For the
past year or so I was a member of an Arts Education Task Force established by
the New York City Department of Education. The Task Force looked at two
particular areas: quality and data. Quality was about defining and ensuring
“high quality” arts education; data was about providing feedback and
advice to the Annual Arts in the Schools Report. The Task Force had two
subcommittees, one for each of the focus areas. Overall, the Task Force, a
who’s who of arts education in
York City
recommendations for the school district, as well as created a quality rubric.
Many people believe the Task Force was created as a result of criticism over the elimination of a long term categorical funding line for arts education: Project Arts. If you click on the link, you’ll notice that the NYCDOE isn’t providing much information about Project Arts. Perhaps this link is a better choice if you want to know more.
The schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein sent an email recently to each Task Force
member, thanking them for their work, updating them a number of issues, and introduced
four questions of concern going forward.
Let’s just call them, for the moment, the four questions of arts education.
It’s not all that often that you will receive an email or just about anything
from a school district superintendent about arts education. The most you would
usually get would be some sort of platitude laced statement about the critical importance of arts education, etc. I would also note that the email was not marked confidential.
These four questions are not the usual platitudes. There are certainly multiple ways of
interpreting these questions. For the moment I will hold off on providing
any interpretation of my own.
Here they are, what do you think?
Four questions about arts education from schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein:
1. What is the
relationship between inputs and outputs in
arts education?
2. Does an investment in arts professional
development pay
off in terms of student achievement in the arts?
3. What school-level variables are
prerequisites for
successful arts education delivery?
4. What are the common elements that can
be identified
among schools with strong arts programs?
5 responses to “The Four Questions of Arts Education”
C’mon Richard! I have laughed and cried reading this. Tell me that it is way out of context, tell me that it is not the REAL chaancellor of one of the largest school districts in the nation asking these questions.
Your four questions make more sense to me.
My answers to his might be:
1.Inputs go in and outputs go out.
2.Yes, No, I don’t know, could you repeat the question?
3. Possibly the same as office-level variables, or hospital-level variables, or library level variables.
4. Strong arts programs.
After reviewing the questions-they seem business oriented, as if putting arts into the students will provide a certain sum or result later. It’s an equation.
Arts education keeps some students in school altogether – IB and sports might not be significant, but a school’s theater, dance, design, etc. keeps students from dropping out. How do you quantify that? Arts education keeps students from dropping out of school and helps the graduation numbers. Maybe that’s the end result.
Why does the link for the 4 questions of arts education lead to the four questions of Passover in Hebrew?
Might want to check links…..
Note, while these four questions are obviously answered by artists and arts groups, many of those people outside the arts want answers to them to justify arts education. Sadly, they dont see the intrinsic value of the arts naturally…people want their data spoon fed to them. Hence the importance of such foundations as Wallace who are working to give the general public what they want in terms of data. I also do think that as individual arts organizations, we should devise and implement more rubrics and assessment tools, because this is how you justify the arts.
Simply saying its dumb for people to even ask these questions, doesnt help.
So long as we ignore the value of thousands of years of human intellectual ancestry, we will forever be doomed to the futility of translating the arts into the jargon of another field in order to justify its mere existence.
I don’t actually think these questions are entirely out of place and to my mind they don’t put the value of arts education into question at all — the fact that arts education is important and valued is implicit in the questions being asked.
What the questions do point out is that all arts education programs are not created equal — and that’s true for any academic discipline. I don’t love the business language being used here, but if you peel away the jargon, I think these are important issues to be discussed.
My translation:
1. What is the relationship between inputs and outputs in arts education? TRANSLATION: Are you getting good value for your investment in arts education? Are the programs provided to students high-quality? Are students getting the high-quality arts education they deserve?
2. Does an investment in arts professional development pay off in terms of student achievement in the arts? TRANSLATION: Basically the same as above, but with respect to PD. Is the investment in particular PD programs paying off in the classroom? Are teachers gaining increased expertise that translates into students getting higher-quality arts education programs where they’re learning more and developing more sophisticated arts abilities.
3. What school-level variables are prerequisites for successful arts education delivery? TRANSLATION: What works well when it comes to arts education? What are the essential ingredients that absolutely must be in place for students to get the arts education they need and deserve?
4. What are the common elements that can be identified among schools with strong arts programs? TRANSLATION: What are the best practices in arts education that are working in schools with high-quality, successful arts programs, and how can we replicate those practices across the system so that every student gets a great arts education?
Putting aside the annoying business jargon, I think those actually are all issues worth thinking and talking about. I personally have worked as a teaching artist and then a program manager at several arts organizations — and there was a very significant range of quality variation between programs I worked with. There were times where schools chose to drop programs not because they had insufficient funding but because they weren’t satisfied with the program. That’s a reality.
There is no reason why we shouldn’t be thinking about what works in arts education, because even great programs have room to improve and considering that the NYC schools absolutely depend on outside organizations to support their arts education programs, they should be asking these questions to make sure that the programs and services they purchase are worthwhile (and they should be asking the same questions of any outside services, and for their own internal teaching programs as well).