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.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• The International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies concluded its sixth World Summit on Arts and Culture in Chile earlier this month. Nearly 400 arts leaders and policymakers from 67 countries gathered to address shared challenges facing the arts world.  The summit coincided with the launch of IFACCA’s report detailing arts advocacy campaigns and best practices.
• The NEA’s Director of Design, Jason Schupbach, talks about the agency’s next steps in creative placemaking “in the spirit of openness and oversharing,” and telegraphs a gradual shift in Our Town’s focus from local case studies to national initiatives.
• New Jersey is the first state in the country to include data on student enrollment in the visual and performing arts in its annual report on school performance. Slightly less than half of Garden State high school students are enrolled in a course in one of the four art forms.
• The New York Times provides a glimpse into the capricious process used by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs to review and approve applications from prospective residents seeking to live in lofts legally reserved for artists.
• A proposed noise ordinance in New Orleans drew a musical protest outside of city hall when musicians gathered to ensure their political voices, and their music, are not only heard, but heard at a proper volume.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Joan Finkelstein, formerly Director of 92^nd Street Y Harness Dance Center, is the new Director of the Harkness Foundation for Dance, replacing Theodore S. Bartwink.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• More good news for Gibney Dance: Director Gina Gibney’s dreams of turning their new space previously occupied by Dance New Amersterdam into a resource for emerging artists are $3 million closer to becoming a reality thanks to a  gift from the Agnes Varis Trust to make repairs to the facilities.
• Can an accounting change by SoundExchange impact the ability of middle-class performers and indie labels to create more music? The Future of Music Coalition thinks so.  A frequently disbursed stream of income that pays performers on a monthly, rather than quarterly, basis can help free up musicians to concentrate on their work rather than wonder how they’ll pay next month’s bills.
• Internet radio service Pandora pays nearly half its revenue to performing artists and labels, while only 4.3 percent goes to songwriters and publishers. Think that’s unfair? So does the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) which represents the latter. But it was Pandora that brought suit to lower the royalty rate paid to ASCAP members. At the heart of the issue is whether music publishers can remove their catalogs from digital transmissions, while still using professional recording organizations like ASCAP to represent their work on issues such as collecting money from terrestrial AM/FM radio stations.
• Meanwhile, back in the world of terrestrial radio, this is what happens when you leave cultural taste-making to the whims of the commercial marketplace. More than ever before, radio stations are playing the same damn songs over and over. The article is interesting throughout, including such tidbits as the fact that the top 10 songs last year were played twice as much as the top 10 songs a decade ago, the fact that this trend is an example of data-driven decision-making on the part of radio stations, and this quote:
  

  In the new intensely scrutinized world of radio, said Mr. Darden, “taking risks is not rewarded, so we have to be more careful than ever before.”

IN THE FIELD

• Ever admire the shelves of beautiful art books as you exit through the gift shop? Turns out they rarely turn a profit, so commercial publishers often avoid them. Enter the Artist Book Foundation, a new nonprofit dedicated to filling the gap.
• Norwegian readers are in for a treat: 135,000 titles, still protected by copyright, are going online for free in Norway thanks to an agreement arranged between the National Library of Norway and Kopinor, an umbrella organization of major authors and publishers.
• Sometimes, when you want a concerto, you really want a concerto: during the Minnesota Orchestra’s lock-out attendance at smaller community orchestras jumped noticeably. We won’t know the long-term effects until well after concerts at Orchestra Hall resume on February 7.
• Just as the musicians of the Minnesota Orchestra prepare to head back to the stage, the entire board of Minnesota Dance Theater abruptly resigned last week, with no explanation yet as to the reason.
• Confused about the difference between a “cultural cluster and a “cultural district”? Learn more in a podcast highlighting work in Cincinnati led by ArtsWave and the Kennedy Heights Arts Center.
• In a victory for Venn diagrams, Americans for the Arts and 12 other national arts and education organizations have endorsed “A Shared Endeavor: Arts Education for America’s Students,” which defines shared delivery of arts education and identifies advocacy priorities generalist teachers, art specialists and teaching artists can support together.
• Arts administrators take note: Americans for the Arts has announced its spring webinar series, which includes sessions on the NEA, rural and small communities, and assessing social impact.

BIG IDEAS

• American artists are taking note of an international movement to ensure a “basic income” for all as a way of ending poverty. In a model proposed by Swiss artist Benno Schmidt, every citizen would receive a modest monthly check, regardless of need or merit.
• Is a permanent facility an asset or a prison to the modern arts organization? Diane Ragsdale shares four steps to scrutinize and reframe organizational core beliefs, and applies them to commonly-held assumptions regarding building-based arts organizations.
• Founder and CEO of The Teaching Company Thomas Rollins, whose nerd-tastic “great lectures on world history” got an affectionate nod in Createquity’s article on MOOCs and arts education, wades into the MOOC debate himself and finds the idea that they can transform higher education to be “utter nonsense.”

RESEARCH CORNER

• What does the cultural data landscape look like? Get a bird’s eye view from the report New Data for the Cultural Landscape: Towards a Better Informed Stronger Future just published by the Cultural Data Project. Barry Hessenius pulls out key highlights and probes the persistent challenge of educating leaders in our field to make strategic decisions using data.
• AFTA’s Randy Cohen digs deep into the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s recent report on the contributions of the arts to GDP. Turns out, it omits a lot of architecture, design and creative writing at the college level, and many arts grantmakers. Fortunately, the BEA is open to suggestions for improving its strong first cut. Follow the link to contribute your thoughts.
• The University of Chicago’s Cultural Policy Center is out with the second issue of The Digest, which summarizes academic research on the cultural sector from the around the world, which is often inaccessible to a broad audience. The issue examines “creative cities in theory and practice.”
• A new Pew report finds that, although the typical American read five books last year, nearly a quarter of us read none at all. In related news, libraries continue to draw patrons in innovative ways, such as installing 3D printers, shifting collections from the academic to the popular, and offering hog-butchering seminars.
• Big Data may be a boon for marketers, but when does segmentation cross over the line into discrimination? A research fellow at MIT argues that this is the central ethical dilemma of today’s data analysts.

Venn diagrams. Photograph by Demetri Mouratis

When some brave soul writes an updated history of arts education in the United States (any takers?) I think he or she will describe the early-to-mid-2000s as an ambitious era. The arts education sector, mirroring the broader arts field and the constantly reforming field of education, is having larger and broader conversations about impact, outcomes and sustainability. In the process it’s moving toward large and broader models of best practice such as the idea of  “shared delivery”  (also known as “blended delivery” and the “three-legged stool model”). Shared delivery has been in vogue for the last few years. It was a central topic of conversation at the Grantmakers in the Arts Conference in 2008. Americans for the Arts identifies shared delivery as a key component to a broader approach called “coordinated delivery” – which, in turn, was identified as a major arts education trend in 2010. My own initiative, Arts for All, upholds shared delivery as integral to the vision of ensuring high quality arts education for all students in Los Angeles County.

In the K-12 public school setting, shared delivery envisions students receiving arts instruction from three distinct parties: 1) generalist elementary school teachers, 2) arts specialists, and 3) teaching artists and/or community arts organizations. Under this model, the three collaborate to provide visual and performing arts programs to children. The generalist teacher integrates the arts throughout daily lessons across subject areas, the specialist hones in on skills and content specific to his or her art form, and the teaching artist supports one or both while engaging directly with students and providing the perspective of a working arts professional. The model posits that each of these three roles is of equal importance. While there are different attempts to represent this idea graphically (try here, here and here (page 17)), all fall back on a basic visual of three concentric circles:

Shared delivery does not reflect what I or, based on anecdotal evidence, the majority of people within my age bracket received in terms of arts education. My fifth grade generalist teacher was a woman named Mrs. Gonzalez. I saw her every day, and she taught me math, reading, science, history and so forth. My school had a visual arts specialist, Ms. Peters, whom I saw once a week. Art never really came up during my math/reading/science/history lessons, and math/reading/science/history never really came up during my art lessons, so if Mrs. Gonzalez and Ms. Peters worked together behind the scenes, their collaboration wasn’t readily apparent to me. The only visiting teaching artists I recall encountering in elementary school were members of a theater company who performed an abridged version of Macbeth during a school-wide assembly in our cafeteria. Afterwards they sat on plastic chairs and answered questions. They stayed for about an hour, and we never saw them again.

Were I the beneficiary of a true shared delivery model of arts education, those actors would have come into my classroom and taught me theater for a number of weeks or months alongside Mrs. Gonzalez, who would in turn be learning theater techniques to use in other subject areas, all the while also working with Ms. Peters to draw connections to visual art. I may have had a teaching artist work with me and my teacher in third or fourth grade so that I understood the elements of visual art by the time I got to Ms. Peters in fifth grade. I would have had a lot more art in my life, period.

Shared delivery is ambitious and, on a broad scale, largely theoretical. As with much in arts education, the roots of the model stretch back to budget cuts in public schools beginning in the 1970s, when broad anti-tax sentiment gripped the country. In California, this sentiment manifested in a state-wide ballot measure capping property tax rates, at a time when California’s school districts received the bulk of their funding from local property taxes. When the measure passed, schools braced for a huge – according to this 1978 estimate, more than 33%– drop in revenue. Similar cuts impacted state and local education budgets across the country; according to the Center for Arts Education, New York City had a robust curriculum in all four art forms before the city’s 1970s fiscal crisis pushed it to the brink of bankruptcy. How many visual and performing arts teachers were laid off as a result across the country is difficult to determine, but it appears that schools took a pretty big hit from which they never fully recovered. In 2007, per SRI’s analysis of arts education across California, 61% of the state’s schools did not have even one full-time equivalent arts specialist on staff.

Concurrent with these cuts, the field of teaching artistry was formalizing. As described in NORC at the University of Chicago’s 2011 report, “Teaching Artists and the Future of Education,”

Artists slowly began entering schools in the 1950s. Their roles were initially limited to introducing students to the excitement of live performance… That began changing in the mid-1960s… Artists in the Schools became one of the first programs of the new National Endowment for the Arts. By the mid-1970s, Young Audiences, Urban Gateways, Lincoln Center Institute of Arts Education, and other organizations in major cities were sending artists to schools to teach workshops and residencies.

These teaching artists brought with them what NORC calls a “new kinds of arts pedagogy” that “modified the more hierarchical pedagogy of the conservatories, rooted in European classical tradition, to find an approach based on the principles that the arts are for everyone.” As “quasi-outsiders” in the public school system, teaching artists could experiment with new ways of teaching the visual and performing arts, many of which went on to become best practices. Given the loss of arts specialists, teaching artistry also allowed many students who otherwise may never had access to a certain art form to learn directly from a professional. Schools, in turn, clearly saw the benefit.  According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2009-10 42% of elementary schools across the country reported partnerships or collaborations with cultural or community organizations, 31% with individual artists, 29% with museums or galleries, and 26% with performing arts centers.

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the standards-and-accountability movement took full force across the United States, with states defining or redefining what students should know and be able to do in each grade level and in each content area, including the arts. National visual and performing arts standards were developed in 1994 (with a revision due out later this year), and every state except for Iowa and Nebraska has adopted its own standards for the arts at the elementary or secondary level, or both. The quality of the state standards varies, but for the most part, they represent newly codified aspirations regarding what public school students should know in all art forms.

Alongside those aspirations came a realization that meeting the standards required changing how teaching artists and classroom teachers (both generalists and specialists) interact. A simple “service provider” arrangement, in which schools select and arts organizations deliver from a list of pre-designed programs, left classroom teachers and teaching artists operating in silos, with the teacher essentially “handing off” responsibility for arts instruction to a short-term visitor. As noted in the National Guild for Community Arts Education’s Partners in Excellence handbook, this approach “does not take full advantage of the expertise of both the artists and the educators to create in-depth, pedagogically sound arts experiences for children and professional enrichment for teachers.” The field’s definition of best practice shifted accordingly to include much higher levels of collaboration between teaching artists and classroom teachers. The teaching artist or arts organization’s goal is not to deliver a certain number of lessons to students, but to make sure something is left behind when the artist walks out of the classroom – be it lasting effects on students, a long-term increase in teachers’ skills, a changed school culture, or all of the above. Teachers, therefore, learn alongside students so that they can, in theory, carry on the arts instruction when the teaching artist is not there.

Hence, the shared delivery model engages not only students but also teachers, and posits that a number of individuals, and a lot of planning time, are needed to ensure that students learn what we want them to learn in dance, music, visual art and theater during the school day. The need for collaboration and planning is not unique to the arts in schools – numerous education initiatives (and even President Obama’s education platform) recognize that classroom teachers don’t have enough opportunities to work and reflect with their peers across subject areas. Shared delivery of arts education does, however, envision a lot of different visual and performing arts cooks in the proverbial education kitchen. Those cooks need to be paid and that kitchen needs supplies. Done well, shared delivery may have a fantastic return on investment, but collaboration takes time, and time takes money. As noted by SRI,

While integrating arts instruction into other subject areas may be pedagogically powerful and may maximize students’ instructional day, the collaboration necessary to make it successful appears to require a substantial amount of teacher time… This time came either from teacher contract time dedicated for planning or professional development or through schools paying to have two adults in the classroom – or both.

Shared delivery isn’t cheap, which begs the question of whether it’s realistic. Many schools, not to mention arts organizations, are gearing up for their fourth consecutive year of budget cuts. We can’t argue that having three parties work together to provide arts education during the school day is more economically efficient than just having one or two – it’s not – and we are particularly vulnerable if we assume the need for multiple parties is unique to the arts. Granted, “shared delivery of math instruction” sounds pretty weird: imagine if Ms. Gonzales, while teaching my class about variables and basic algebra, had been collaborating with a math specialist whom we also saw once a week, and we’d had periodic visits from a friendly community partner from, say, a local investment or research firm, and that partner led us through hands-on projects that allowed us to see how using letters to stand in for numbers applies to real-life, day-to-day careers and decisions – hold up, that sounds amazing.

The real costs/benefits of this approach have yet to be known, but in my mind, the promise of the shared delivery model is not that it allows us to “restore” arts education in a cheaper or easier way. True shared delivery is such a far cry from what most of us received growing up that its relevance to a (possibly mythical) “golden age” for arts education within classrooms is dubious. Instead, it aspires for an entirely new vision of how all students receive arts instruction – and perhaps, by extension, how education works in general. The promise of the model is that it acknowledges deep and meaningful learning, whether in nuclear physics or dance, happens when different experiences, concepts and skills overlap. You can’t expect to learn everything from a single source any more than you can consider yourself an expert on a topic by hunkering down alone and reading a textbook. Colleagues in other subject areas are aware of this; several math and science grant programs run through the Department of Education and National Science Foundation feature an emphasis on partnerships similar to what I described above, with the latter going so far as to aim to “promote institutional and organizational change in education systems — from kindergarten through graduate school.”

We may not be entirely alone, then, in the scale of what we hope to achieve. We even may be ahead of the curve in recognizing how deeply those concentric circles need to overlap in order to be effective, and in developing best practices for how that overlap happens. In order to take the model further, we need to pay more attention to the all-too-neglected shared spaces between the arts specialist and community arts provider, and between the arts specialist and generalist. We also need to be meticulous in documenting and discussing how the circles come together and stay together over time, and assertive in sharing what we are learning with colleagues from other subject areas. As complex as it is, the very notion of shared delivery reflects how far we have come as a field: from trying to “catch up” to other subjects in schools, to pioneering collaborations between teachers, schools and communities that those other subjects may very well learn from.  With luck, future students will thank us for our ambition.