Funding the Arts

"F" is for Funding in my A to Z Challenge

Yesterday, I put up a couple of posts about Arts Education in Schools vs "Core Standards", including studies in which employers say that the arts make students more employable and give them needed creative skills.

This is my call for those corporations to step on up, and invest in their future. Put their money towards educating those kids, so five to ten years from now they will have a potential employee pool that better meets their needs.

There are two ways to get arts to kids. One is to get the arts back in schools, which can be done if the artist has the patience and time to formulate a program that fits into the mold of the Common Core State Standards. I teach such classes through Great Big Planet. I was in McKenny, Virginia just the other week presenting a program on Rainforests. The presentation utilizes props, video, student volunteers, and I bring a little live music into the mix. The kids learn about endangered species, how rain forests affect climate, indigenous peoples, and how to make a difference. Schools need funding to bring these types of shows to the kids.

The other way to get arts to kids is through after school programs. I have been part of the Ashland Stage Arts Program and Christian Youth Theater, both programs that teach performing arts to kids. My wife is a piano teacher and teaches kids in her studio. She has also taught dance. However, not all families can afford such after school programs. Businesses should make it easy not only for non profits, but also for individual teachers like my wife, to offer free or low cost lessons to kids. As I've mentioned before, there is a lot of talk about supporting the arts, but not that much about supporting the artists. Artists as teachers shouldn't have to struggle so hard to make a living, and kids shouldn't have such limited access to the arts.

Gold Cup trophies awarded to my wife's piano students through the NFMC

Personally, I'd love to have a studio where I could not only make the props and crazy stuff that I do from time to time, but also could produce large scale puppet theater, all the while teaching kids how to make stuff. Engineering as Art.

When Senator Mark Warner was visiting Ashland, Virginia last week, he said that the Fortune 1000 companies had done very well over the last couple of years, and are sitting on about two trillion dollars that needs to be re-invested in America. Arts education is a good place to start.

"F" is for Funding, and April is Parkinson's Awareness Month

neatoday article on Arts Education

From the National Education Association, April 5th, 2012:

The U.S. Department of Education painted a somewhat bleak picture of the state of arts education in America’s schools this week. According to new findings - the first government survey in a decade that tracks the availability of arts in schools – fewer elementary schools are offering visual arts, dance and drama classes than during a decade ago

The DOE’s report come on the heels of a recent study by the National Endowment for the Arts that specifically tracked the impact arts has on economically disadvantaged students. These students who have access to arts in or out of school tend to have better academic results, better workforce opportunities, and more civic engagement, according to the report. Specifically, low-income students who had arts-rich experiences in high school were ten percent more likely to complete, for example, a high school calculus course than similar students who had less exposure to the arts.

In addition, economically-disadvantaged students who had exposure to the arts were more likely to have planned to earn a bachelor’s degree (74 percent) than were economically-disadvantaged students with little or no access to the arts (43 percent).

All this is a result of the ill-fated "No Child Left Behind Act". Schools are so busy teaching to the tests, they don't have time to teach kids how to think. It is missing the forest for the trees. In the mean time, you've got stuff like the Common Core State Standards, which states:

The Common Core State Standards Initiative is a state-led effort coordinated by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO). The standards were developed in collaboration with teachers, school administrators, and experts, to provide a clear and consistent framework to prepare our children for college and the workforce.

This seems to me to be just more of the same. Standardized testing is the antithesis of creative studies. The very effort to "prepare our children for college and the workforce" is resulting in fewer of them attending those colleges and having fewer workforce opportunities.

Oh the irony. As Katherine Damkohler points out over on Artsblog, "Currently, and in the near future, the dialog within schools focuses upon the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). The shifts that are required to implement the CCSS are vital for arts partners to understand."

So in order to get the Arts anywhere near schools, you have to couch them in language relating to these "standards". Forget the Arts for their own sake. The Arts must somehow conform to the banality of standards designed to do what the arts inherently do, yet standards that miss the mark entirely.