Arts Intranet

I was planning to write a post about how President Obama made sure to put creativity and innovation at the forefront of his State of the Union last week, but somehow missed any references to the arts. There I was on a treadmill at my local Washington Sports Club, waiting for him to say it. And waiting. And running. And running. And waiting. It never came.

Before I could write a post about it, I came across another one making many of the exact same points. So, rather than state the same thing twice, I invite you to check out Lee Rosenbaum’s Huffington Post piece, State of the Arts: Why Culture Matters for Obamanomics.

In her post, Rosenbaum mentions that Capitol Hill may not be ready for a pro-arts argument following the National Portrait Gallery incident and an influx of new members of Congress who have no interest in funding the arts, humanities, railroads, or Americorps programs. I understand that, but even a passing line about turning STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) into STEAM (adding Arts), would have been easy to insert.

What if instead of…

“And over the next 10 years, with so many baby boomers retiring from our classrooms, we want to prepare 100,000 new teachers in the fields of science and technology and engineering and math.”

…The President said (using some of the language of Education Secretary Duncan):

Pam Korza

The current environment has created a context for Local Arts Agencies (LAAs) and State Arts Agencies (SAAs) to reconsider support for arts and culture activity that addresses social and civic concerns.  Many will argue, and rightfully so, that, local and state arts agencies have long responded to disadvantaged populations and encouraged community engagement in their grantmaking.  It’s in their DNA as funders working for the public good.

The 2010 report, Trend or Tipping Point: Arts & Social Change Grantmaking, recently released by Americans for the Arts’ Animating Democracy program, gives public sector arts funders some food for thought about their roles. The report assembles a first-time portrait of arts funders, social change funders, and others in both private and public sectors that are funding civic engagement and social change through arts and cultural strategies. Local and state arts agencies comprised an impressive 48 percent of the 157 survey respondents that say they currently fund or plan to fund arts for change work; and they were in the top four categories of types of funders supporting this work (others included private foundations and nonprofits that make grants). In this still very much evolving arena of arts for social change philanthropy, the study finds local and state arts agencies are playing a role even though there are challenges and perceived risks.

In the world of arts and arts education advocacy, we sometimes forget that it’s not just the “arts” that are facing scrutiny and budget cuts.  The humanities are facing the budget ax as well, and not just at the elementary, middle, or high school level, but at the college level.  Recently, the State University of New York at Albany announced last month that it would cut programs in Russian, French, Italian, theater, and the classics due to budget constraint.  And it’s not just budget cuts that are the problem; since 1966, the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in the humanities has dropped from 17% to 8%.  Some might argue that there is no use in funding humanities departments if there’s no one majoring in those disciplines.  But as a history major, I can’t imagine a university without a French department, or theater, or languages, et al.  These aren’t just a huge part of history, in fact, they are history (no pun intended).  How can one study law without studying the classics?   Can you even hope to study foreign affairs without knowing another language?

Worried “that students won’t develop the kind of critical thinking, imagination, and empathy necessary to solve the most pressing problems facing future generations,” a group of college leaders is working to combat these cuts and the apathy that has built up toward humanities. I think this may be an uphill battle, though.  If this month’s election results are any indication, I can’t imagine funding for humanities at the university level (especially at state-supported schools) receiving anything but the same treatment the arts have received.  For me, it goes without saying that the long-term impact of cutting humanities programs at the university level will be devastating.  When even the best college students can only muster a D+ on a history test surveying topics from high school civics, there is cause to be alarmed.

Tim Mikulski

Dr. Jim Taylor, a psychologist who specializes in the areas of “business, sport, and parenting” and has also worked with a number of performing arts groups and individual artists over the years, recently published a blog post that takes a different approach to the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) movement in American education. Instead of turning STEM to STEAM to include the arts, Dr. Taylor makes a modification to the lovable acronym, changing it to STAMPER (science, technology, arts, math, physical, emotions, and reason).

How’s that for covering all of your bases?

In the post, Taylor says that he took engineering out of the equation, so to speak, because it is an “offspring of science, technology, and math” and he thinks the subject should remain in college and graduate programs, not in K-12 education.

Robert L. Lynch

Recently, Philanthropy News Digest spoke to Robert L. Lynch, president and CEO of Americans for the Arts, about the state of the arts in America, what arts and cultural organizations can and should be doing to weather the Great Recession, and what the digital future holds in store for artists, arts organizations, and all who support them.

Philanthropy News Digest: For many years now, arts groups around the country have been working to develop new, younger audiences while retaining their core, older supporters. How are they doing?

Robert Lynch: Some have done it very well, and others are struggling. To a large extent, it's about marketing. Performing arts organizations have a product, but audiences have a variety of interests and ways in which they can receive information. Arts organizations that understand that, that understand the needs of multiple audiences and either market or deliver their product in a variety of ways, are building audiences. The ones that rely on the product to sell itself are having more difficulty.

PND: Are particular art forms or disciplines doing better than others? Are symphonies doing better than dance companies, for example?

RL: It's too easy to generalize. But an example of an organization that has done a good job is the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. It has a variety of mechanisms, many of them based on new technologies, for reaching a range of audiences. Similarly, many theaters, including for-profit theaters, have diversified their performance times with an eye to an older audience. And though we read a lot about the graying audience for classical music, I don't know if that's universally true. A 2008 survey by the National Endowment for the Arts found what looks like fewer people attending performances, but when I look at our own National Arts Index I see a huge increase in the downloading of classical music. My colleagues at the League of American Orchestras also tell me they are seeing a lot of positive trending in their studies of audience development. So, while we read about certain art forms that may be in trouble, let's keep in mind how difficult the economy has been for the arts in general.

Students from Starting Artists

When I was 16 years old I desperately wanted to do something—something to express myself, something to make a difference. For me, that something became a fundraising calendar that I conceived of and photographed as a high school student and then again as a college student. I photographed portraits of internationally adopted children, worked with graphic designers to put them into a calendar and then sold the results to family, friends, teachers, community members and later at Barnes & Noble. The two calendars raised thousands of dollars to benefit international orphanages, including the Colombian orphanage I was adopted from at the age of three.

This project taught me that I could use both creativity and entrepreneurship to positively affect the world. Today, this is what I teach my students at Starting Artists, Inc. (SA). I founded SA in 2006 as a graduate student in the Program in Arts Administration at Columbia University Teachers College. I wanted to create a place where young people could use media arts and business skills to be just as artistic and innovative as I was at their age.

During the SA Afterschool Program, students learn the professional tools to make a statement—a statement about their lives, a statement about their communities, and a statement about their world. Through classes in photography, graphic design, printmaking, crafts, mixed media, video, animation, music mixing, and entrepreneurship students transform from passive media consumers into active media producers and catalysts for change.

Tim Mikulski

Having worked for a state legislative caucus and an individual legislator at the beginning of my career, it always amazes me that potential arts advocates feel that contacting local or state officials is either a difficult or frightening experience.

As arts education programs across the country continue to face uphill budget battles in individual school districts and even within schools, it is the perfect time to sit down with leaders at all levels to discuss the benefits of arts education and the good work that you do or witness others doing in your own communities.

Recently, I have been working on a new tool kit for our Keep the Arts in Public Schools Facebook Cause that provides teachers, students, and parents with a few easy steps for those groups to take to support arts education in their respective schools.

Here are the six easy steps that parents and teachers can take to affect change for arts education in their schools:

Lyndon Johnson signs into law the act that created the NEA

Today marks the 45^th anniversary of the National Endowment for the Arts as on September 29, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the law that created the cultural agency.  

 Here is a list of facts regarding the Endowment that they provided in honor of the event. For more information, visit http://www.nea.gov/news/news10/NEA-45.html.

A compendium of statistics on the National Endowment for the Arts on the occasion of its 45th Birthday

September 29, 2010

Total dollar amount of NEA grants awarded to nonprofit organizations
in 45-year history: $4 billion (>130,000 grants)ⁱ

Economic activity generated by the nonprofit arts sector Ueach yearU: $166 billionⁱⁱ

Number of cities participating in NEA's Mayor's Institutes on City Design since 1986: 600ⁱⁱⁱ

Average ratio of matching funds to NEA awards: 7:1^iv

Rate at which arts participants volunteer compared to non-participants: 2:1^v

Languages translated into English through NEA Literature Translation Fellowships:  61^vi

Tim Mikulski

On behalf of Americans for the Arts, I would like to thank all of our readers for stopping by to celebrate Arts in Education Week by reading all the posts of our fantastic bloggers throughout the week. Having organized two of these events now, I can say that the content is just getting better and better.

Here is just a sample of all of the topics covered by our intrepid bloggers this time around: national standards; research; technology & pedagogy; collaboration; assessment; innovation; advocacy; school districts/leadership; and reform.

But to put things into the complete perspective, I copied and pasted all of the blog posts into a word cloud website and came up with the words that were used the most in all of the posts (and unlike Wordle, Tagxedo even lets you pick the shape of your cloud).

The results showed that the words most often used in the posts were arts, education, school, programs, learning, students, teachers, and assessment.

To view the entire cloud, visit http://bit.ly/blogcloud.

However, our job isn’t over. Not by a long shot.

Enough pondering. On with our Arts Education Week party. To wit, let’s celebrate:

• Students first, last, and always as learners, advocates, and our guides to the future.
• Student learning in the arts that gives ownership and choice and therefore empowerment.
• Training programs for arts educators that embrace changing modes of learning, new technology, and other tools that teachers and students need to succeed in the twenty-first century.
• Seminars, workshops, and breakout sessions that always remember to add students to the butcher block paper checklist of stakeholders.
• Arts space architects and builders that understand the need for facilities to be safe, and simultaneously messy and orderly enough for creativity to thrive.
• Initiatives like the P21 Arts Framework that suggest the learning of skills beyond the arts discipline while supporting the core content of the domain itself.
• Thoughtful advocates who recognize there is no single strategy to “make the case” for an arts program before school boards, legislators, administrators, or parents.
• Collaborating arts educators who work to integrate the arts with other core subject areas in order to deepen their own and students’ understanding of the world we live in.
  Read More

Kim Dabbs

I joined our organization, Michigan Youth Arts four years ago.  When I stepped through the door, our organization was known best for the Michigan Youth Arts Festival, a comprehensive arts spectacular, culminating a nine-month search for the finest artistic talent in Michigan high schools. More than 250,000 students across the state are involved in the adjudication process that results in nearly 1,000 being invited to participate in the annual three-day event, held in May. It is here that these exceptional students in the arts gather together to explore, celebrate, and showcase their talent in multiple disciplines.  

This organization was built on collaboration. 

The 15 statewide arts education organizations consistently work together to provide this opportunity for students in Michigan for nearly 50 years now. When I would be asked if our organization collaborated, I could confidently answer, “YES!”

But was that enough? Was having collaboration be the rule in our organization enough for us to be highly effective and efficient and serve our constituents throughout the state?

Victoria Plettner-Saunders

I recently wrote a post for the California Alliance for Arts Education (CAAE) blog about What I Did on My Summer Vacation. My thesis there and here is that arts education advocacy doesn’t take a holiday just because the students do.

On a warm summer afternoon in July, I received an email from CAAE Policy Director Joe Landon about State Assembly Bill 2446 going from the Education Committee to the Senate Appropriations Committee. In a nutshell, if enacted, AB2446 would undermine access to arts education courses by allowing students to substitute Career Technical Education (CTEC) courses for current requirements in visual and performing arts or foreign language.

Up to this point, the CAAE had worked diligently to help policymakers understand that although trying to boost graduation rates by making it easier for students to meet the requirements with CTEC credits makes sense, using it as a replacement for arts education is not the answer. All the letter writing and testimony couldn’t make them change their minds and it was headed Appropriations.

Back to the early afternoon email from Joe.

Mark Slavkin

Arts for All: the Los Angeles County Regional Blueprint for Arts Education is working to strengthen arts education in the 81 school districts in our county. These districts enroll 1.7 million K-12 students - more than many states. The effort is "housed" at the County Arts Commission, with essential leadership from the County Office of Education and other key stakeholders.  None of this would be possible without the remarkable support of our Board of Supervisors.

As part of this effort, I was pleased to work with a retired superintendent, Ira Toibin, to produce a "Leadership Fellows" program for the superintendent, assistant superintendent for instruction, and arts coordinator from five of the participating school districts. We met over the course of a school year as a whole group, in job-alike sessions, and in site visits to each district. This work was made possible in part through a generous grant from the Wallace Foundation.

I want to share some of the lessons learned to help inform future advocacy at the school district level, as opposed to the school site or classroom.

Barry Shauck

Having a rigorous, stable, strong, sequential education in the arts just might be nationally valued as a fundamental right of all students in our democratic society if we move our advocacy efforts from addressing the broad value of programs, to telling stories about the developmental benefits for students who are engaged in learning languages of expression that are grounded in aural notation, movement, re-presentation, and the visual arts.

One of the factors that impacts our public dialogue about the role of the arts in American public schooling is deciding what is to be provided as a given public right and what is to be set aside as a private option. We enjoy the freedom of local jurisdiction, and we suffer the inconsistencies of arts programs delivery across the country, in part, as a result.

One method for linking the arts in America to public purposes for improvement of our democracy might be to ground studio teaching approaches for aesthetic and arts education to the development and life of the student. The visual arts contribute to the public democratic purpose of prosperity (Wyszomirski, 2000) far beyond the perceived contributions of work cast as the contributions of non-profit industries. Everyday, in America's schools, the best arts teachers practice a child-centered philosophy of self-discovery that educates for a vision of tomorrow and seeks to develop a consciousness of aesthetic form. Theirs is a philosophy that uses self-knowledge as the basis for building human relationships through art.

Heather Noonan

CD-ROMs are hardly considered cutting edge technology today, but back in 1998 they were still something of a novelty.  So it was considered pretty big news when the 1997 National Assessment of Educational Progress in the Arts (NAEP) was released that year by the U.S. Department of Education in hard-bound format, online, and on disc.  This breakthrough was necessitated by the advanced nature of the assessment itself, which went beyond fill-in-the-bubble measurements to include performance-based assessment of student knowledge and skills in the arts.  In addition to thumbing through pages of data analysis for the 1998 arts NAEP, readers could also view sample student work. 

As arts education advocates, we should reach back to this moment in time more than a decade ago and remind ourselves and policy leaders how much the arts have to offer in the current education reform discussions regarding assessment of student learning.  The 1997 NAEP was not just the most comprehensive assessment in the arts (far more robust that the 2008 assessment that followed) - the performance-based measures and reporting set a new standard for national assessments of other core academic subjects to follow.

Sarah Collins

In my previous post, I cited the dog-eared pages of my composition notebooks as the source of inspiration for my list of essential readings for 2010.

Each comp book is a creative space to pose tough questions and big dreams for my development as an arts education action agent.

And so I just came across a page from a late night brainstorm in February: ideas for the blog I never got around to writing. The ideas were actually just titles for prospective posts such as “The Art of Multivariate Regression Analysis,” “The Rebel Teacher as an American Folk Hero,” and my personal favorite “Jane Remer is Trying to Break My Heart.” While I don’t quite remember what Jane Remer had done to cause such heartache, the post-that-never-was provides a convenient (if not humorous) transition to my first entry in the second installment of my essential arts education reading list for 2010. 

From Lessons Learned to Local Action: Building Your Own Policies for Effective Arts Education, by Jane Remer. In the January 2010 issue of Arts Education Policy Review, Jane Remer unwraps over 40 years of experience to take a fresh look at the possible futures for arts education policy. While acknowledging the increasing federal and state role in our education system, Remer’s focus is on invention and implementation that are spurred by grassroots leadership. Based on lessons learned about effective arts education programs, we find an intellectual framework and action agenda for developing local policy at the classroom, school, or district level. While the article generated a number of questions for me, my reflections aren’t half as provocative as the questions Remer poses to her audience. Definitely an essential read.

Tim Mikulski

As I began writing this blog post, which is serving as both the regular weekly “Arts Canvas” piece for Arts Watch and as one of 29 blog entries that will make up our Arts in Education Week Blog Salon on ARTSBlog, I have my office door closed and my portable iPod speaker is quietly playing the music of an independent singer/songwriter who happens to be from my hometown in Southern New Jersey. It’s one of those days when I need help focusing and Matt Duke’s music is helping.

And that got me thinking about the influence that music has had on my life over the past 30 years. It just so happens that I just moved out of my twenties over the past weekend and I’m in a reflective mood.

If you don’t mind the indulgence, I’d like to leave the serious arts education policy discussions up to the very capable (and excellent) other arts education bloggers for the week and explore those thoughts.

Now… back to my original point.

All I have to do is hear the first few notes or words of a song on my iPod, on the radio, or even as part of the soundtrack of a movie, and I can be instantly transported back to a certain day or short period of time in my life. I’m sure it is the same for most of you.

Barry Shauck

On September 6, 2010, The New York Times published an article by the same name as this posting.  It discussed the ‘value-added’ approach to assessing teacher performance that is gaining a foothold in American education. This approach is based upon what students have learned in a certain period measured by what they were expected to learn in light of the speed of their past progress. Teacher evaluation at its best does more than ascribe to following a plan whether that plan is yearly, unit, or lesson. Teacher evaluation at its best recognizes and rewards surprises, deviations from plans in teaching and learning; rather than regarding surprise as a performance advantage. Such measurement and regard reduces students to commodities calculated in economic metrics on a quarterly basis.

Quality in education depends on what teachers can personalize - not on standardized performance. Leadership itself depends upon establishing fundamental relationships so that the best that teachers have to teach can be handed along to their students. If connoisseurship is used to draw a larger picture of a teacher’s qualities, the stories that a teacher has to tell to students, and the value that is added to the experience students take away from learning can be described in an artful and lasting way. There are no metrics or modular responses that are appropriate when connoisseurship is used to appraise teacher quality. Descriptive substitutes, plug-ins, or narratives describing the particular qualities of teaching cannot be interchanged from one modular phrase to another. The narrative of connoisseurship depends upon one’s abilities to discern particulars to school environments, situations, students, and teachers.

Sarah Collins

When I was first asked to participate in the Arts Education Blog Salon, I did what any good graduate student would do. I did a little background research. From the cinderblock depths of my basement office at the University of Oregon, I poured over posts from previous salons to get a better idea of what I was getting myself into. I was humbled before the collection of knowledge and experience shared here by some of the leading voices in the field of arts education. I was left wondering what I - knee deep in lit reviews and composition notebooks - could possibly contribute to the conversation.

Yet flipping through my comp books, I find reactions to journal articles, notes from conference sessions, URLs, call numbers, quotes, big ideas, and bigger questions. So that is where I begin, with an earnest curiosity, a student of arts and education policy. Reflecting on the dog-eared pages of the past year, recalling what has had the greatest impact on my understanding of this field, I present my essential arts education reading list for 2010: Part 1.

Laura Reeder

I have been reading and re-reading So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools by Chicago-based education reformer Charles Payne. In this book, he describes with kindness and clarity the cycle of good intentions that come into schools through professional development, curriculum design, and school improvement measures. Arts education advocates cannot possibly read this book without seeing our own efforts as part of what he describes as the “predictable failures of implementation” (p.153).

The heartfelt desire that we all have to improve education through the arts may shift when we pay closer attention to the struggles of literacy education, science education, technology education, etc. These topic groups have also formed advocacy and grassroots measures and campaigns to change the way we do school. Perhaps we should remember the words of Maxine Greene (2001) who said, “We are interested in education here, not in schooling.”

Are we advocating for school reform with our arts education campaigns or for education change?

Rachel Evans

When the pre-service theater teachers I advise do their final semester of student teaching, Kean University’s College of Education requires them to be observed leading one lesson that uses technology.  In the past, I have been known to say something like, “You don’t need to use real technology to fulfill this requirement. I’ll accept the stuff of theater as our technology.  That’s more important.”  I found myself encouraging the use of technical theater tools and theater design materials as acceptable substitutes for what the requirement was intended to encourage.

My philosophy, however, has forever shifted.  After participating in a self-designed summer of technology-based professional development, I’ve come to see how very wrong I was for justifying my own bias and shortcomings.  I see that this requirement is not only one of the most relevant student teaching mandates, but that blending technology and pedagogy should be guiding instructional design for more than one out of 75 days in the pre-service teacher’s classroom.

In my mind, the fact that my students were teaching theater was a legitimate “out”—that somehow the arts were exempt, immune to the craze of incorporating technology into lesson plans.  I realize how short sighted my justification was.

Zack Hayhurst

I recently returned from an extended stay in Cooperstown, New York. No, I wasn't there for the Baseball Hall of Fame, or the charming Amish handicrafts. Rather, I was there from mid-May through the end of August on an arts administration internship with the Glimmerglass Festival. Specifically, I worked with the Young American Artists Program (YAAP), and its phenomenal director, Michael Heaston.

When one thinks of upstate New York, first class opera typically isn't the first thing that comes to mind. Rolling hills, yes. Charming valleys and cool springs, sure. To some, it is the ideal reprieve from city life and a chance to reconnect with Mother Nature. For burgeoning young opera singers, interestingly enough, it is also an ideal opportunity for them to get away to a place where they can focus and refine their craft, and take their careers to the "next level. Glimmerglass Festival provides this environment.

I learned of the creation of National Arts in Education Week in the midst of working on the details of a master class to be facilitated by composers John Corigliano and Mark Adamo.  It immediately occurred to me that arts education typically has a certain connotation - that of art taught in K-12 classrooms and/or through the educational outreach programs of arts organizations. Seldom do we think of arts education in terms of furthering an artists' artistic and professional growth. Glimmerglass Opera's young artist program does exactly that.

John Abodeely

The KC’s got a couple great opportunities coming up to bring some national attention to your local community. We host two national competitions: One for schools and one for districts.

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Schools of Distinction in Arts Education awards highlight five schools annually that have developed exemplary arts education programs. Though we recognize the importance of federal, state, and local policy makers in providing arts education, this award recognizes of the role individual school leaders, educators, and communities play in providing a creative learning environment for outstanding student achievement. The award garners media attention for the winning school and for the nominating member of the Kennedy Center Alliance for Arts Education Network, and it comes with a $2,000 unrestricted cash award.

Laura Reeder

I have recently stepped from arts education advocacy into arts education academia after twenty years as a teaching artist and arts administrator. The advocacy work continues, but, I have been able to view it with a new perspective. The thing that has remained unchanged in this short step is my understanding about the role of the teaching artist in contemporary education.

In arts education advocacy, the compelling stories that we bring to policy makers almost always include an artist-educator (as one human being) or an artist-educator partnership. The teaching artist appears in our tales as a full-time educator in a school, as a visitor who sparks a new energy in the classroom, or as a community mentor who engages learners outside of the school setting. The teaching artist also appears in the halls of the legislature each year when we are lobbying for policy change.

In arts education academia, with the focus on individual students who will go out and become the great teachers and artists of the future, we recruit newcomers and increase endowments with glossy images and passionate speakers who each embody the seriousness of education with the rebel promise of creativity. The teaching artist also joins the campaigns for new programs and new funding when it is time to make institutional changes.

Victoria Saunders

I sat in an Americans for the Arts conference session in Baltimore this year and listened to a panelist state, “we don’t need to save arts education when eight-year-olds are making their own videos.” To that I say “cultural participation is NOT arts education.”

Just because a student is able to use computer software doesn’t mean he or she knows how to create a storyline, understand lighting and visual effects, include music that helps convey their story, etc. It’s like saying that I didn’t need arts education at that age because I could create cool pictures with my Lite-Brite!

I know this might sound smart-alecky, but it really is a concern of mine.

Young people these days have access to so many modes of creative production via computers as well as traditional tools. Parents are so proud of “Junior” because he can use the software.

But do they understand what an education in the arts really means?

Here in California our Visual and Performing Arts Content Standards include things like Artistic Perception; Historical and Cultural Context; and Aesthetic Valuing among others. If “Junior” was able to have standards-based arts education as part of his core learning, these things would be included in his lessons. By applying what he learns in class to the creation of his videos, his work would “pop” as they say.