Art smarts

Lessons learned about investing in a well-rounded education

People have a high regard for the arts, whatever the medium. From sculpture and painting to the written word to performance and beyond, the arts help define us, both as individuals and as a society.

They touch our lives in some form every day, influencing us in ways we perhaps cannot always see or consciously sense.  They give meaning to our lives and distract us from our problems.

And yet a strange dichotomy exists within our society, where the arts are paid rhetorical respect even when they are not always adequately funded. Nowhere is the divide more acute than in our schools, where impressionable young minds are open to aesthetic possibilities and yearning for an outlet for their burgeoning expression of individuality and identity—but where time and money for arts programs can be in perilously short supply.

“Arts education gets a lot of lip service,” says Susan Stauter, artistic director of San Francisco Unified School District. “The problem comes when you look at actual budgets and schedules.”

What Stauter is talking about is the widely held perception that, whatever its intrinsic value, arts education is stifled by the dry atmosphere of today’s results-oriented drive for core educational achievement. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, for example, esteems the arts as a “core academic subject,” putting them on a par with math or language; but the act doesn’t actually require states or districts to evaluate their students’ artistic abilities in the coin of the realm under NCLB—standardized tests.

“Many people consider testing to be the litmus of whether a subject is important,” notes Dr. Kathy Kinley, president of the California School Boards Association. “The arts aren’t generally tested. They’re considered to be discretionary.”

Indeed, arts education is typically one of the first subjects cut or eliminated in difficult times. “News stories portray arts education as easily traded off in an era of cash-strapped school districts and an increasing focus on standardized testing,” declared a 2005 study by the Education Commission of the States. That’s particularly worrisome, the study’s authors said, because “while the arts are not portrayed by the media in a negative light, the media [do] reinforce a sense of the inevitability of their disappearance.”

Of course, the media could be wrong.

In fact, arts education in public schools seems to be enjoying something of a revival in California, if not yet a full-blown renaissance. Throughout the state, numerous cities and school districts are reinvigorating or reinventing their arts education programs.

Some of these efforts are homegrown. The most dramatic of those may be in San Francisco, where a local ballot initiative approved by voters in 2004 kicked in this year. Proposition H provides more than $50 million over the next seven years to improve and expand arts education in city schools.

“It makes you proud to be a San Franciscan,” Stauter crows.

But every school district in the state is benefiting from at least a small windfall in arts education funding. Recent legislation led to the disbursement this year of a half-billion dollars in one-time grants for arts, music and physical education equipment and supplies; another $105 million for program development, staffing and training, and supplies is now available annually through the Arts and Music Block Grant. In both cases, the grants come with no strings attached; they are based solely on student enrollment, allocating about $83 per pupil for the one-time grant money and $16 per pupil for the ongoing grants.

Almost 10,000 schools in the state have received money from the $500 million one-time grant. Funding from the $105 million annual grant program has ranged from $3,000 to individual schools to $8.4 million to the 710,000-student Los Angeles Unified School District, the largest in the state.

“It’s historic legislation, a step forward,” says Penelope Venola, president of the California Arts Education Association, a Bakersfield-based advocacy group consisting of arts educators in pre-kindergarten through college.

A step forward is one thing; Putting one’s best foot forward is—or can be—something else. The California Arts Project, a state program intended to promote and enhance the teaching of the arts in public schools, has a resource to help local educational agencies do just that. Its Maximizing New Resources Block Grant Web site (http://csmp.ucop.edu/tcap//maximizingnewresources) allows users to share and compare information on how schools and districts are putting the new funds to use.

“For [some] districts,” points out Kristine Alexander, TCAP’s executive director, “this is a brand new thing to talk about.”

It’s also not a moment too soon.

Earlier this year, the independent and respected research institute SRI International published “An Unfinished Canvas,” the first comprehensive evaluation of the status of K-12 arts education in California public schools. The study comprises a survey of 1,800 randomly selected schools; an analysis of statewide databases; a review of relevant public policy and literature; and case studies of 13 districts. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation commissioned the study, with support from the Ford Foundation.

The findings are cause for concern: For example, 29 percent of California’s schools lack a course of study in any of the four arts disciplines—music, visual arts, theater and dance—that is based on state standards (although they may offer courses not aligned with those standards), and 89 percent fall short of the state’s goal to offer a standards-based course of study in all four disciplines. The study also reports that California lags behind the national average in hours of arts instruction.

“An Unfinished Canvas” echoes earlier reports. In 2004, for example, a survey of music education in California public schools reported that while the state’s total student population had increased by 5.8 percent between 1999 and 2004, the percentage of students enrolled in music education courses declined by almost 50 percent—the sharpest drop in any academic subject area. The number of music teachers employed by districts dropped by more than 26 percent.

Arts education supporters and advocates lament such statistics, especially in light of what they see as overwhelming evidence of the value of the arts in educating the whole child.

Art’s effect on learning

“High-quality, sequential arts education does more than help develop a sustained interest in the arts,” asserts Moy Eng, director of the performing arts division at the Hewlett Foundation. “It fosters the ability of our students to think in new and creative ways.”

And there’s documentation to prove it. In 2002, the Arts Education Partnership, a national coalition of arts, education, business, philanthropic and government organizations, released a report based on an analysis of 62 previous studies of various categories of art by almost 100 different researchers. It was the first study to combine all of the arts and make comparisons with academic achievement, performance on standardized tests, and improvements in social skills and student motivation.

The AEP report concluded that schoolchildren who are exposed to dance, music, theater and the visual arts appear to better master reading, writing and math than those who simply focus on the basic curriculum.

James Catterall, an education professor at UCLA who coordinated the AEP study, catalogs how each of the arts provide specific educational benefits:

• Music improves spatial-temporal reasoning.

• Drama hones one’s understanding of
narrative and human behavior.

• Dance teaches persistence and contributes to increased self-confidence and group social development.

• The visual arts help students see the world in new and different ways.

“The most expansive areas where the arts pay off are these,” writes Catterall: “First, in basic reading skills, language development and writing skills. Increases in general academic skills also show up and would appear to reinforce these specific literacy-related developments. Here we refer to focus and concentration, skills in expression, persistence, imagination, creativity and inclinations to tackle problems with zeal.

“These are the sorts of skills and behaviors that, in their absence, parents and teachers have been seen to tear their hair out: positive social behavior, social compliance, collaboration with others, ability to express emotions, courtesy, tolerance, conflict resolution skills and attention to moral development.”

To be sure, not everyone entirely buys into the “arts make you smarter” mantra. In 2000, Ellen Winner, a professor of psychology at Boston College and Lois Hetland, an associate professor of art education at the Massachusetts College of Art, published a controversial study that concluded that arts classes do not significantly, quantifiably improve students’ overall academic performance. There may be correlation, they said, but that’s not a cause. Playing the clarinet doesn’t mean a kid is going to do better in math.

Their report provoked outrage among arts education supporters like Catterall, but Winner and Hetland insist they are, in fact, ardent supporters of arts education—for its own sake. In a new study, Winner finds that arts programs teach thinking skills rarely addressed elsewhere in the curriculum.

“Such skills include visual-spatial abilities, reflection, self-criticism and the willingness to experiment and learn from mistakes,” according to Winner. “All are important to numerous careers, but are widely ignored by today’s standardized tests.”

On that point, Winner and Hetland join the chorus of other arts education advocates, all of whom believe arts education may finally be emerging from what San Francisco USD’s Stauter calls “a time of great scarcity and the triumph of testing.”

“With the new brain sciences showing the importance of engagement—something the arts do—being a key piece of the learning process, we have a new window of opportunity,” Stauter says. “Arts can now be used as a point of engagement for academics, a way to move farther and deeper.”

Farther and deeper doesn’t mean fast or easy. Real success in anchoring the arts in the schools will take time. Some of the hard work has already been done, though. The California Education Code, for example, already mandates arts education in grades K-12. The state’s Board of Education adopted a Visual and Performing Arts Framework for that Ed Code requirement in 2004, describing specific content standards and goals for each grade, encouraging professional development and promoting arts education as a key to educating the whole student.

2 county office models

Few districts will be able to emulate San Francisco’s multimillion-dollar Arts Education Master Plan, but every district can draw on the resources of its county office of education. Two of the best can be found on the south coast, where the Los Angeles COE is in the fifth year of a 10-year strategic plan to revitalize the arts in the area’s 80 school districts (which serve nearly 1.7 million students—more than a quarter of the state’s total enrollment), and the Orange County office has rolled out an arts advocacy program called “Arts Advantage.”

Currently, 27 districts are involved in Los Angeles County’s “Arts for All” plan, which requires districts to:

• adopt specific board policies promoting arts education

• establish an implementation plan and timeline

• hire a district-level arts coordinator

• allocate 5 percent of the district budget to arts education

• meet a minimum 400-to-1 ratio of students to credentialed arts teachers

“When we started, we surveyed almost every superintendent in the county,” notes Ayanna Higgins, director of arts education and community development for the Los Angeles Arts Commission, which oversees the Arts for All plan. “They all said they believed arts education was important, which told us that our first battle was already won. The bigger challenge has been infrastructure. Despite all of the professed support, [many] districts lack concrete policies and plans regarding the arts, they lack key leaders and staffing. If you can help them get those, the rest takes off.”

Higgins says funding to provide support and professional coaching to participating districts comes from local public agencies, foundations and business—especially the region’s expansive entertainment industry.

Something similar is happening in Orange County, where the Arts Advantage program has 15 of the county’s 27 school districts participating. Jim Thomas, coordinator of visual and performing arts for the OCOE, says the program focuses on helping school districts develop strategic plans and leadership skills for improving and expanding their arts curricula. Arts Advantage includes training for principals and administrators; linking district arts coordinators in a collaborative network; and cultivating relationships between art venues, such as museums, theaters and galleries, and schools.

“Just giving people drawing paper and supplies doesn’t change anything,” Thomas says. “In Orange County, we want more. Our students deserve more.”

‘Creativity critical to everything’

“Education must aim for far more than mastery of the basics, far more than the possession of tools for economic competitiveness,” historian Diane Ravitch told a gathering of more than 200 educators, business leaders and policy-makers pondering the nature of public education in the 21st century this year in Washington, D.C.

“Certainly, it should aim for enough [content] for an examined life, enough for civic virtue, and enough for those mental habits that incline one to think, to read, to listen, to discuss, to feel just a bit uncertain about one’s opinions, and to love learning.”

The arts engender all of those things, and more.

“Something is changing in the world,” says SFUSD’s Stauter. “There’s a new understanding of how creativity is critical to everything, including our economic survival. It’s the responsibility of educators, of us all, to make sure that every kid is exposed to the arts, that they get their shot at being creative because—who knows—the person who cures something like cancer will probably be somebody who thinks like an artist.”

Scott LaFee is a contributing writer for California Schools.