Photograph by Joop de Graaff

What would happen if you enlisted some of the most prominent artists in the country to bring the arts into the classrooms of eight struggling schools? Got the White House, foundations, and leading arts advocates involved? Could you use this intensive injection of the arts to transform these schools into healthy learning communities? The Turnaround Arts initiative was created to road-test that proposition, and the results are encouraging enough to take the idea for another, longer spin.

Turnaround Arts is a whole-school initiative aimed at reforming the lowest-performing schools through intensive integration of arts and culture into classroom instruction and school life. Administered by Americans for the Arts and overseen by the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities (PCAH), an arm of the federal government, the initiative was implemented in eight schools around the country beginning in 2012 following a PCAH review of opportunities and challenges in the arts education field. The schools were competitively chosen on the strength of school leadership and commitment and staffing for arts education. However, all had received School Improvement Grants (SIGs) from the U.S. Department of Education, meaning that they were in the bottom 5% of performance in their state and were following strict reinvention plans.

The Turnaround Arts program is built on eight strategic pillars, which include development of a “strategic arts plan,” leadership from the principal and support from the school district and parents, at least forty-five minutes a week of dedicated arts instruction, integrating arts-based learning techniques into non-arts subjects, and collaboration with local arts groups. The design also features intensive and sustained involvement in the schools by high-profile artists, such as cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and leading regional arts organizations like the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Some of the program’s tactics are specific to arts education – such as the use of teaching artists and community arts organizations – while others add arts elements to more traditional school reform approaches. Turnaround Arts asks schools to consider the role of the arts in engaging parents, improving school infrastructure, and boosting the effectiveness of the administration’s leadership – and it trains non-arts classroom teachers to integrate arts throughout the curriculum, even in those darlings of reformers, literacy and math classes. Schools have considerable latitude in how exactly they implement the model, but the overall theory is that the arts shouldn’t be a bow pasted on education improvement or an occasional intervention in cordoned-off spaces; they should lie at the heart of how we help the schools and kids who struggle most.

So does it actually work? An evaluation published earlier this year suggests that it can. The evaluation team, comprising the University of Chicago’s Sara Ray Stoelinga, independent consultant Yael Silk, and two Booz Allen Hamilton consultants, uncovered early positive indications in the Turnaround Arts pilot, although the report speaks of “hopeful signs” and “potential” rather than an unqualified success.

Much of the report concentrates on describing the ways in which the eight pilot schools put the Turnaround Arts principles into practice. For example, the principal at Orchard Gardens school near Boston, MA, shook up the previous focus on “the 3 R’s” by alternating arts topics and traditional topics like reading and math during the school day. At Roosevelt Elementary in Connecticut, arts education coaches and arts teachers pulled non-arts teachers into professional development, which helped forge a cohesive faculty team at this struggling school. Findley Elementary in Iowa used interactive arts nights hosted by the school, with student performances, group dancing, and dinner in the classrooms, to increase parent and community involvement. Even at one of the most challenging pilot program sites, Lame Deer School on a Northern Cheyenne reservation, an exchange of performances at the school by Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble and Northern Cheyenne musicians reportedly thawed the frosty relationship between the tribal community and the State of Montana-run school.

All of these small victories seemed to help the pilot schools make progress towards fixing deep-seated problems such as disinterested students and mistrust of school officials. In perhaps the evaluation’s most notable result, test results show Turnaround Arts schools improving math and reading scores at higher rates than similar low-performing schools in the same regions. On average, from 2011 to 2014, the eight Turnaround Arts schools improved math and reading test scores by greater than six percentage points more than comparable schools that had also received School Improvement Grants. Teachers and administrators saw behavioral changes, too: in a 2014 survey, over three quarters reported reduced disruptions and more focused students. The Turnaround schools also reported modest increases in attendance and more robust decreases in disciplinary incidents, although the evaluation didn’t pull data from comparable schools. While there wasn’t a perfect relationship between school improvement scores and how faithful a given school was to the Turnaround Arts principles, the evaluation did find that the three of the four schools that came the closest to implementing Turnaround Arts – Orchard Gardens, Roosevelt, and Findley schools – demonstrated the best achievements.

Given those serious improvements, why isn’t every school Turningaround? For one thing, eight schools is obviously a small sample size. But two other issues beg caution. First, positive results may have been partly “built in” – that is, the Turnaround Arts process may have selected schools that were primed to succeed. After all, strong school leadership and a committed school district were criteria for selection into the program, and those conditions might have made the schools ripe for improvement even without the involvement of the arts. It is also possible that the excitement and attention of a big new idea for school reform, combined with the novelty of the project and involvement of celebrity figures like Yo-Yo Ma, was more responsible for motivating the schools and students to engage than the specifics of the Turnaround Arts recipe.

Even so, the promising results from two years of work make a strong case for expanding Turnaround Arts – and that’s exactly what’s happening: in May 2014, the program escalated from eight to 35 schools and is now active in 49. The larger version will reach more than 20,000 students, including preschoolers. As that expansion takes place, however, it’s vital that we don’t close the book on the program’s evaluation just yet, for at least two reasons. First, we need confidence that the outcomes in the initial report weren’t statistical flukes made possible by the small scale of the pilot. And second, we need to understand how the effectiveness of the Turnaround Arts method compares to other holistic school improvement strategies, such as Linked Learning.

What happens if you bring the arts into the classrooms of struggling schools? It turns out that it just might help some of our society’s most vulnerable kids learn to love learning and give them a better shot at leading healthy, happy, and fulfilled lives. If the early evidence holds up, that will be a story worth telling.

Metropolitan Opera House – Photo by Flickr user Zio Paolino, Creative Commons license

Never fear, Wagner lovers: the largest opera company in the US will open its season on time. Faced with what it called an unsustainable financial strain, management had threatened a lockout this fall if labor representatives refused to accept drastic pay cuts. In the end, General Manager Peter Gelb was able to secure the first pay cuts for the Met’s unionized employees in decades, but the cuts were by no means as deep as initially proposed. Singers and orchestra members agreed to a 3.5% pay cut, effective immediately, and an additional 3.5% cut in six months’ time. That’s a far cry from the 17% reduction that Gelb had previously sought, and will be partially offset by a 3% raise in the fourth year of the union’s contract.

From the standpoint of the larger nonprofit arts field, the most significant part of the deal is a clause that allows an independent financial analyst to monitor the financial management of the organization on behalf of the employees. Experts claim this highly unusual provision could have ripple effects throughout the industry. This agreement came about when the unions, faced with the drastic cuts proposed by Gelb, developed a list of alternative cost-saving measures. While the management didn’t adopt those proposals outright, it agreed to let the employees have a say in how the overall savings are achieved.

California turns to tax breaks to reassert film industry dominance
Just as North Carolina decides to follow the examples of Michigan and New Mexico by scaling back its support of the motion picture industry, California is doubling down (actually, tripling down) on its incentives in an attempt to keep Hollywood productions in Hollywood. Governor Brown and the state Legislature have expanded California’s tax credit program from $100 million to $330 million per year. While the ability of film tax incentives to increase employment and stimulate the economy remains highly questionable (as previously discussed here at Createquity), California lawmakers have described the expanded tax program as a demonstration of their commitment to the film industry. California may indeed be in a somewhat different position than most other states in that a lot of film industry professionals are based in and around Los Angeles and would presumably prefer to work closer to home if the production costs, which can be significantly reduced by tax incentives, are roughly on par with other states.

International cultural agencies shake things up
The Australia Council for the Arts has announced what it’s billing as the most sweeping overhaul of its grant programs in 40 years in order to make them more inclusive and reduce the administrative burden on applicants. Each of the newly created funding categories will be open to artists of all areas of practice and applicants will be able to choose which discipline’s peer panel they want to assess their application. Meanwhile in the UK, the Arts Council England has rebalanced its portfolio of funded organizations to direct more funding to organizations outside of London at the expense of such venerable institutions as the English National Opera. Nevertheless, critics say the plan to devote 53% of the Arts Council’s budget to regions outside of London (up from 49%) doesn’t go far enough. Finally, the French Minister of Culture, Aurélie Filippetti, has resigned in protest of austerity measures that led to cuts in her Ministries budget. She will be replaced by Korean-born Fleur Pellerin.

New foundation to support American classical composers
The Chicago music critic Lawrence A. Johnson has launched a nonprofit foundation that will provide grants to ensembles and presenters that perform American classical music and commission new works by American composers. The American Music Project is still in the early stages of fundraising, but it’s already commissioned its first new work and is set to start awarding grants for the 2015-16 season. Johnson hopes to have raised $500,000 by next spring and eventually establish a standing endowment of $1 million. There’s no word yet on the size of the grants that will be doled for performances of rarely heard American works or how many organizations will be supported each year. While some might question the need for another nonprofit dedicated to classical music, Mike Scutari argues that the American Music Project will fill a gap in current support mechanisms with its focus on increasing the breadth of the American repertoire featured in concert halls around the country.

Corbett Foundation closing
Cincinnati’s Corbett Foundation, which has provided more than $70 million to arts and education nonprofits in Ohio and Kentucky since 1955, is finally closing its doors. The dissolution of the foundation has been planned for years; indeed, it was never intended to persist beyond the founders’ lifetimes. Explaining why it took until now to wrap things up after Patricia Corbett’s death in 2008, Executive Director Karen McKim said in effect that rising markets had foiled plans to spend down the foundation’s funds despite best efforts.

MUSICAL CHAIRS/COOL JOBS

• The Pittsburgh Foundation has announced its new president & CEO, Maxwell King.
• The National Association of Media Arts and Culture has a new executive director, Wendy Levy.
• The Center for Cultural Innovation’s board chair Angie Kim has been appointed interim leader as the organization’s search for its next President & CEO continues.
• Oregon Cultural Trust has hired Brian Rogers as executive director.
• Grantmakesr in the Arts has chosen Jim McDonald to be its new deputy director and director of programs, replacing the retiring Tommer Peterson.
• ArtWorks, an art therapy service provider in New York & New Jersey, is looking for an executive director. Posted August 15, no closing date.
• National Network of Consultants to Grantmakers seeks a project director; work virtually. Salary: $30-35k for 20 hrs/wk.
• McLean Project for the Arts (DC area) is in the market for an executive director. Salary: $55-70k. Posted August 6, no closing date.
• The Boston Globe is seeking an arts reporter. Posted August 21, no closing date.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• Research on the effects of video games is booming; much is unknown, but apparently Grand Theft Auto promotes bad behavior in real life and playing Voldemort makes you evil. But it’s not just video games: watching reality TV can make you a worse person, too.
• Rhetoric about a “universal language” aside, it turns out that about 3% of people just don’t like music at all, and they’re amazingly not monsters.
• A new study finds that true stories aren’t any more emotionally resonant than fictional ones, despite expectations to the contrary.
• Hollywood still lags behind in diversity. According to a new study, whites had 74% of the movie roles despite making up only 64% of the population.
• A Kennedy Center evaluation found that 4th- and 5th-graders in arts integrated classes displayed more creativity and better problem-solving skills than peers.
• A college-aged mathematician has put together a linear regression model predicting the length of Broadway show runs.

• Glenn Beck is at it again: the right-wing broadcaster recently attacked the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture along with the Imagining America initiative on his Internet show, The Blaze. Far from a government agency, the USDAC is a “citizen-powered” art project that hasn’t received any public funding to date. Not one to be deterred by facts, Beck claims the two groups are “America’s newest propaganda machine” attempting to “rewrite our history.”
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art has signed a new lease with the city of New York that clarifies the museum is allowed to charge a suggested admissions fee, and added fees for special exhibitions. A lawsuit filed earlier this year alleged that the Met’s previous lease with the city required the museum to be free to the public five days a week.
• Cultural policy researchers in England are crying foul over Arts Council England’s “long-standing bias” toward organizations based in London, which receive a whopping 82% of funding, and asking it be redistributed proportionally to the population across the country.
• A number of theaters in upstate New York are concerned about the possible opening of several casinos in the area and the potential impact on booking major performers and retaining audiences. The advocacy group Upstate Theaters for a Fair Game is seeking protections from the state to “‘establish a fair and reasonable partnership” between the casinos and the local market.

IN THE FIELD

• The Museum of Modern Art sure is committed to staying on top of digital trends in education: it jumped on the MOOC train early, and now has a new partnership with Khan Academy.
• Two Latino theater companies in New York, Pregones Theater and the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, are getting set to merge with the help of Time Warner and the Ford Foundation. The two performing ensembles will retain their original names under the new organization, but will share resources.
• The Theater for a New Audience has moved into its first permanent home after spending the last 34 years producing shows in a variety of rented spaces around Manhattan. City planners view the completion of the newly constructed theater as “the capstone” to a downtown Brooklyn cultural district long in the making.
• What’s going on with the Brooklyn Philharmonic? The NYC-area orchestra made a splash back in 2011 with a daring programming strategy focused on marrying classical music with other more widely popular genres as well as local composers and artists. But all the positive press and attention the new direction received apparently wasn’t enough to stanch the organization’s financial bleeding.
• While the debate rages on over whether Spotify is good or bad for musicians, YouTube muscles in on its territory by planning a subscription service that would give users on-demand, ad-free access to music videos on their mobile phones.
• Musicians of the Charleston Symphony Orchestra recently voted to break from their local union chapter of the American Federation of Musicians in an unprecedented industry move. The decision was reportedly motivated in part by the “understanding that to be successful as an orchestra in the future, [they] need more flexibility, they need to be nimble, and…unions sometimes get in the way of that.”

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• With 71 percent of projects getting funded (compared to the 43 percent average), the dance community boasts the highest proportion of successful Kickstarter campaigns. Theater clocks in at second place with a 64 percent success rate.  Is this evidence that arts orgs are reaching new supporters – or just swapping money back and forth between their friends?
• Pop quiz: which nonprofit group has successfully  “reduc[ed] its reliance on foundation funding, buil[t] new revenue sources” and is “constantly experimenting and challenging assumptions around who their audience is and what they care about”? Nope, not the arts — nonprofit news outlets.

BIG IDEAS

• Barry Hessenius’s Arts Dinner-vention has wrapped, and the edited video has been posted in seven installments; GIA collects them all on one convenient page. The conversation among some of the leading lights of arts administration explores ideas for the future across three areas: the role of the community, new format and delivery mechanisms, and the artist’s role and artist ecosystems.
• Say you didn’t require a project budget as part of that RFP. What’s the worst that could happen? Michelle Williams calls for grantmakers to trust the artists we work with, and she catalogues some innovative ideas from the GIA 2013 conference.
• Scott Walters has a new blog series examining the history of the regional theater movement by riffing on Todd London’s An Ideal Theater: Founding Visions of a New American Art. London, incidentally, delivered what reads like a doozy of a talk on innovation at the recent National Innovation Summit for Arts + Culture.
• Michael Kaiser’s latest book, The Cycle: A Practical Approach to Managing Arts Organizations takes an optimistic look at the difficult and delicate task of building an arts organization that is effective and strong enough to last.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The National Endowment for the Arts is offering a $30,000 prize for an interactive application that will “make the rich content of the 2012 [Survey of Public Participation in the Arts] more accessible to the public through a series of interactive, visually appealing, and easy-to-use data visualization tools.” Submissions are due February 3.
• A new study by On the Move examines how European cities support “cultural mobility” – the ease with which artists and cultural professionals engage outside their home region.
• In an effort to increase both convenience and access to data on the nonprofit sector, major players Guidestar and the Foundation Center have entered into a strategic partnership meant to “support the field in new and innovative ways.”
• The Whole Schools Initiative in Mississippi reports that 5,000+ students participating in an arts integration program performed significantly better on fourth and fifth grade state assessments than their peers.
• For its Arts, Culture and Audiences week, the American Evaluation Association highlighted assessment practices in arts education with a series of blog posts stressing that assessments can be “hands-on, active learning experiences for students.”
• York University and the National Ballet School in Toronto are partnering to conduct a pilot study with the hopes of providing scientific evidence of the positive mental and physical effects of dance on people with Parkinson’s disease.
• Grantmakers in the Arts’s ongoing research into support for individual artists has generated a crop of admirably detailed case studies of how a nonprofit grantmaker, state agency, private foundation, and family foundation select recipients for their awards to individuals.