lack of appreciation for what an arts education provides a young mind, and subsequently an adult mind, have resulted in the abandonment or near abandonment of arts programs across the nation.

Kristen Engebretsen

To celebrate our second annual National Arts in Education Week, Americans for the Arts is hosting its biannual arts education blog salon.

We’ve chosen the topic: “Career Development for Students and the Role of Arts Education.”

I asked our contributing authors to interpret this broadly: careers in the arts, post-high school options, 21st century skills, workforce development, investment in an innovative workforce, etc.

Throughout the week, you’ll hear from many staff members from Americans for the Arts, several of our Arts Education Council members, and other key players in our field including: a former assistant superintendent, a corporate arts education funder, the Deputy Executive Director of the National Association of State Boards of Education, and more.

Mary-Helen Rossi

There’s no doubt about it: when budgets are cut the arts are the first to go. Those of us who’ve been at this for a while have always found ways to adapt, and this time my company’s gotten pragmatic...creatively pragmatic.

Creative pragmatism is a timely take on an old topic--using the arts to enhance seemingly disparate fields. Some of us, myself included, have been resistant: why should the arts play maidservant to fields in which most professionals view them as a distraction from the ‘real work'?

Mental health, education, and workforce development are good examples, and in this post I’ll explore the field of workforce development.

Workforce Development
Workforce Development is worth considering for at least two reasons: it’s still relatively well-funded and it’s precisely what’s needed to revitalize our youth and communities.

Deb Vaughn

My husband and I are now expecting our first child. With both of us being arts educators, we feel like we’re in a good position to help our child experience the arts.

In fact, the little one has already been to see shows at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. (During the production of Pirates of Penzance I could have sworn I felt jazz hands in my belly.)

But, as much as we value the arts in our family, I know that when the time comes to send Junior off to school, we will have to be active, passionate, vocal, and unrelenting advocates. Here are some places we plan to start.

Stay Educated
Although I have plenty of stories about the importance of arts education, it is equally important for advocates to stay on top of the statistics too. Here are some recent data gems to keep handy:
• 72.5 percent of tenth graders from "high-arts" schools scored in the top half of standardized tests (verbal and math combined) compared to 45 percent from "low-arts" schools.
• A state of Missouri survey found that districts offering more fine arts classes have a one percent higher attendance rate. Attendance effects funding, so in a district of 12,000 students, a one percent increase in attendance equals an additional $430,000 annually.

Stephanie Riven

We, the arts community, agree that arts learning improves academic performance, increases lifelong learning skills and often helps students at risk of failure engage in school.

We can point to the children. We can point to classrooms and to certain districts. We see their success.

In our arsenal of facts and arguments, we have key messages, data, research, policy briefs, examples of districts that have made progress, and a very effective lobbying effort in Washington.

We know the public agrees, too. After all, 91 percent of voters indicate that the arts are essential to building capacities of imagination.

But our message continues to become lost in translation where math, reading, and science are seen as the only subjects worthy of significant support.

Maya Kumazawa

It seems that “community engagement” and “community arts” are paving the way to a new paradigm in the local arts sector.

By browsing through some local arts agency (LAA) websites, I got the sense that most organizations were somehow relating to their local communities already. But what exactly IS community engagement and how do you do it?

Of course, by sponsoring a public art installation or creating a cultural district, the community benefits. There’s no clear line between community outreach and actually engaging citizens in conversations.

An article in the New York Times describes the shift towards community engagement in MFA programs as, “[capturing] the evolving contemporary art world, one in which awareness of the social, cultural, economic and political context in which art exists has become increasingly important. “

However, even this description doesn’t clearly distinguish how the arts world is changing – the arts have always reflected an awareness of social and cultural contexts. By defining the paradigm more specifically, LAAs will be able to plan more efficiently.

Kristen Engebretsen

This week I got an email from someone concerned about the budget cuts to arts education and inquiring about what they could do to help keep the arts in schools.

In the spirit of my colleague Randy Cohen’s popular post (Top 10 Reasons to Support the Arts), I am presenting my own:

The Top 10 Ways to Support Arts Education

10. Volunteer your time, resources, skills: Many schools would appreciate your time as a chaperone, your skill as a teaching artist, or your donations of money, costumes, rehearsal space, etc.

9. Know the facts: Stay on top of current arts education research, trends, and news articles. Start with Reinvesting in Arts Education, which summarizes research on the topic. Use this data in your messaging when you speak to elected officials or school leaders.

8. Get involved politically: Tell your elected officials why arts education is important. Ask your members of Congress to keep the arts listed as a core subject during the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Lynne Kingsley

“Hi, I’m hoping you can help. My daughter has special needs and the only thing that gets her to pay any attention in school is her performing arts subject. Drama, dance and music make her come alive and help her understand people. I just found out the arts programs in her school are being cut. They just CAN’T cut the arts. How can I get the arts reinstated in her school and ensure they are a big part of the curriculum in the schools she will attend in the future?”

GOOD question.

This was the frazzled phone call I received last Thursday. This mother, clearly concerned about her child’s well being and education, was desperate; she is hungry for arts education for her daughter and was not stopping until she found it. I directed her to some well-connected folks in her region who may be able to help her situation, but it made me wonder: what about the others, the parents who didn’t call?

Kirsten Kichenstein

Growing up a child of divorced parents living on either coast, I spent the school year with my mother and the summer with my father. Living in a single-parent household, money was tight. Very tight.

How I looked forward to those summers…I’d leave the west coast to spend hot Alabama days visiting with my dad and grandparents. I remember farmers markets, beefsteak tomatoes, juicy peaches and bee-stung watermelon.

I was always partially wet from a recent dip in my grandparent’s swimming pool and enjoyed magical adventures in the vacant lot down the road. Mostly what I recall from my Alabama summers is feeling more creative in those two months than at any other time of the year.

My father and his parents were artists. My father a guitarist, my grandfather a pianist, my grandmother a sculptor.

My grandparents’ home was filled with original works of art—paintings, sculptures, and stacks and stacks of books. There was always beautiful music playing either from the stereo or resonating from my grandfather’s attached piano studio. If my family wasn’t creating their own artwork, they were enjoying someone else’s. It was their life. It still is. Creativity was a family value.  

Arizona Commission on the Arts, a long-time member of Americans for the Arts, has secured seven-time National Basketball Association all-star Grant Hill as a spokesman for their four-year public awareness campaign, The Choice is Art.

The campaign is intended to: advance the cultural conversation in Arizona; grow public understanding about the broad-spectrum benefits of arts programs, and increase arts participation in Arizona communities; and, fortify a privately-held arts endowment whose funds can be utilized in support of statewide arts programs.

The campaign began with a focus on access to arts education with Hill spreading the message in a video airing throughout the state.

In addition to being avid visual art collectors, Grant and his Grammy-nominated wife Tamia support arts education for their children, as well as all the children of Arizona:

Alyx Kellington

Running short on money for long-term big picture projects?

Is “Community Outreach” a part of your mission statement or goal?

Is working with the school district a maze (um, maybe talk to so and so, oh he’s no longer there, leave a message, come on in – but not today…), a closed door (we can’t afford the arts or can’t afford to take chances), or a money pit (what else can you give me?)?

Many arts and cultural organizations want to work in a specific school or with a certain population but encounter the roadblocks mentioned above.

If several arts organizations collaborate and each contributes one staff member one full day a month to one school for a year, you’ve got the beginning of a funded program.

In that creative spirit, five science-based organizations recently approached a Southeast Florida local arts agency (LAA) with this idea and commitment.

Narric Rome

Not long into my tenure at the U.S. Department of Education during the Clinton administration, I came to understand the limits of what the federal government can do for K-12 education.

At the time, the department boosted funding to support the hiring of 100,000 new teachers and the launch of a new national afterschool initiative that is now a $1.1 billion program.

Arts teachers were among the 100,000 new hires and many of the programs embraced the arts. Federal investment had an important impact, but many arts education advocates would not rank these two accomplishments as major successes. Why? Because a new arts teacher and a new arts afterschool program did not appear in every school in every community.

We need to remember that the federal share in total education spending is only 11 cents on the dollar. The remaining funds come from state and local sources.

Which brings me to federal policy.

Kristen Engebretsen

This weekend I had the pleasure of experiencing my first authentic D.C. experience—the protest. I was drawn to the Save Our Schools March because I want to believe that America can still offer all students a quality PUBLIC education.

The Save Our Schools March (SOS) was a large umbrella event for anyone who is dissatisfied with our educational system. As a parent and an arts education advocate, my dissatisfaction has grown as our curriculum has dwindled. Cutting of subjects such as the arts, social studies, and science has been, to me, one of the worst consequences of No Child Left Behind.

So, on Friday my activism began with a screening of the film, The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman. It was great to watch this film in a room full of frustrated teachers.

There was booing when Arne Duncan said that the best thing that happened to New Orleans schools was Hurricane Katrina. There was hissing when Michelle Rhee bragged about her own private school experience. There was cheering when the teachers in the film spoke about public schools’ responsibility to educate the poorest and neediest of students.

The 53rd Street Community Garden

The goal of the 53rd Street Community Garden was to create a sustainable community garden with colorful artistic components and outdoor classrooms. Students would utilize this outdoor space to discover scientific exploration of plants, insects, and animals, while fostering a respect for the neighborhood.

Although this project is still pretty fresh and constantly evolving, we have seen an amazing community effort in building a space where education, cultivation, and neighborhood come together. It has been beautiful to have a place where teachers can bring their classrooms outside to plant vegetables, where community members tend to their plots and interact with the youth, and where two schools that rarely socialize now have some common ground.

We are currently working with the school on plans for developing a culinary arts program, installing a gazebo, and scheduling a community harvest event. We are excited about expanding the school/community garden model, which we’ve named Growing Great Gardens (3G), to other Milwaukee Public Schools.

Students display a bench they created for their school/community garden.

I was fortunate enough to attend this year’s Americans for the Arts Annual Convention in San Diego. One of the most engaging ideas that I took home with me was the relationship between innovation and impact.

We talked about how these two ideas are often assumed to go hand-in-hand and although many innovative ideas do have significant impact on large groups of people, sometimes innovation is for the sake of innovation.

One member of my table used the analogy of the space pen – how NASA spent tons of money and research developing a zero gravity pen that could write in space, which is a cool, I want one, but pencils always seemed to work just fine in the past. Was this innovative, probably, did it have a significant impact on a large group of people or was it a catalyst of great purpose, probably not.

I must admit I am a bit biased on what we termed ‘The Space Pen Theory’ because of my arts education background. We are trained to weigh much more heavily on the impact of a project than the novelty of the idea, not to say that we aren’t often able to bring those two elements together but for educational purposes, the process is often more closely examined than the product.

We deliberately tried to balance impact and innovation with the 53rd Street School Community Garden Project. Community gardens and school gardens are not super fresh ideas but the fusion of the two in a project that uses the arts to engage the entire community from the inception, brings new life to both.

Sahar Javedani

As Director of Educational Programming at Pentacle in New York City, I am constantly seeking opportunities to partner with organizations that share our mission of educating students on career opportunities in the performing arts through our “Behind the Scenes” program.

Last year, we welcomed a new relationship with Exploring the Arts, Tony Bennett and Susan Benedetto’s nonprofit charitable organization. We have our long-standing relationship of eight years with Frank Sinatra School of the Arts (Exploring the Arts’ original partner school) to thank for providing the foundation for this new partnership.

I believe that we've created a successful model of arts education where the collaboration of a school, funding partner, and arts education provider can come to the table with a common goal of better preparing students for entering the creative workforce through hands-on and experiential learning.

I recently had the opportunity to ask Susan Benedetto, co-founder and board president of Exploring the Arts to share her perspective on cultivating relationships with new partner schools and arts education providers:

Ryan Hurley

Hello cyberpeople. My name is Ryan Hurley and I am a part-time educator and writer, and full-time Program Coordinator for an arts education organization in Milwaukee, Wisconsin called Arts @ Large (A@L). I’m excited to share some of the things that we are doing in Milwaukee and read about the emerging ideas blooming around the country.

Arts @ Large works with school communities in Milwaukee, which often lack basic access to art and music education, to develop comprehensive arts programs in collaboration with students, teachers, staff, afterschool providers and parents. At each of our 20-25 school sites we develop a team with the above mentioned community members to develop and direct a multi-faceted arts program which includes arts-integration training for teachers, multidisciplinary artist residencies, access to art and music supplies, and opportunities for field trips into the community.

Our goal is to empower each site to use the arts to enhance the academic curriculum and the creative climate. The academic connection is essential not only because we feel it is important to enhance classroom learning through the arts but also because of the limited amount of time teachers are allowed for creative exploration due to some of the overwhelming mandates put onto school communities.

Last year, Arts Achieve: Impacting Student Success in the Arts, won the distinction of being one of the forty-nine winners of the Investing in Innovation competition. Project applicant Studio in a School, along with project partners Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall, ArtsConnection, Inc., 92nd Street Y / Harkness Dance Center, Dance Education Laboratory, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, and the New York City Department of Education, were the recipients of this $4.4 million, 5-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

Reviewers that scored this grant application gave it high marks because they felt that creating high-quality student assessments in the arts would improve arts education experiences for students, create collaborative experiences for teachers and arts professionals, and would benefit students for years to come.

One of the reviewers of this application felt that high quality arts assessments are greatly needed in today’s schools, and the use of assessments can help the arts to remain a strong part of the curriculum. Another reviewer commented that the project was highly innovative because it 1) had a strong base of community support 2) utilized professional learning communities 3) connected to the new common core standards; and 4) incorporated the use of technology for disseminating units of study, assessments, PD materials, and toolkits.

Ron Evans

I wasn’t able to attend the Americans for the Arts Annual Convention this year, but I did get to participate in the next best thing: following the conversation on Twitter.

There were lots of great discussion and opinions. But unless you were following 24/7, you may have missed some gems.

So, I’ve gone through the entire stream of tweets using the hashtag #AFTA11 (all 2389 of them!) cut out all fat, and filtered them down to my picks for the top 50 most-useful tweets to me from AFTA 2011.

I say most useful because I wanted to separate out things that can be acted on, resources/measurements that can be explored, impactful facts and figures, and new “lightbulb ideas.”

A big thank you to these great posters for posting meaty tweets – If you like something you see, follow the author on Twitter.

So here goes, from oldest (public art pre-conference) to newest (end of conference) order…

In 2010, the U.S. Department of Education’s Investing in Innovation competition awarded District 75 (New York City’s special education district) and Manhattan New Music Project (MNMP), a $4.6 million, five-year grant to develop and implement Everyday Arts for Special Education (EASE).

EASE is a professional development program designed to improve student achievement in the areas of communication, socialization, academic learning, and arts proficiency through integrated, arts-based approaches.

EASE gives teachers tools and experience with arts-based instruction, and participating teachers learn skills and strategies across multiple arts disciplines (music, dance, visual arts, and theater) in order to integrate the arts into classroom instruction. This makes learning more accessible to special education students who struggle with more conventional instructional approaches.