Americans for the Arts

Victoria Plettner-Saunders

As Chair of the Arts Education Council of Americans for the Arts, I’d like to welcome you to the first Arts Education Blog Salon of 2011.

There are always so many things to learn from our colleagues as we share blog posts and commentary on a particular theme for one full week.

I hope you have time to return to the Salon several times throughout the week (and again after it ends on Friday) and post your own thoughts or questions as they arise.

I also wanted to take this opportunity to share with you a little bit about the Arts Education Council and what our agenda for 2011 looks like.

This past January, the council met to plan its annual agenda. With a renewed focus on supporting members at the local level, we developed a rather ambitious set of activities for the year around five main themes (some of which were the result of the council’s Trends Report that has been developed over the past two years).  

Clayton Lord

There are a lot of posts coming in about advocacy and arts education, and many of them are both hopeful and cautious about what's happening now in the world.

It's good to see such optimism, especially given that we face mighty opposition to the very basic value of what we do and make, but it seems to fly against what I see as a burgeoning reality in America.

Starting in the mid 1980s, on the tail of the passage of Prop 13 in California, the public at large started to make a demonstrable shift away from valuing the arts.

The number of eighteen-year-olds claiming to have received any arts education has declined, and precipitously, every year since 1985.

This isn't new info, and it probably has been rehashed better than I could in many other blogs across the ether, but while we sit here taking pride in our new data on our value, we are up against a mightily fractured world being run by a series of generations who have, by and large, had little or no sustained education in (or using) the arts, and who consequently are acting like people that don't care about a looming loss simply because that loss has never been personally felt.

It's a hard place to find ourselves in, a shrinking minority in a country with very little love for something that has been framed (by both them and us) as a luxury, a "want" instead of a "need."    

Merryl Goldberg

The film Race to Nowhere is a provocative entrance into a conversation about educational reform and, in my role as Chair and Professor of the Visual and Performing Arts as California State University San Marcos, I've been invited by local PTAs to comment on the film and begin a dialogue with teachers, parents, and school administrators.

I've created a top ten list in response to the film and to what I see as core needs in schools. In embarking on a path to student success, I suggest reinvigorating curriculum development and policy with the following:

1.    Wonder – Wonder sets the stage for learning. Children (indeed all of us) have an innate ability to imagine and create – all of which starts with wonder. Scientists, mathematicians, and artists are wonderful role models for the act of wondering and the arts cultivate wonder – engaging us, both as creators and as audience members.

Kathi R. Levin

In today’s struggling economy, there is renewed emphasis on the importance of creativity and innovation. Most of us in the arts automatically think of creativity and innovation as essential to our “brand” and they are.

But, “ownership” of creativity and innovation in today’s evolving worlds of social media communication, a shifting economy, and the global marketplace also feels like “code” for successful entrepreneurism.

In the education sector, where there is a clear federal emphasis on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) creativity and innovation relate to these fields, with examples of American ingenuity drawn from NASA, the automotive industry, and other technological developments of the 20th century. We cannot be sure that when people speak about creativity and innovation that they have even considered, let alone are thinking about, the arts.

According to a 2008 report from the Conference Board, there is overwhelming consensus from superintendents (98 percent) and corporate leaders (96 percent) that “creativity is of increasing importance to the U.S. workforce.” Of those corporate respondents looking for creative people, 85 percent said they were having difficulty finding qualified applicants with the creative characteristics they desired.

Clayton Lord

Last week, arts advocate Arlene Goldbard spoke at the Association of Performing Arts Service Organizations conference in Austin. Goldbard believes we need to start using a more empowered (and less-numbers-based) vocabulary for arguing for the value of the arts. At one point she said this:

"The best argument for arts education is that children today practice endlessly interacting with machines, developing a certain type of cognitive facility. But without the opportunity that arts education affords to face human stories in all their diversity and particularity, to experience emotional responses in a safe space and rehearse one's reactions, to feel compassion and imagine alternative worlds, their emotional and moral development will never keep pace."

Later, she noted:

"Students today are preparing for jobs and social roles that have not even been imagined yet. They cannot be trained in the narrow sense for jobs that do not yet exist."

Goldbard argued that arts education, with its ability to instill social skills, empathy, intellectual development, critical thinking, etc., would allow students today more flexibility as those as-yet-unknown jobs and roles revealed themselves over time.

Joan Weber

As part of my pledge to Testify for Arts Education, I showed up at the Carroll County (MD) Board of Education meeting on March 9.

The room was full, as the board had recently released its preliminary budget. There were many people in the room who were there to protest cuts to school staffs, including nurse’s aids, teaching assistants and paraprofessionals.

They all wore printed labels saying “Together We Can Make a Difference.” They also all wore band-aids because, as they said, “Our hearts are broken.”

I was worried. I hadn’t brought anyone with me. (Note to self: Next time, bring people with me.)

I was sure that all these people would use the “Citizen Participation” time and my message of arts education would be lost. But, the agenda of the board was clearly divided between citizen participation and employee groups.

There were only two names on the Citizen Participation speakers’ list: mine and the chair of a parents’ group. (Note to self: Next time, bring lots of people with me.)

When my name was called, I went to the podium and delivered my prepared remarks. I spoke about an expanded definition of arts education, one in which the school system recognized the importance of arts specialists, teaching artists, and arts institutions.