Social Innovations
Arts Education Needs Investment
A new study says arts education should be expanded.
Supply of the arts is outpacing demand, a critical gap that arts advocates and investors need to help bridge.
The arts help drive the U.S. economy, and arts advocates have done a good job building arts programs and access to them.
But they also have failed to invest enough in arts education to build an audience for the arts.
That is the conclusion of a new RAND study for the Wallace Foundation that urges policymakers in the arts and in education to focus more on changing public policies to strengthen and expand arts education.
Connecting kids to the arts helps ensure they will become arts consumers as adults, creating the demand needed to help cultural life in America thrive, the study says.
National and state standards for the arts content that schools should teach are comprehensive, the study says, but too few students actually get that education because state, local, and district policies fail to provide the resources or school time to teach the arts.
And over the last 20 years, the study says, state arts agencies have invested less than 10 percent of their grants in arts learning.
The study recommends that state arts agencies and policymakers survey arts education in their states, develop high-school graduation requirements for the arts, publicize exceptional arts-learning programs, and push for changes in state policy to increase the amount and breadth of arts-learning opportunities.
“For policy change to happen at the state level, the entire arts community needs to get behind it,” an author of the study says. “Arts educators can’t do it by themselves.”
A 2007 study by Americans for the Arts found nonprofit arts and culture fueled $166.2 billion in spending in the U.S. in 2005, generated $29.6 billion in annual federal, state and local tax revenue, and accounted for 5.7 million jobs.
In addition to enriching our culture, the arts clearly are big business.
But until arts advocates and investors focus more of their effort and resources on closing the gap between demand and supply, the arts will fall far short of their potential to transform civic society into a culture that is truly civil.
Todd Cohen, a veteran news reporter and editor, is editor and publisher of Philanthropy Journal, an online newspaper published by the A.J. Fletcher Foundation in Raleigh, N.C. Cohen has taught nonprofit reporting and media relations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at Duke University, and regularly speaks on the topics of nonprofit media relations and trends in the charitable world.
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COMMENTS
BY christina Rupsch
ON September 22, 2008 11:40 AM
I am concerned about the lack of support at the higher education levels. Quite often you will find the needed financial support for music programs but not for the visual arts. Knowing that the music programs provide bands for sports, etc., I believe they are perceived as neccessary entertainments for the institution at large however visual art and theater are not that important for the school image.
So, if there is a lack of support at this level, how is it perceived at the K-12 level?
BY Marv
ON October 3, 2008 02:22 PM
I am also concerned about kids getting enough arts education, or at least exposure to the arts so that hopefully they will pursue it further on their own if they can’t get enough in school. I encountered a college student recently who had no idea who Robert Rauschenberg was, despite being a major figure in late 20th century art. I really think that getting exposure to the arts can help kids think outside the box, and encourage creativity. I have an arts educator friend who told me about a website which aims to give kids an introduction to major figures in the arts in a fun way through games and “investigations,” he was telling me he thought it was effective because the kids were learning without feeling like they were being taught. Since showing it to my kids, I’ve been encouraging others to utilize it with their kids: www.artsology.com