Cables in the Sky – photo by flickr user Crodriguesc

Fourteen months after Comcast announced it would take over Time Warner Cable in February 2014, the $45 billion deal — which would have resulted in a mega-company controlling almost 60% of the broadband market and just under 30% of pay television — is dead. The takeover faced strong opposition from the outset: Netflix, Democratic senators including All Franken and Elizabeth Warren, and 56% of the general American public, among many others, expressed concerns that a bigger Comcast would have too much control over what Americans can do online or watch on TV. Even so, the merger had seemed inevitable until quite recently. First, the FCC issued a “hearing designation order” on April 22, a move that put the merger’s outcome in the hands of an administrative law judge and was seen by all as strong indication that the FCC did not see the deal as being in the public’s interest. After antitrust attorneys for the DOJ — in a conceptual shift — indicated they were prepared to block the deal, Comcast folded. The end came at a price: Comcast reportedly spent $336 million on “transaction-related costs,” and Time Warner another $219 million. Time Warner, for its part, seems to have wasted no time in jumping into bed with a new partner, rekindling merger talks with Charter Communications Inc.

New York City Catches Up With the Times, Orders a Cultural Plan: New York City’s dubious designation of being the only one of the country’s top ten municipalities without a cultural plan is slated to end. The majority-Democrat city council unanimously passed legislation to develop a comprehensive cultural plan this month. The law, introduced in August 2013, tasks the Department of Cultural Affairs with surveying the city’s five boroughs, and establishing a strategy to both meet the specified cultural needs of each community, increase cultural activity and economic impact citywide – all by July 1, 2017. To start, the DCA will establish a Citizens’ Advisory Committee, made up of at least 12 members from diverse cultural and geographic backgrounds, to assist it in soliciting  feedback from citizens and implementing the plan. Meanwhile, in neighboring Boston, recently-elected Mayor Marty Walsh announced the details of his own $1.4 million cultural planning initiative. To start: an eighteen-month survey, nicknamed #BostonCreates, that will look at how different neighborhoods and their citizens define arts and culture.

Small Steps Forward for Arts Education at the Federal Level: This month the Senate’s new draft of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (popularly known as the No Child Left Behind Act) added writing and music to the list of disciplines it defines as “core academic subjects”. (The previous list had included the more general “arts” along with both “English” and “reading or language arts,” but did not explicitly break out writing and music as separate subjects.) In addition, although the bill does not scale back testing requirements, it includes several progressive components, including the clarification that Title I funds can be used for arts education and more holistic language throughout that implies a reduced emphasis on math, science, and language arts. The bill, introduced by Sens. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and Patty Murray, D-Wash., and dubbed the “Every Child Achieves Act of 2015,” was approved 22-0 by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee in mid-April. Though this is the third time the Senate has tried to reauthorize ESEA in the last several years, it is a positive step towards reauthorizing a bill first introduced in 1965.

LA’s 99-Seat Theaters Ordered to Pay Up: The people spoke, but the Actors Equity Association did not listen. Earlier this month, the AEA ordered small theaters in LA County (that’s theaters with fewer than 100 seats) to pay its actors a $9 hourly minimum wage. The decision came even after the Los Angeles AEA membership — some 3,000 people strong — voted 65.5% to 34.4% against adopting the new wages. In 1987, the AEA formally adopted the so-called “99 Seat Plan,” which allowed union actors to rehearse for up to eight weeks and to perform in up to eight shows in small LA County theaters,  waiving their usual union salaries in return for small stipends. Although at first it seems strange—why would an actor willingly forgo her union benefits?—proponents of the plan argue that the system has been good for actors, and good for theater, allowing difficult plays—those with large casts, or new, and thus risky, works—to be staged for the love of it all, without the pressure of the bottom line. The debate heated up this month, with the #ILove99 camp literally taking to the streets, and prominent names weighing in (largely against the AEA.) In the end, the Actors Equity Association (mostly) stuck to its original plan, and it remains to be seen what effect, if any, the decision will have on LA. In the meantime, it’s worth considering the bigger picture: wealth inequality in the nonprofit theater world (heck, the nonprofit arts world).

FM Radio’s Days Are Numbered: FM Radio was patented in 1933, and although it took the medium four decades to become the international standard, no one would have disputed its dominance. Today, four more decades later, it looks like its days might finally be numbered. On January 11, 2017, Norway will flip the switch on frequency modified broadcasts, transitioning its entire country to digital radio. The move should come as no surprise in a country which boasts of 22 Digital Audio Broadcast stations (and only five FM ones) and where more than half the population listens to digital radio daily. Denmark, Sweden and the UK have made noise about a similar switch. The digital takeover is likely to be slow and meandering in the United States, however, where 92% of folks over 12 listen to terrestrial radio at least once a week. The main reason? The transition to digital would require an act of Congress, and with the majority of US FM stations privately held, we can imagine what might be involved.

MUSICAL CHAIRS / COOL JOBS

• Dr. Kathryn (Kit) Matthew, currently Chief Science Educator at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, was nominated by President Obama to lead the Institute of Museum and Library Services in March.
• The National Assembly of State Arts Agencies has appointed Pam Breaux its new CEO, effective July 15.
• Bahia Ramos, currently program director for community foundations at Miami’s John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, will move into the role of arts program director at the foundation.
• June O’Neill has stepped down as executive director of the Philadelphia Cultural Fund after twelve years at its helm. Lois Welk, who led Dance USA/Philadelphia until its recent demise, has been named interim executive director, and a search is underway for O’Neill’s successor.
• Ken Berger, CEO of Charity Navigator, stepped down abruptly last month after its Board decided it needed leadership with more tech expertise.
• The Morris & Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation is hiring a Program Assistant. Posted March 30; no closing date.
• The Bohemian Foundation in Fort Collins, CO is hiring a Music Programs Manager. Posted April 2; no closing date.
• The Boston Foundation seeks a Director of Arts and Culture. Posted April 3; no closing date.
• Bolder Giving, based in New York City, seeks an Executive Director. Posted April 14; no closing date.
• The Oregon Community Foundation is accepting applications for an Opportunity Fellow, an 18-month position offered in partnership with the Momentum Fellowship Program at Philanthropy Northwest. Posted April 17; deadline May 15.
• Slover Linett Audience Research is hiring a Chicago-based Associate/Senior Associate. Posted April 17; no closing date.
• CECP, a coalition of CEOs united in the belief that societal improvement is an essential measure of business performance, seeks a Manager, Data Insights. Posted April 24; no closing date.
• Applications for BuzzFeed’s (yes, that BuzzFeed) inaugural Emerging Writers Fellowship program are now open. Deadline is October 1.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• A survey from the Nonprofit Research Collaborative shows that 63% of US nonprofits saw a year-over-year increase in 2014 fundraising revenues, continuing a general upward trend. On the other hand, a new report from the Center for Effective Philanthropy found that across the board, nonprofits are in need of funding to collect and better assess their performance data.
• The Cultural Data Project released a new report, “Bridging the Capacity Gap: Cultural Practitioners’ Perspectives on Data,” looking at the challenges to using data to strengthen nonprofit decision-making. Related, the Urban Institute’s Center on Nonprofits & Philanthropy published a resource guide for implementing a culture of continuous improvement at Head Start and Early Head Start programs, though the insights are applicable broadly.
• DanceUSA reviewed the National Endowment for the Arts’s recent reports on arts engagement, as well as its own audience engagement efforts, in an effort to better understand what works for dance.
• In the world of early education and the arts, three different papers presented at last month’s biennial research conference for the Society for Research in Child Development detail the ways in which the arts have a positive impact on early childhood development.
• Looking at the other end of the life cycle, a new report from the Mayo Clinic shows that making art consistently over the course of one’s life has significant positive cognitive implications in later life.
• The Government Accountability Office released a report indicating that the Library of Congress continues to be behind the digital times, and faults Librarian of Congress James H. Billington for failing to hire a chief information officer, which is required by law.
• According to The Art Newspaper’s annual survey of museum attendance, solo shows at US museums were dominated by artists from five of the world’s biggest galleries, accounting for nearly a third of solo shows between 2007 and 2013.

Photo by E. Briel

In early 2014, President Barack Obama addressed workers at a General Electric gas engine plant. “A lot of young people don’t see the trades and skilled manufacturing as a viable career,” he said,  “but I promise you, folks can make a lot more… with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree.”

That simple remark sent arts advocates into a letter-writing and tweeting tizzy. When the president apologized a few weeks later, via a hand-written note to an art history professor, the gesture was hailed by arts ed advocates as a victory that acknowledged “the untapped potential of [arts] industries in helping to improve the economic growth, jobs creation, and trade surplus of the United States.”

But the apology, while well-intentioned, didn’t reflect a change of heart. In the letter, Obama admitted that the arts were a source of joy in his life, but explained he was trying to “mak[e] a point about the jobs market, not the value of art history.” According to him, it’s not that art history doesn’t have value; it’s just that its value has more to do with joy than dollars – or practical skills.

Obama, like most high-profile leaders in education, frequently trumpets the need to cultivate an “innovative” workforce. While the definition of “innovation” has long been squishy, the president’s earlier statements suggest he sees an innovative workforce as one with “makers of things, not just consumers of things.” One would think the link between arts education and workforce development would be easier for him to grasp, particularly with reports on the impact of “creative economies” popping up left and right. Yet the link may seem more tenuous than arts educators would like to believe. Take, for example, the 2013 Otis Report on the Creative Economy. Released annually since 2007, and focused on the Southern California region, the report attempts to quantify the economic impact of “creative professions and enterprises that take powerful, original ideas and transform them into practical and often beautiful goods or inspire us with their artistry.” Not surprisingly, the report shows that those professions and enterprises are a big, and lucrative, deal in the region.

Arts education advocates hail these findings as evidence of a huge market for the skills taught in arts classes. Yet it seems that the very for-profit leaders who hire for such creative economy jobs are skeptical of the relevance of arts education. According to “LA Creates: Supporting the Creative Economy in Los Angeles,” which was released as an addendum to the 2013 Otis Report and features a synthesis of interviews with leaders from the creative industries,

While public and nonprofit sector participants were in near unanimous agreement on its importance, private sector participants expressed a fuller range of skepticism about the benefits of seeking solutions through support of arts education, and often didn’t see arts education as a priority among a hypothetical set of specific strategies that would improve the ability of creative businesses to expand and thrive.

What’s going on here? For-profit CEOs rank creativity at the top of their lists of important leadership qualities; arts education advocates have been arguing that their work provides a direct pipeline to the “creative economy” for years. Why, then, does the link between arts education and workforce development seem so difficult for people – even those working in the “creative industries” – to grasp?

One explanation may lie in the disconnect between arts educators’ rhetorical embrace of creativity and the constraints they, and all educators, face in traditional K-12 classrooms. Arts educators have fought hard for inclusion and respect within the public school system, and have dutifully adopted many trappings of that system along the way. The most obvious example is content standards, such as the Common Core, which outline what students should know and be able to do at each grade level. The standards movement started in the 1980s and continues to the present day, when forty-five forty-nine states and the District of Columbia have established them in the visual and performing arts. While arts educators variously embrace or chafe against those standards, they’re widely accepted as best practice, in large part because they allow the arts to demonstrate parity with other disciplines.

But does “demonstrating parity with other disciplines” at the K-12 level foster the best environment to nurture 21st-century skills like creativity? After all, “creative studies” programs in higher education– both bricks-and-mortar and virtual offerings of which are growing in number – are designed around the idea that creativity is not content-specific:

Traditional academic disciplines still matter, but as content knowledge evolves at lightning speed, educators are talking more and more about “process skills,” strategies to reframe challenges and extrapolate and transform information, and to accept and deal with ambiguity… “The new people who will be creative will sit at the juxtaposition of two or more fields,” [the director of a creativity center] says. When ideas from different fields collide… fresh ones are generated.

Meanwhile, most K-12 classrooms are still structured with each discipline, be it math, reading, or dance, in its own bubble. Despite efforts by the writers of the Common Core and the soon-to-be-released national arts standards to provide more flexibility across disciplines, advocates in all content areas are pushing for students to receive a minimum amount of guaranteed instruction in whichever discipline they support.

This raises some questions for arts educators. If the economy of the future will require that students demonstrate more applied problem-solving than content-specific knowledge, our hope that schools address discrete, and traditional, arts disciplines during the school day may not the most obvious choice for our future “innovative workforce” – if cultivating that workforce is indeed what we hope to do. Is teaching the arts a more effective means of teaching 21st-century skills than a framework like the Buck Institute’s Project Based Learning, which puts a heavy emphasis on hands-on, interdisciplinary problem-solving but doesn’t yet have a strong arts focus? If our top priority is “cultivating a 21st-century workforce,” should we be arguing that every student should have, for example, forty-five minutes of violin instruction per week? Are we missing a broader opportunity to get ahead of what may be a long-term shift toward a more interdisciplinary approach in education?

Some arts educators are embracing the interdisciplinary approach via the “STEM to STEAM movement,” a promising offshoot of our renewed focus on workforce development. While broad STEAM rhetoric is as muddled as it is popular, certain STEAM school models, particularly those at the high school level, are pretty friggin’ fantastic. Current interest in STEAM from government and certain business leaders provides an opportunity to investigate research on creativity and problem-solving in a deeper way, expanding our understanding of how creative people work and enabling openness to how “creativity” is taught in non-arts contexts.

Whether we like to admit it or not, the arts do not have a monopoly on 21st-century skills. Nor should those skills have a monopoly on our arguments for why arts education is important.  Perhaps the more willing we are to examine the link between the two, the more likely we are to uncover what the full impact of arts education can be.

• Joan Mondale, wife of former Vice President Walter Mondale and known to many as “Joan of Art” for her arts advocacy efforts, passed away February 3.
• After April 6, cracking jokes in the UK will become a little easier. A new UK regulation allows for the use of parts of original copyrighted material if used for parody, caricature, or pastiche.
• Over at ARTSblog, Ciara McKeown argues municipalities are commissioning too many permanent public art pieces, and suggests public art programs “generate goals that are not defined as permanent or temporary, but that are about people and experiences.”
• Well, this is one way to make it as a DIY band: Canadian electro-industrial rockers Skinny Puppy have invoiced the Pentagon for $666,000 for the unauthorized use of their music during interrogations at Guantanamo.
• Confused about the ins and outs of all those visual art lawsuits of the past few years? Daniel Grant has a detailed overview over at Hyperallergic.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Geoffrey Canada, the charismatic face of one of the most ambitious and widely watched education and anti-poverty initiatives in the country, is leaving the Harlem Children’s Zone after two decades at its helm. He will be succeeded by Anne Williams-Isom, the organization’s current Chief Operating Officer.
• The William Penn Foundation has found its new leader: Peter J. Degnan, Vice Dean of Finance and Administration at the Wharton School. The foundation’s new structure (his title is “managing director”) will allow him to “focus on aligning interconnected organizational functions, including strategic grantmaking, knowledge-building, and community engagement.”
• Ron Ragin will jump coasts from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to become the first arts program officer for the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
• The National Center for Arts Research at Southern Methodist University recently appointed Kate D. Levin, former Commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, as its first fellow. As part of role, Levin will be responsible for raising the center’s visibility and providing input on its research. Levin will continue in her new position with Bloomberg Associates, a consulting firm founded by the former Mayor that advises local governments around the world.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Artist Pension Trust controls some 40,000 works of contemporary art as part of a risk-pooling retirement plan for the artists themselves. As it begins to sell some of them off in its tenth year, dealers express concern about the effect on the market – and others question whether the plan can possibly make money.
• Arts funders, take note: the New York-based F.B. Heron Foundation has ceased requiring its grantees to submit reports, moving instead to a “outside, cooperative data warehouse” to provide real-time information. It’s also transformed its structure and operations to maximally integrate investing with grantmaking. President Clara Miller’s annual letter describes the nuts and bolts of the foundation’s ambition to maximize the social return from every dollar in its corpus.
• Foundation transparency is all the rage this month. It emerged as a major theme in a recent arts funders’ convening on failure hosted by NYC’s The Field. GrantCraft published a new guide with tips for funders interested increasing the transparency of their day to day work. And the new site Inside Philanthropy targets potential grantees with eye-catching headlines (“Find Out How You Can Get $10,000 From the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation”), and offers subscribers insight into individual program officers’ giving preferences. It also exposes staff email directories and allows anonymous Yelp-style reviews.

IN THE FIELD

• The National Coalition for Core Arts Standards (NCCAS) has been hard at work drafting new national arts standards for K-12 classrooms. These standards are rad for a number of reasons, most importantly 1) because they are aligned to the Common Core, and 2) they bring us into the 21st century by including media arts as a distinct discipline. A final draft of the standards is up for final public review through February 28; get on over and check them out.
• The New England Foundation for the Arts has launched a new directory mapping artists, “creative businesses” and cultural nonprofits across six states.
• Following an encouraging trend started last year, issues of race and diversity continue to spur conversation, with HowlRound devoting a week of blog posts to asking whether or not “a white person can write, adapt, direct, or perform stories from a different culture or race.” Meanwhile, new studies on how perceptions of an individual’s race change over time underscore race as a social construct.
• Even better than talk, though, is action, and there’s good news on that front: Detroit’s Sphinx Organization and management agency IMG Artists have a budding partnership aimed at creating greater diversity among classical musicians while broadening audiences for classical music. Stay tuned for the first trial run at this summer’s Napa Valley Festival del Sole where the Sphinx Symphony Orchestra will perform.

BIG IDEAS

• We’ve mulled whether computers can generate art, but a related question is whether computer programmers are artists when they dabble in code. A novelist makes an eloquent case that they are.
• Been a while since your last nerdgasm? Read up on social physics, which explores how ideas flow, evolve, and (we hope!) improve within communities — and asks whether “our hyperconnected world may be moving toward a state in which there is too much idea flow.”

RESEARCH CORNER

• Following up on the first-ever official count of the arts’ contribution to the GDP, the NEA has released more detailed estimates for individual industries, including a breakout of performing arts groups by tax-exempt status. (Most of the $526 million added by dance comes from non-profits; most of $407 million from circuses is pure capitalism.)
• Southern Methodist University’s National Center for Arts Research (NCAR) released a study claiming that, contrary to the insinuations of Republican lawmakers, NEA doesn’t simply represent a “wealth transfer” from poorer to wealthier citizens. Michael Rushton, however, argues that the study doesn’t succeed in the argument because it looks at wealth at the level of the community, preventing firm conclusions about the wealth of individual attendees of NEA-sponsored arts. The comments on Rushton’s article contain a lively methodological debate if you like that sort of thing. In other news, NCAR officially launched its inaugural report (originally reported by Createquity back in December) on the health of U.S. arts and cultural organizations; the event was webcast by HowlRound TV.
• A new study from the College Art Association shows that visual arts professionals – scholars, curators, publishers – don’t understand fair use, and they avoid or abandon projects because of it. The CAA is working toward a Code of Best Practices for Fair Use to assuage the anxiety; such a code proved helpful to documentary filmmakers.
• Anyone who works with schools should carve out a few hours to play with this: DonorsChoose.org, which in 13 years has allowed teachers to raise more than $220 million in funding for their classrooms, is making its 20+ million project records on proposed and successful projects available via a free, interactive data analysis tool.
• Are too many of our research and evaluation efforts in the arts theoretical rather than directly applicable to practice? Nina Simon thinks so, and the comments from Peter Linett, Jay Greene, Carlos Manjarrez and others are worth checking out as well.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• The US Bureau of Economic Analysis, following new international standards, has adjusted the official method for calculating GDP to “include the amount of money business invest in … intellectual property.” This involves some tough calls: development costs for hit TV shows with potential for syndication and even greeting cards count, but journalism and blogs are deemed perishable. Some commentators interpret this as refreshing and official recognition of the economic value of creative productions.
• Back in April, Createquity explored what might happen if the federal tax deduction for charitable contributions went the way of the dodo. At the federal level, the debate rages on, but various states – including Hawaii, Minnesota and Kansas – have recently decided against capping charitable deductions within their states, citing negative impact on the nonprofit sector.
• Across the pond, it looks like economic arguments for the arts are becoming increasingly influential. Britain’s Culture Secretary preserved most of the UK’s £450m-plus culture budget in part by highlighting the arts’ role in driving economic growth. Not everyone is on board though: the Scottish Secretary of Culture responded by reminding Scots of this fall’s referendum on independence and declaring that Scotland “doesn’t measure the worth of culture and heritage solely in pounds and pence.” (Bonus: this recent post recaps the rise of “Art Works” justifications for subsidy in the US.)
• Why it’s important to pay attention to policy: an arts educator is California is “shocked” to learn his state requires the arts to be taught in schools. (Psst: so do forty-four others.)

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Darren Walker, currently a vice president of the Ford Foundation, has been named the foundation’s next president. His portfolio as VP covered arts & culture, and he was instrumental in the formation of the ArtPlace creative placemaking funder collaboration.
• Nate Silver, founder of FiveThirtyEight.Com and intellectual crush of data geeks everywhere, is leaving the New York Times for ESPN. Good news for baseball fans, bad news for political wonks, though Silver will continue to cover elections via ABC News.
• Don Rosenberg, longtime music critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, has been laid off along with 49 other employees of the paper.

BIG IDEAS

• Americans for the Arts has launched a new project to study America’s 600+ “Cultural Districts,” updating their 1998 Cultural Districts Handbook. As part of the kickoff, they hosted a blog salon last week.
• Are organizations that eschew dynamic pricing “punishing [their] staff[s] in the service of an ideal the community may not be aware of“?
• FSG is launching a Next Generation Evaluation project. An initial post summarizes three long-held assumptions about evaluation and three “game-changing approaches” that could challenge them: Developmental Evaluation, Shared Measurement, and Big Data.
• With the backing of the Haas, Hewlett, and Packard Foundations, Shiree Teng has launched ImpactRising.org, a website designed “to help bring a level of standards to the consulting industry, to raise the quality of social sector consulting, and to to have some measure of accountability.” It includes tools and resources for organizations working with consultants and for consultants themselves.
• A scientist-turned-artist reflects on the differences between the two cultures.
  

  From funding levels (‘I write grant applications for research and it’s like taking an arts grant and adding a couple of zeros’) and the culture of peer review (‘It’s all about surviving the gauntlet of people trying to tear your ideas apart – that doesn’t happen with an arts audience’), to scrutinising outcomes (‘In science, they really care about the outcome of their funding – I don’t get the same impression in the arts’), institutionally, science and the arts are still very far apart.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• We know the Common Core State Standards aren’t cheap; states across the country are scrambling to figure out how much the newer, “smarter” tests will cost them. But beyond that, the Common Core is also prompting some borderline-creepy partnerships between for-profit and nonprofit educational entities. Beginning in 2014, the American Council of Education, which administers the GED, is joining forces with textbook giant Pearson. The upside? The GED is getting re-written to align with Common Core. The bad news? The cost of taking the GED will almost double. Way to reduce barriers to a high school diploma, guys.
• Hyperallergic has a helpful summary of five approaches artists have taken in attempts to guarantee fair wages and benefits. And while he doesn’t explicitly mention artists, Adam Davidson uses the example of a wannabe-hair-metal-rock-star-turned-accounting-“cliff jumper” to illustrate how hard it is to determine the financial value of ideas.
• Bloomberg Philanthropies announced in June a $15m, 3-year grant to 5 major cultural institutions to support the development of mobile apps. The Guggenheim recently released its free, Bloomberg-funded app; others will follow through the end of 2014.

IN THE FIELD

• Is this the future of professional conferences? The ever-intrepid Nina Simon recently hosted seventy-five designers, museum professionals and artists in the Santa Cruz Museum of Art for a 2.5 day “camp” for participants to “take a risk” in creating exhibits. Beyond sounding super fun, the experiment generated reflection about what “taking a risk” even means in a museum environment.
• Abe Flores (recent winner of Americans for the Arts’s Emerging Leader Award) shares his thoughts on the distressing lack of racial diversity among respondents to AFTA’s recent report on salaries in local arts agencies.
• While the fate of Detroit’s art collection is still up in the air, the Wall Street Journal offers two arguments for keeping the works where they are, and the director of the Detroit Institute of Arts insists it’s too soon to panic.
• Jon Silpayamanant writes about what declining attendance at sporting events – and the measures teams have taken to preserve revenues – can tell us about the similar problems faces by live performances in the arts.
• Meanwhile, demand for classical music on Pandora (and iTunes) has been growing – and outperforming the company’s expectations based on market share. But lest we get too excited about our digital saviors, Spotify – the streaming service that musicians love to hate – is hardly rolling in cash; those pitiful payments to artists offset nearly all of its equally-pitiful revenues.
• Allan Kozinn chronicles the “sea change” in music conservatories as courses are added in the business of music, covering the use of digital technologies, the art of networking, and how to build a personal brand as part of a career.

RESEARCH CORNER

• This puts a twist on arguments touting the economic impact of the arts: new research from the Corporation for National and Community Service indicates people who volunteer their time with organizations have a 27 percent greater chance of finding employment, with the link strongest for those who traditionally have the hardest time finding work. Per the NEA’s Director of Research and Analysis, “If volunteerism is indeed a pathway to employment, then arts organizations, venues, and activities could be hotbeds for this crucial transition.”
• The chance that a child will earn her way into a higher class than her parents’ varies considerably across major American cities – her odds are better in New York or several California cities than in, say, Ohio. The driving forces seem to be not higher tax credits for the poor or taxes on the rich, but greater geographic integration of the poor and middle class, more stable families, stronger K-12 education, and higher civic engagement.
• Researchers in Ireland have found that listening to music from different cultures may prompt you to “denigrate outsiders” if the music sounds particularly unconventional to you, and conclude that “attempts to celebrate and share diversity may have the reverse effect.” Isn’t that also an argument for exposing children to lots of different kinds of music, all the time?
• Market research by IMPACTS into visitor-serving organizations like zoos, symphonies, and museums suggests that overall satisfaction is driven much more by the “entertainment experience” than the “educational experience” – entertainment is four times as important to visitors. (The linked piece does not define “entertainment,” so it is possible that really fun education may fare better.)
• Any idea how much you’d have to pay the Rolling Stones to cover “Brown Sugar” on your debut album? According to preliminary results from a new set of music-and-copyright quizzes hosted online by the Future of Music Coalition, fewer than a quarter of respondents can tell you – though we don’t know how many of them are aspiring musicians. Or Mick Jagger.

Former entrances to the US Department of Education. The red schoolhouses were removed by the Obama administration in 2009. Photo by Andy Grant

Common perception among arts educators in the United States is that the arts are “edged out” of the curriculum because schools value them less than math and reading. Schools value the arts less than math and reading because math and reading are on state tests; in turn, math and reading are on the state tests because schools are required to show growth in these areas under the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). If only those federal policies around arts education were different, we often say, things would be better.

But what might a different national policy look like, and to what extent could it change the degree to which arts education is implemented – and implemented well – in public schools?

One way to get a sense of our options is to take a look at how other countries handle this issue. Such an investigation is particularly timely right now, as most states in the US have adopted the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) – the biggest step we have ever taken toward a “national” system of curriculum and assessments. While the Common Core has generated its own share of debates (head over to Americans for the Arts’s recent Common Core blog salon for a great cross-section of perspectives from arts educators), it nevertheless represents a defining moment in education policy in the United States. A big selling point of the standards is that they are internationally benchmarked. This will provide, in theory, a better sense of how our students are doing in relation to peers in other countries, so that we don’t keep getting sideswiped by the United States’s “poor performance” on the dreaded Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). (Whenever you hear policy makers lament that we are xxth in math or reading, PISA scores are usually what they are referring to.) Other counties even point to the Common Core as evidence that we are finally willing to learn from strides made elsewhere.

So how do arts education policies look in other countries?

This article covers Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany and South Africa. Specifically:

• What policies and standards are in place at the national level regarding the arts in schools?
• What dedicated funding streams are available (again, at the national level) for arts education during the school day?
• What are the roles of federal versus state/municipal governments in implementing/monitoring education?

The first two questions relate to concerns I hear voiced most often about the national arts education landscape in the United States – i.e. that the policies set by The Government (in the broadest sense) aren’t conducive to flourishing arts practice in public schools, or that we don’t dedicate enough money to arts education. The third question is necessary for context-setting –how The Government makes decisions about education depends on whether education is a national or a local responsibility.

Limiting my scope to the national level means a lot is left out, particularly regarding funding. If a country doesn’t have a lot of national funding directed toward arts education, that does not mean that its state and local governments aren’t choosing to invest in it. On the flip side, a country may have strong national policies that are haphazardly enforced at the state and local levels.

Though by no means an exhaustive overview of arts education practice in each country, this article aims to provide a bird’s-eye view of national policies that affect which students get which disciplines during the school day, and how. Let’s begin with a quick refresher on national arts education policy in our own country.

The United States

If you’ve paid even scant attention to public education debates in the last decade, you’ve heard of No Child Left Behind, our much decried cornerstone of national education policy since 2001. No Child Left Behind is an updated and renamed version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), originally passed in the 1960s. Per our Constitution, education is a state responsibility – each state is responsible for setting standards in each academic discipline, implementing its own assessment systems, and providing the bulk of education funding. Our federal department of education oversees the ESEA and provides funding for certain provisions of that law (e.g. Title I, which aims to “improve the educational achievement of the disadvantaged”).

Jennifer Kessler’s 2011 Createquity post on ESEA provides a great summary of its history and relevance to the arts. The ESEA was up for reauthorization when Jennifer wrote her article and is still awaiting reauthorization now. The Obama administration has floated a number of ideas for how it would like to change ESEA, but since education did not factor prominently into the 2012 election cycle, the chances of reauthorization happening anytime soon, with or without substantive adjustments, are slim to none.

In the decade-plus since the 2001 version of ESEA/No Child Left Behind was passed, it has been nearly universally blasted by arts education advocates – mainly due to its negative impact on schedule, workload and funding for programs related to the arts. However, No Child Left Behind did include the arts in its definition of “core academic subjects,” as follows: “The term `core academic subjects’ means English, reading or language arts, mathematics, science, foreign languages, civics and government, economics, arts, history, and geography.”

Using the single word “arts” leaves a lot up to interpretation. However, the arts’ inclusion as a core subject is important for a couple of reasons:

1. It places the arts, as a matter of policy, on equal footing with other subject areas
2. It allows any federal funding designated for “core academic subjects” – including Title I, Title II, and economic stimulus funds –  to be used for arts education

The latter point has faced obstacles: despite Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s 2009 letter clarifying that the arts are eligible for general purpose federal funds, some states have pushed back.  California’s State Superintendent, for example, maintains that schools cannot use Title I funds for programs whose “primary objective” is arts education, but can apply them toward arts-related strategies that have been demonstrated to raise achievement in English and math. As the issue of federal-versus-state control of our education system is both heated and politically fraught (especially in the era of Common Core), Secretary Duncan is unlikely to take anyone to task over this.

Besides general purpose federal funds for education, national funding streams for arts education include the National Endowment for the Arts’s arts education grants and the Department of Education’s Arts Education Model Development and Dissemination (AEMDD) Grants Program.  While the NEA’s commitment to arts education appears steady, AEMDD grants are slated to be collapsed with other subject areas under Secretary Duncan’s proposed revisions to ESEA, in favor of creating a new, larger pool of competitive funds to “strengthen the teaching and learning of arts, foreign languages, history and civics, financial literacy, environmental education and other subjects.”

Again, because the effort to reauthorize ESEA is currently dead in the water, don’t expect this or any related proposal to gain momentum in the immediate future. Few people seem to like our major national education law, but even fewer seem to agree on how best to fix it. Until they do, it will sputter along on autopilot as the Obama administration absolves states of meeting its more stringent requirements in exchange for agreeing to equally controversial reforms such as linking teacher evaluation systems with student test scores.

Add the sorta-kinda-national-but-not-really-Common Core movement into this mix and the future of national arts education policies in the United States form a big, bold question mark – but one with a great deal of potential to shift our landscape.

Australia

For a glimpse of what we may have in store if the Common Core movement gains enough traction to anchor a “national” curriculum, look no further than Australia, which adopted a standardized curriculum andassessment system in 2008. Australia and the United States have a great deal in common: Australian K-12 education primarily has been the responsibility of state and territorial governments, and according to Robyn Ewing’s excellent overview of the history of arts education in that country, British and North American traditions heavily influence Australian arts education policy. While the arts have been designated one of “eight key learning areas” across the country for more than a decade, visual art and music tend to be taught the most, while drama is lumped in with English/language arts and dance with physical education (sound familiar?).

That’s poised to change, however, with Australia’s Curriculum, Assessment, and Reporting Authority (ACARA), newly responsible for developing and implementing curriculum across the entire country. That curriculum includes the arts as five distinct disciplines: visual art, music, dance, theater and media arts.

That’s right, five disciplines. Our national policy defines the arts as “arts,” and Australia’s gets into specifics. The full curriculum won’t be finalized until February 2014, though you can take a look at draft versions here. In the meantime, our own College Board’s 2011 overview of international arts education standards found Australia’s curriculum “exemplary in the breadth of its scope, the considerable attention to defining its own language, and the lengths it goes to in recognizing the differences in abilities and learning opportunities at the different age/grade levels.” This sample chart gives you the idea (click through for better resolution):

ACARA states each school should determine how to teach the arts, and how much time to devote to each discipline. Its general guidelines (see page 4 of this document), outline a minimum of 100-120 hours of the arts per year through primary school, increasing to 160 hours in secondary school as students gravitate toward a specialty.

As great as these guidelines may sound, not all segments of Australia’s arts education community are excited about them. ACARA’s goal for students to study all five arts disciplines throughout elementary school has met some backlash in arts education circles, particularly those focused on visual art and music. Because some territorial governments invested heavily in those two disciplines already, they balk at the idea of “watering down” existing programs to make time for theater and dance. (This rad YouTube blog offers a performing arts student’s perspective on the issue.)

The irony of such squabbling is that the arts were originally entirely left out of the national curriculum, and were included as a result of heavy lobbying by a “united front” of all disciplines. As Ewing states,

One of the most significant things about the advocacy for inclusion of the arts education in this iteration of the Australian curriculum was a united stand by the various arts disciplines, which contrasted to the previous fragmented arguments for individual allocations for separate arts disciplines.  At the time of writing this review paper there is some re-emergence of that old fragmentation, with the assertion that some arts disciplines are more important than others.

Fragmentation in arts education communities deepens when resources are scant, and dedicated national funding streams for arts education in Australia are few and far between. The Australia Council for the Arts supports research on the effectiveness of partnerships between schools and the “professional arts sector,” and funds an Artists in Residence Program managed primarily by each state and territory’s arts council and education department. Arts funding in general has taken a squeeze recently. On October 15, Young People and the Arts, Australia’s national service organization representing arts education providers, lost its funding from the Australia Council for the Arts and announced staffing and operations would cease for at least the short term. Arts funding at the university level is getting trimmed as well.

Nonetheless, the country’s commitment to the arts as integral to Australia’s curriculum is impressive – and may provide us lessons for what to expect when (if?) we ever elaborate on that vague “arts” reference in ESEA.

Brazil

As in Australia, Brazil’s national education policies are undergoing big changes. Unlike Australia’s those changes don’t explicitly have a lot to do with the arts, but they dohave a lot to do with money and the affirmation of access to arts and culture as a basic human right.

In 2000 Brazil ranked dead last among more than forty countries that participated in the PISA. Since then it’s committed to overhauling its education system, and the effort appears to be having an impact on the country’s performance on international tests. The backbone of that overhaul is a recently approved National Plan for Education (PNE) that will structure education policy for the next decade. The plan emphasizes committing resources to education, eradicating illiteracy, and increasing access to elementary and lower secondary school. (To give you a sense of where things stand right now, according to this recent article, students in some rural areas of the country spend little more than 3 hours a day in school, oftentimes without teachers present.)

One of the PNE’s many goals is to expand “mandatory” basic education, currently required of students aged 7-14, to include ages 4-17 by 2016. Doing that requires building schools, raising teacher salaries, professionalizing the teaching industry and finding a whole lot of money. A major sticking point (and victory) of the PNE is that it raises Brazil’s spending on education to a whopping 10% of GDP – nearly twice the rate of our spending.

Where do the arts fall into all of this? While the national government defined the arts as compulsory in 1972, it provides few guidelines for which disciplines to include at which grade levels, or who should teach them. (According to this overview of arts education practice, few arts specialists are in primary classrooms.) The PNE, framed as a “guarantee” of financial and material resources to support the country’s educational infrastructure, doesn’t get into specifics about what should happen in the classroom. It does, however, indicate that all students have a right to the arts and culture. Here is one of the strategies it lists regarding the arts (with apologies for the clunky Google translation):

Promote the list of schools with institutions and culture movements, [to] ensure the regular supply of cultural activities for the free enjoyment of students inside and outside of school spaces, ensuring that even schools become centers of cultural creation and dissemination.

Universal access to arts and culture is listed alongside access to clean water and sanitation as goals of the PNE. This vision aligns with Brazil’s 2010 National Culture Plan and established around the principles of “culture as a right of citizenship,” “culture as symbolic expression,” and “culture as potential for economic development.” With the assistance of the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Culture is also developing a National Policy for Integrating Education and Culture focused on training teachers, establishing partnerships between cultural organizations and schools and creating an asset map of schools in relation to cultural spaces. The Ministry of Education, meanwhile, has a Mais Educação (More Education) program funding schools to work with cultural groups.

Brazil will be a country to watch over the next decade. Brazilian educators Augusto Boal and Paolo Freire, who used the arts to galvanize political expression in the 1960s and 70s, strongly influenced arts education in the United States. As Brazil’s education infrastructure expands and stabilizes its translation of cultural rights into education policy may well influence us again.

Canada

Most countries in this survey, including our own, place a heavy emphasis on test scores and are leaning toward standardizing their education systems. Our friendly neighbor to the north is a glaring exception. “National” education policy does not exist in Canada; it does not have a national ministry or department of education, and policies from primary grades through high school are set, implemented, funded and monitored exclusively at the provincial level.

Thanks to this, getting a comprehensive overview of arts education across Canada is a little tricky. Canada’s national universities don’t have any admission requirements related to arts education, and only five of ten provinces require some arts credits to graduate high school. According to the Canadian Commission for UNESCO, the arts are considered core subjects in “many” provinces, but all arts disciplines tend to be grouped under one program.

This doesn’t mean that arts education policies don’t exist, of course – just that they vary greatly from province to province. By extension, the quality and content of curricula vary as well. Compare, for example, Ontario and Alberta. Ontario requires full day kindergarten programs and English-language schools to provide “the arts” across all grades, though how much art is needed to fulfill that requirement is unclear. The only specific mandate is that students taken one arts credit to graduate high school. Ontario does, however, have a fairly robust arts curriculum that covers dance, drama, music and visual art in grades 1-8. As the College Board notes, “Unusual among the countries studied [in its international comparison of standards], [Ontario’s] curriculum provides … specific examples of possible demonstrations of standardized skills and knowledge [and]… teacher ‘prompts’ in the form of questions.”

By contrast, Alberta defines “fine arts” as an element of its core curriculum through grade 6, but its standards (in visual art, music and theater) date back to the 1980s. They are up for revision and in 2009 Alberta’s Ministry of Education identified certain issues for consideration in its Arts Education Curriculum Consultation Report:

• the ramifications of renaming “fine arts education” as “arts education” (interestingly, most educators opposed to the change, fearing the “integrity of disciplines” would erode)
• a near-universal commitment to include dance in any revision
• a recognition that while flawed, the existing standards allow for creativity and flexibility that might wither if policies became more concrete

The timeline for updating the curriculum and standards is up in the air; while a draft framework was released in 2009, according to the Ministry of Education’s Web site, “revision of Fine Arts programs has been slowed to ensure alignment with current changes underway in education… the implementation of an inclusive education system, and other ministry initiatives.”

While the two provinces contrast in their arts curricula and requirements, their dedicated funding streams – or lack of them – are similar. According to Statistics Canada,  provincial governments allocated less than 5% of their arts and cultural budgets to arts education. Neither province’s Ministry of Education appears to have specific allocations for arts education, though their individual Arts Councils include funding for artist-in-residence programs (an overview of Ontario’s is here and Alberta’s here).

National arts and culture funders, meanwhile, seem to hold arts education at arm’s length even though Canadian citizens value government investment in the arts. Canada’s Department of Heritage supports programs to increase audience engagement and train arts workers, but does not seem to support arts in schools directly.  The Canada Council for the Arts lumps arts education with audience engagement and states that while “there are challenges to equitable and sustained arts education and access for youth and children… the Canada Council is not directly implicated in the development of arts education curriculum.”

In place of formal government infrastructure for arts education, Canada has a number of initiatives supporting K-12 arts learning across the country. The most prominent is ArtsSmarts, a pan-Canadian nonprofit that attempts to reduce disparities between “have” and “have not” provinces by partnering with like-minded organizations and provincial ministries to advance creative process and artistic inquiry in classrooms. It is also plays an active role in national research and dialogue on arts education through conferences like its recent Knowledge Exchange. A very young nonprofit called the Canadian Network for Arts and Learning also hopes to establish a national presence, with an emphasis on research about arts’ impact on learning.

So if our department of education were abruptly disbanded – not a completely farfetched idea, depending on which way political winds are blowing – would arts education efforts suffer a major setback? Not necessarily: despite its decentralized system, Canada performs well on international education metrics and isn’t leaping onto the testing bandwagon that so often “crowds out” arts learning. At the same time, efforts like that of ArtsSmarts make clear that regional governments feel they need broad-scale support, collaboration and exchange to enhance their arts education efforts.

China

With its rising economic prominence and “remarkable” performance on the PISA, China spurs the majority of our fretting over how to prepare students for a global marketplace. It is also occasionally held up as an example for the need to promote arts education in the United States; Chinese students may kick our butts on standardized tests, some argue, but they aren’t taught to be as creative and flexible as ours.

Such anxiety and pride are both justified. China is an enormous and rapidly modernizing country that has made huge strides in educating swaths of its population in a relatively short period of time. It is also aware of the advantages of our higher education system and its liberal arts ethos.

For the past few decades China’s education policies have focused on reducing disparities between its rural and urban populations. It declared nine years of education compulsory for all children in 1986 and has since put much energy toward ensuring that basic mandate is fulfilled. Despite significant progress, according to UNESCO’s overview of current policies in the country, “by the end of 2007, there were still 42 counties in the west of China which had not fulfilled the ‘two basics,’ e.g. universalizing the nine-year compulsory education and eliminating illiteracy among young people and adults.”

Concurrent with the nine-year mandate, China overhauled its higher education infrastructure from a “free” system to one in which students compete for government scholarships through a notoriously difficult national exam called the gaokao. The gaokao is central to education in China and according to one student is “responsible for killing ninety percent of the creativity” in the country. The exam’s approach has an inverse effect on the amount of arts learning students receive: the closer the exam, the less the arts are emphasized.

China’s elementary curriculum was revised in 2001 with a number of goals, including to “highlight the requirements on the innovative spirit and practical abilities of students, attach more attention to cultivation of their initiatives, encourage their creative thinking… and foster their curiosity and aspiration to knowledge.” Accordingly, visual art and music appear in the curriculum, with standards that seem to place a heavy emphasis on cultivating early interest and enjoyment of the arts, which are linked to character, integrity, spirit of patriotism, and optimism. (Caveat: a thorough translation of the standards is difficult to find, though the College Board provides a rough overview here.)

According to UNESCO, music and fine art are required for two hours a week in elementary school, down to one hour a week in junior secondary school. The first two grades of senior secondary school (e.g. high school) offer one hour a week of “art appreciation.” Based on my conversations with several students from China, those courses are more in line with what we think of as “art history” than in-depth studio courses; not a lot of emphasis is placed on students creating works of art themselves. Those students also stressed that most classes are taught as lectures, with teachers taking very few questions. Not surprisingly, then, dance and drama have very little presence in schools, though after-school programs are available to students in urban areas.

To most Western observers the country’s emphasis on rote memorization is a problem the country will need to tackle eventually, especially as the country considers reforming its higher education institutions to resemble our liberal arts universities. (In fact, some universities are explicitly designed around a liberal arts agenda.) The arts may play a more central role in China’s schools if and when significant university reforms move ahead.

Germany

We’ve touched on what might happen to arts education if we didn’t have a national body overseeing schools and student learning. What might happen if we had a bigger one – or, even better, several of them?

Judging by the German model, we’d have more money – or at least an easier time tracking it. While most countries have few government offices concerned with arts education, Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education & Research has an entire division devoted to it. Per this fantastic 2010 issue of UNESCO Today, the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth has one too. Not to be outdone, the Federal Commissioner for Culture and Media oversees an annual award program of €60,000 (roughly $80,000) to “acknowledge the importance of exemplary cultural education projects.”

Just as in the United States, Australia and Canada, education in Germany is considered a state responsibility. The country moved, however, toward more nationalization in response to its poor performance on (what else?) the 2000 PISA. Among other reforms, national standards and curriculum frameworks for primary grades were adopted in 2003.  As far as I can gather, the arts were not included in that effort.

Nevertheless, by all external appearances Germany is doing such a bang-up job of providing support systems for arts education that untangling them is a daunting proposition.  Luckily, two intrepid academics, Susanne Keuchel and Dominic Larue, beat me to it with a graphic titled “Arts education as a cross-sectional task in German federalism”:

 Thanks to Keuchel and Larue’s analysis (and a 2008 parliamentary mandate to track this spending), Germany is the only country for which I could ballpark discrete national investment in arts education. Between 2001 and 2007, the Ministries of Education and Family Affairs doled out €9.5-10.5 million ($12.6-$14 million) annually for the arts. Taking current federally-funded initiatives into consideration, one can assume those numbers increased in the last 5 years. The current initiatives include researching Jeden Kind ein Instrument, a pilot program in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia that provides instruments to students ages 6-10, and the recently announced “Educational Alliances to Reduce Educational Deprivation,” which has the Ministry of Education supporting after-school cultural education programs to the tune of €30 million ($40 million) a year.

In short, national support for arts education is abundant and complex. With so many arts-friendly policies in place, do all students in Germany get more arts education during the school day than we might expect in the United States?

The surprising answer is no. How much arts education a student receives depends on how he or she is tracked. All students receive the same basic education (grundschule) from roughly age six through nine. After those first four years, students are divided into one of three programs:

• Haptschule, designed for students perceived as having lower academic skills. The program lasts approximately five years and culminates in a vocational certificate.
• Realschule, designed for students perceived as having some academic skills. This program lasts six years, and prepares students for middle-management positions.
• Gymnasium, for students perceived as the most academically adept and “suited” for university. Gymnasium lasts through what we would consider high school, but is more challenging than the typical high school in the United States.

Visual art and music are included in all tracks, but the recommended allotments of time vary:

• Grundschule:  85 hours per year
• Hautpschule: 56 hours per year in grades 5-6, zero beyond that
• Realschule: 141 hours in grade 5, 113 in grade 6, 56 in 7-9, zero in grade 10
• Gymnasium: 113 hours year in grades 5-7, 56 in grades 8-10, zero in 11-12 (though electives are available)

We can’t glean much from these numbers (are the content and structure of art offerings the same in all tracks?), but a few things stand out. All students are not expected to learn or have access to the same things, but arts education seems to be universally valued. To quote Keuchel and Larue again,

 “If ten years ago in Germany the need and the importance of arts education were still stressed, today the accents have shifted: one does not ask any more whether arts education is good, but checks upon the quality of arts educational projects in particular cases.”

Even the Germans don’t think they have everything figured out – three years ago, the Enquête Commission of Culture in Germany issued a series of recommendations (summarized here starting page 22) to advance arts education.  Those recommendations include:

• adding the arts to the Arbitur (the college entrance exam issued to Gymnasium students), probably to address concerns that the arts are “squeezed out” as students prepare for the Big Test
• developing national standards for cultural education
• funding more competitions and awards for cultural education
• developing partnership networks between schools and arts organizations

Germany’s model implies that a country can make a sustained, direct investment in arts education with admirable results. It also implies that the age-old tension between quality and equity does not necessarily go away with increased resources.

South Africa

As the United States reacts against No Child Left Behind’s narrowed curriculum with the Common Core, South Africa reacts against a flexible system with a return to “the 3 Rs.” Spurred by an “education crisis” and “national disgrace,” the country is in the middle of a massive reform that retains the arts as core in its curriculum while adopting the most large-scale, standardized system profiled here.

South Africa spends more money on education (more than 5% of GDP) than any other country on the continent, and by most accounts is getting a poor return on its investment.  With the end of the apartheid regime in 1994, education was made compulsory for all students through grade 9, though the legacies of apartheid and language barriers (South Africa has 11 official tongues) have hampered the country’s quest to provide equal access to education for all its young people.

The first education reform in newly democratic South Africa was “Outcomes Based Education” (OBE). Intended to support a holistic approach to learning that allowed students to demonstrate understanding in a variety of ways, OBE provided few guidelines to teachers. Since many teachers were poorly trained under apartheid, they were ill equipped to deliver instruction through an open-ended system. OBE was scrapped in 2010, with little complaint:

“In theory, at least, OBE turn[ed] the educational process away from a rigid top-down system to one that … let[s] students demonstrate they “know and are able to do” things derived from their growing understanding and mastery of material.  Too often, however… OBE became a treadmill for teachers to create their own student study materials, evaluate a stream of student projects and deal with the administrative tasks and documentation that absorbed hours, even in the poorest schools.”

OBE was replaced by “Schooling 2025,” which outlines a much more rigid and uniform curriculum – driven at the national level and consistent across the entire country — with specific breakdowns of how much time teachers should be spending on each topic, and little choice in what should be taught when, or how. (For an example of how it addresses the arts, see this National Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement.) Based on conversation with Yvette Hardie, a theater educator, producer and director in South Africa involved with the curriculum process, textbooks are similarly prescriptive, designed to “teach teachers how to teach” rather than supplement instruction.

Schooling 2025 standardizes assessments and workbooks, and “collapses” certain curriculum areas to ease the burden on teachers. Hence, in grades K-6, the arts are included in a broader subject called “life skills.” Life skills “aims to develop learners through three different, but interrelated study areas, that is, personal and social well-being, physical education and creative arts.” The creative arts include four arts disciplines to be “studied in two parallel and complementary streams – visual arts and performing arts (dance, drama, and music).” As a subject area, “life skills” is typically taught by oneinstructor who, similar to the generalist elementary teacher in the United States, does not have a great deal of arts training.

K-3 students receive six hours of life skills per week, with the arts allocated two of those hours. In grades 4-6, allocations are reduced to 4 and 1.5 hours, respectively. Students receive two hours a week of discrete “creative arts” in grades 7-9, and pick from arts electives in grades 10-12. Schools choose which elective disciplines to offer based on the availability of qualified staff and the “abilities, talents and preferences” of their students. Distinct Curriculum and Assessment Policy Documents have been developed for each discrete arts discipline at those upper three grades.

Only grades 4 and 10 are using the new curriculum so far, though policy documents are complete for all grades. It is too early to tell what the impact of Schooling 2025 on the arts will be. On the one hand, including arts in the standardized curriculum may ensure all students get a basic level of instruction. On the other, the system, designed to scaffold the most poorly trained teachers, is so prescriptive it may prove stifling in the long term.

Implications

Amidst this maze of education reforms, priorities, policies and national/state structures, a few themes leap out as relevant to our national dialogue around arts education.

First and foremost, assessments matter. As much as we bemoan the “drill and kill” culture associated with large-scale, standardized testing, all countries (except Canada) are motivated by test scores, whether issued via the PISA or internal metrics. We are also not the only country to see the arts de-emphasized in favor of what is on a test. We do seem to be unique in:

• When that de-emphasis takes place. China’s gaokao and Germany’s Arbitur are at the end of high school, whereas testing under NCLB focuses on elementary grades. In China and Germany arts learning requirements diminish as students prepare for the test; in the United States, more high schools than elementary schools report teaching art subjects.
• The scale of testing (the Arbitur is given only to students graduating Gymnasium, which is approximately one-quarter of the student population; the gaokao is technically optional).

As the Common Core is implemented in the United States, the content and structure of its corresponding assessments will impact how much attention is paid to the arts. States participating in the Common Core choose to participate in one of two testing “consortia” – Smarter Balanced or Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC). Both had planned on assessments that would include  complex performance-based tasks alongside multiple choice questions – which seemed to provide an opening for more arts integration. Smarter Balanced’s recent decision to scale down the number of performance tasks is disheartening, but the truth is that we know very little about what the “testing” climate in the United States will look like in the next few years.

Secondly, including the arts as “core” is important, and defining them as “arts” has weaknesses AND strengths. To many of us, the victory of “arts as core” under ESEA was muted by a sense that the definition should be more specific. Vagueness has its drawbacks: I’ve had numerous people – including museum educators – express surprise that my work in “arts education” includes theater. Seeking validation of each specific art form through our definition of “arts” is understandable. Australia, as the only country to name five arts disciplines in its curriculum, recognizes this. The country should be lauded for its goal to provide all students instruction in five art forms, but the discipline in-fighting leading up to and resulting from Australia’s policy changes is instructive. Even if we extend school days across our country, we have to acknowledge the trade-off between breadth and depth of experience. Requiring students to participate in many arts disciplines within the school environment prevents them from gaining a lot of experience in any one.

Similarly, a strong national arts education “mandate” can be a double-edged sword. Enacting pan-Canadian arts education policy is difficult, if not impossible, without a central body overseeing education. Nonetheless, Canada isn’t clamoring for a department of education (maybe because despite its de-centralized system, its PISA scores are pretty high). Australia’s ambitious national requirements around the arts in schools, meanwhile, leave some states grousing the new curriculum doesn’t honor or acknowledge quality work that has already taken place.

Germany occupies an interesting middle ground between these two, in that the federal government issues few distinct arts education policies, but does invest a great deal in support of arts education. (Brazil will be interesting to watch for a similar, non-arts-specific reason – its current education plan provides few specifics for how things should happen in a classroom, but a whole lot of resources to give that “how” breathing room.) Beyond providing financial resources, Germany’s national ministries lend visibility to the intersections of arts and education, and assert that the arts play a central role in the country’s identity despite the fact that all students are not provided them equally.

More arts-education friendly policies in the United States might not mandate that all children learn x, y and z. They may instead continue to affirm “arts” as core, while supporting assessments that accurately capture student gains without overburdening schools. With the Common Core on the horizon, we have a lot to learn about whether something resembling a national curriculum is even viable. As we do, the models above, for all of their strengths and challenges, provide hints of where we may wind up.

(The author would like to thank the following individuals who  assisted in the research of this piece by answering questions, sharing resources and expertise, and/or providing connections to people who could: Octavio Camargo, Agnieszka Chalas, Yvette Hardie, Volker Langbehn, Kate Li, Jessica Litwin, Christopher Madden, Jennifer Marsh, Tom McKenzie, Ian David Moss, Scott Ruescher, Jason van Eyk, Shannon Wilkins and Yang Yan.)