ARTSblog

A colleague sent me this brilliant letter advocating for arts education. It uses financial, ethical, and socioeconomic arguments for retaining the Visual and Performing Arts office of the San Diego County Office of Education. And each point is research-based. As the sender noted, “I think it takes the cake for most inventive and well researched. ” Thanks to our tipster, Victoria, for keeping Americans for the Arts and our readers up-to-date.

May 31, 2009

Members of the Board:

In the face of unprecedented financial hardship, the Board of Education is charged with the unenviable task of meeting the needs of the public while concurrently addressing budgetary limitations. Given this economic climate, it is understood by all parties involved that concessions must be made in order to protect the integrity of the educational experiences provided to San Diego’s youth.

With this in mind, I must adamantly insist that the board not proceed in considering the elimination of the Visual and Performing Arts (VAPA) program. There are a number of grounds that suggest that the elimination of such a program from the district would prove to be both financially and educationally ill conceived.

The elimination of the Visual and Performing Arts Department will, according to district figures (i.e. the entire VAPA budget), save approximately $3.2 million dollars for the 2009-10 academic year. While the financial benefit of this will help meet the needs of the immediate budgetary constraints, the long-term effects of this decision will far outweigh the short-term benefits.

Read the rest of this entry »

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One of the session proposals that Americans for the Arts sent to Grantmakers in the Arts for their annual conference this October in Brooklyn, NY was about the future of Arts Education. Here’s a brief bit:

Future Forms of Arts Education

What are trends? What’s the next format? What arts education is relevant to kids versus relevant to arts administrators or teachers? Drawing on the most successful new programs, this session will illuminate now nonprofit arts education programs are empowering youth to be cultural creators to whom adult intervention is optional.

The stunning idea is that adults are optional. Kids learn and do without them and sometimes, unfortunately, in spite of them. With a computer, kids can create music, videos, and visual art. Internet platforms allow for global distribution. Folksonomies and comments become teachers, guides, and distributors, launching the most acclaimed photos, videos, or songs to the highest visibility. Read the rest of this entry »

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The following is an email letter sent to an indivdual quoted in a regional NY paper on the arts’ being of no value to prisoners in future employment efforts.

Dear Mr. Walker-

I would like to offer a perspective in response to the article “Inmate’s Show Won’t Go On” in the Times Herald-Record online, dated May 17, 2009. My hope is to illuminate the simple fact that the arts and arts education mean jobs.

The article notes that you called the prisoner’s original theatre piece “a blatant waste of manpower and funding.” It also noted that you asked, “How many of these medium-security convicts do you think will go to Broadway and get a job?” Fortunately, Americans for the Arts has conducted some research to answer your question. Read the rest of this entry »

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Given the abundance of crises and combustible situations we face, one would hardly blame the new administration if it moved slowly on the cultural front.  But there’s been something of an arts offensive in the last little while.  Last week, the President named a new chair of the National Endowment for the Arts and hosted the first spoken word performance at the White House featuring young poet-rappers.  Michelle Obama spoke passionately about the importance of the arts and arts education.  And I was lucky to be included in a delegation of about sixty-five people from around the country who were briefed by White House staff about the arts and cultural policy.  Remarkable. Read the rest of this entry »

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This week I attended a performance of Sweeny Todd staged and performed by my local High school drama department, Carlsbad High School, (in southern California).  When my neighbor informed me that the high school was embarking on Sweeny Todd, I immediately thought to myself, “what the heck is this high school drama teacher, Monica Hall, thinking?!” 

Sweeny Todd is a complex dark piece of musical theater and musically challenging, even for professional actors and singers. It’s not the kind of musical theater that one walks away from humming the songs.  Rather, it is more operatic, with dissonances and harmonies, flowing songs, and surprises.  The music is by Stephen Sondheim – a genius in my book.  Bottom line, and by any measure, add acting and choreography, set design, lighting design, technical design, a live orchestra, a production crew, fund raising, ticket sales, and advertising, and you’ve undertaken one heck of a big challenge.   Of course there’s also the issue of the content of the play – which is seriously dark and brutal, and ask high schoolers to make sense of it?! I don’t know. Read the rest of this entry »

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I am pleased to introduce myself as a guest blogger for Americans for the Arts.  I’m Merryl Goldberg, and I am a professor of Visual and Performing Arts at California State University San Marcos (near San Diego).  I run a Center dedicated to restoring arts back to education, Center ARTES, which in cooperation with the San Diego County Office of Education, is the recipient of a current Department of Education Arts in Education grant for DREAM (Developing Reading Education through Arts Methods).  I’m a professional musician having been on the road for 13 years with the Klezmer Conservatory band and still perform regularly.  My performance focus these days is on contemporary music, a little bit of klezmer and folk music.

I’ll be focusing on arts education in my blogs, and emphasizing my belief that it’s time to change our conversations about education as a whole.  I’ll be introducing a top ten list of challenges including reinvigorating the discussion of education with the notions of wonder, complexity, passion, risk, desire, application, confidence, and democracy, all of which I believe at the core of good art-making. Read the rest of this entry »

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There are a number of fantastic, city-wide projects for arts education taking place. The latest? San Antonio:

ARTS EDUCATION PROJECT DIRECTOR
The San Antonio Arts Education Task Force seeks an individual to manage, coordinate and administer the development of a comprehensive arts education blueprint for San Antonio.

Others include Seattle, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Baltimore.

Wallace commissioned one fantastic read from RAND Education on the topic, as well. I’ve used in it in the policy class I teach and, more so, to inform our work on supporting system-wide change for arts education through partnerships with education decision makers. I call them “EDMs.” EDM examples: parents, school boards, superintendents, principals, teacher unions, and others.

Did I miss a city? Did I not post a great resource for this work? Post it in the comments below.

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I found this article this week while compiling my Arts Education Weekly News email. Each Monday I slog through hundreds of Google News alerts, electronic newsletters, new research and other data. I’m lucky to have a job where knowing who is doing what when and how is part of the responsibility.

Art Education: It may take years to realize its value (by Louis Hoglund from Perham Enterprise Bulletin)

Our art room teacher wasn’t far from retirement. Lord knows, she deserved a permanent break from us–7th and 8th graders, especially us boys.

Despite our every effort to make her life miserable, Miss Rollefson continued to teach with an almost defiant passion.

For the first half of our eighth grade year, Miss Rollefson taught what was sort of an “art literature lite” class. We were taught a very general art history timeline, that progressed roughly from DiVinci’s “Mona Lisa” to Rembrandt to the French impressionists to Picasso.

She taught with all her heart, even as the inane, smart alec boys were snickering at the masterpieces portraying partially nude women.

Read the rest of the editorial here.

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Dear Keep the Arts In Public Schools members,

I’m asking those of you who can to assist me in the following way:

1. Share a memory of an Arts Teacher who helped shape or influence the person you are today.
2. Share a program or school that is successfully maintaining an Arts program despite all circumstances or conditions.
3. Share a regional vote or initiative with at least six weeks of preparation time that we can coordinate and mobilize around.

Thank you for leaving your comments below. Your passion is appreciated.

MacEwen

www.twitter.com/KAIPS

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On March 31, 2009, Arts Advocacy Day, Americans for the Arts gathered a panel of acclaimed artists and experts to call on Congress for continuing and additional support and funding for the arts and arts education in America.  This hearing, entitled “The Arts = Jobs,” focused on congressional support of strong public policies for the arts, appropriating increased public funding for the arts and supporting arts workers.  Josh Groban and Wynton Marsalis were among the artists who testified before a Congressional Committee to champion the benefits of arts and arts education.

Josh Groban – GRAMMY ® nominated singer-songwriter

Wynton Marsalis, World-renowned trumpeter,
composer and Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center

Play Your Part!
Add your voice to the growing list of arts advocates across the country by joining the Arts Action Fund.

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Why Americans for the Arts, a respected organization in the Humanities and Public Policy community is willing to let me speak my mind like this, I’ll never know. But, I can say, the minute I started taking risks with this topic, things started to happen.

A few months back I joined Keep the Arts In Public Schools, a cause on Facebook. I got pretty excited about maxing out that tool and came up with some ways to organize people around it. Its been extraordinary fun and I’ll touch on that in more depth as we go. Being invited to blog here is an enormous honor. I’m excited to document what happens when some passionate people push the edges of technology and the edges of caring to their limits. I’m uncontrollably enthusiastic about that.

Here’s what I see next. I’d like there to be no question about balanced education. The ancient Greeks lived in mud huts and perfected fine arts with the best of ancient civilizations. They also formalized much of the math our culture clings to today and left behind some of the most amazing architecture in history (a perfect blend of art and science). If they could get it, surely we can.

I’m not a total nutjob. To me, the purpose of understanding and affording arts education makes financial sense. When young people receive a balanced education, its been shown they are more productive, tend toward happiness and are creative problem-solvers. Strong civilizations are built on those foundations.

Dig around the site this post is on and you’ll bump into serious scientific research to back that up.

I’ll be using this space to showcase efforts that are really helping. I’ll introduce ways we are having impact in our communities. I’ll ask for feedback, ideas, help, guidance. I’ll collaborate with you here. And, I’ll learn as we go. With your help.

Looking back on the opening quote from the first part of this blog post, I remember the first time I saw, Stop Making Sense, the live concert movie featuring Talking Heads (and Tom Tom Club). I was with my Uncle Jay and best friend Tim at the (then) Plaza Theater in Petaluma, California.

When people still smoked and drank in movies. (Woah. Some things are way better now.) Anyway, I remember when it clicked. When the phrase oddly made ironic sense. There is such a freedom when we surrender and Stop Making Sense.

As with all aspects of our society, this year is big. We have a social climate demanding change. Our institutions have reached the completion of their missions and are asking to be redesigned using intuition and logic. Arts and Sciences together are the disciplines that allow our youth to constructively co-create a new version of the broken mess we’re rumbling around in now.

Here’s to getting there together.

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“Well, how did I get here?” David Byrne, Talking Heads, from the song, Once In A Lifetime

Looking back, I’m actually not sure. I know that I could draw some obvious conclusions, and that would make for a short introduction, but I’m tired of off-the-cuff. That’s not what got me here.

What got me here, on this page, was throwing away any resistance to taking a stand for the things that are important to me.

Let’s start, for the sake of getting to know one another, in that moment between youth and adulthood. Often known as college. Because that’s where education kicks in. Where individuation happens and the proving ground of every grade that came before shows up as internships on the resume, or the ability to connect with teachers and students and chance relationships with room mates who launch Napster, and… it’s where I got clear on the connection for me between Humanities and Science.

I graduated from High School with a reasonable GPA and a demonstrated interest in chemical and physical sciences. I don’t know if it’s because I liked the way atoms looked in my imagination, miniscule and unpredictable galaxies colliding at millions of nanometers apart. I could literally see them in my mind’s eye and calculate spins. Balancing chemical equations became second nature so maybe it was a deep appreciation for the zen-like balance that a well-done chemistry experiment shows up as on paper when it’s all said and done.

That stuff is pretty cool. Especially when you have a good teacher. And, in 1989, when Silicon Valley was not quite established, I attended San Jose State University where Next Computers (a company run by Steve Jobs now of Apple & Pixar) was plying their wares on the quad next to Amex and Spring Break in Cabo Bus Tours.

My SJSU professors (I don’t know if I ever actually saw them) weren’t anywhere near as committed to my success as I’d grown used to in High School. Labs were fun, but there no room for error, and my best learning method was trial and error.

So, alongside losing two grandfathers and being thrown out of the dorms for excessive and noisy creativity, I packed up my 0.08 GPA (not a typo) and moved ‘home’. (Never do this if you can help it. It’s against nature.) Read the rest of this entry »

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I’ve heard that your average museum patron looks at each painting for less than 2 seconds, a fact I cannot verify but which has held up anectdotally in nearly every gallery I’ve frequented…until recently.  I found the Arts Experience Initiative.

The research brief is actually quite entertaining as it weaves through history, painting a picture of engaged patrons that looks more like a sports bar than an arts event: “People came to the…gallery, and they talked to each other–before the show began, while the show was on and after the show ended. This was because the function of interpretation was understood as a cultural duty and a cultural right.”  Every person on a Pittsburgh City bus feels entitled to an opinion about the Steelers; when did the everyman lose interpretive authority w/ art?

As with all things theoretical, this whole idea didn’t sink in until I found myself smack in the middle of a practical application: an exhibit of egg pictures, to be precise.  For six weeks, I slipped down to a Southside gallery every Saturday morning for two hours w/ 8 other people, charged with the task of writing fiction in response the photographs.  The idea was, if you’re comfortable in one artistic genre (writing), then you’ll feel authorized to interpret another (photography) using the first. Read the rest of this entry »

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Every day it seems like another corporation is planning layoffs.  The employees who keep their jobs are often stressed, overworked and their morale is low.  Businesses are left wondering how they can get out of this recession when they are struggling to do more with fewer resources.  This is where the arts can play an important role by improving employee morale, encouraging creativity and, as a result, improving the bottom line.

U.S. employers rate creativity/innovation as one of the top five skills that will increase in importance in the next five years and they rank creativity/innovation as one of the top ten challenges they will face in the next ten years according to research from the Conference Board. CEOs view participation in the arts as one of the top indicators of employee creativity and innovation.  Whether it’s a performance in the workplace, an opportunity to volunteer at an arts festival, company tickets to a symphony or an employee art exhibition, the arts can stimulate innovation and creativity. Read the rest of this entry »

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The following is an open letter to the School Board and the Superintendent of San Diego Unified School District which is currently faced with the challenge of budget cuts.  The letter calls for bold leadership in decision making processes with an eye toward creating opportunity for students to become engaged members of society and future problem solvers.  The letter argues the arts and physical education are essential to an education for an engaged citizenry.

March 24, 2009

Dear School Board members and Superintendent Grier,

Opportunity is knocking loudly at your door, and you have the power to revolutionize education. No doubt these are truly tough times with regard to funding. At the same time, a significant transition is at our doorstep. In a recent editorial in the Union Tribune, County Superintendent Randy Ward called for flexibility in school funding. He is absolutely spot-on. Since the National Defense Education Act of 1958 (NDEA) (Public Law 85-864) put federal dollars toward discipline specific curriculum (science and math), and more recently the No Child Left Behind legislation which unintentionally emphasizes reading and math (because they are tested and test scores are tied to funding), educational priorities have shifted from preparing a knowledgeable and informed citizenry to an emphasis on student achievement.

It is no secret that our society desperately needs innovative and creative problem solvers. Educational leaders must respond to this need with bold initiatives which emphasize the teaching of innovation, community, and creativity along with discipline specific achievement. Education in all cultures has mirrored the needs of societies. I suggest we revolutionize education in the true sense, by returning to some of the core values upon which education in the US was created. For example, when Music was first introduced to the public schools in 1837, it was in concert with the overall goal of education of the time and it was aimed at educating children intellectually, morally, and physically. Read the rest of this entry »

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