William Safire Introduces: Planning an Arts-Centered School

Presenters: William Safire, The Dana Foundation; Janet Elber, Artistic Director, Martha Graham Resources; Carol Fineberg, Arts And Education Consultant, New York; Ronald Treanor, Woodrow Wilson Integrated Arts School, Weehauken, New Jersey; and Ellen Rudolph, Surdna Foundation, New York.

This session is presented in separate parts. Use the buttons at the end of the transcription to navigate between each part.

Part Three

JANET ELBERG: We are going to have more time for questions and answers. I'll take one more now, but I just wanted to let you know that you will have another chance.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I have been connected with public education for more years than I would like to say right now, but my experience has been that the arts are supported in a community to the degree that the arts people involved, particularly teachers, have been able to make the arts program something that the community is proud of. The same as many sports are community-centered, where everyone kind of supports the team, those teachers who have been able to make the drama program or the band or whatever the arts program might be kind of the center of attention of the school are the ones who then, when they are in trouble politically, have a whole groundswell of people to come out and support that.

But I just cannot miss the opportunity to say, since we have got a well-known journalist up here as part of the panel, that support in the community, or making the arts kind a central factor in the community, has a lot to do with how much the media in the community pay attention to the arts. For example, if you look at local newspapers across the country, you will find that most newspapers give far more space to local sports than they do the local arts.

A couple of newspapers are exceptions. The New York Times would certainly today, for example, have more pages for the arts than for sports. And just within the last year, the Los Angeles Times has changed its policy, and it also now has more pages devoted to the arts than to the sports. But I do not think that is true across the country. And, William Saffire, if you do not mind commenting on that.

WILLIAM SAFIRE: You are quite right about that. It is interesting, at the Times, news coverage of all the arts is one of the most carefully read sections of the paper. It attracts advertising. It is profitable for a journalistic enterprise to do a good job in the arts. That is an example that we are trying to set at the Times.

But at Dana, taking what you just said, the fact is that community involvement and parent involvement in the arts in connection with schools is a story. It is occasionally covered by local newspapers, but not frequently. What we are doing now is something we did with neuroscience. And that is, we had a publication called The Brain In The News, and we would go around and collect and put into one eight-page publication reprints of all the best articles around the country on brain science and send it out to editors as well as other interested people, to give people in the world of journalism, the media, the notion that, hey, this a story that is being covered and you are missing it.

We are starting that with arts education next week. It is called Arts Education In The News. You are the driving force behind it, Janet. What she has being doing — thank God for Lexis-Nexis, you can pull together the best coverage of arts involvement in education — and what we will be doing is sending out this free publication to anybody who wants it, and also to arts editors and education editors, and stir them up a little more. So any of you who want a free subscription to it...

JANET ELBERG: How to order it will be on our Web site, or you can just give me your address or your card as you leave and I will put you on the mailing list.

ELLEN RUDOLPH: Can I stay with this for just one second to stay with your question, too? Even at the Times, however, there is going to be a big change, or it is happening already, in the arts coverage itself. And within the arts pages, there is more and more attention to — and you will correct me if I am wrong — on the changes that are about to happen to popular culture and films. There is even discussion about moving the theater coverage to behind the film coverage. And if you have watched it over the years, there is much more attention to film than there is to live arts, and they are hiring a new arts editor whose focus and background has been in popular culture.

So, it is a hard battle in local newspapers. And what Dana is doing I think is of major importance, because it could wind up in various sections of the newspapers besides the arts sections. I do not know what you are finding in your own communities, but there needs to be focus in some ways we have not thought of yet, because the attention in the media is turning to popular culture just as the schools are using arts more.

WILLIAM SAFIRE: If any of you see a good story in your local press that tells the story that we are trying to tell about the importance of arts in school, send it to us at Dana and we will get it into this Arts Education in the News and get it all over the country.

JANET ELBER: I think this also touches on one of our questions as fully as we are going to be able to: What do you do in tough economic times? Here is one answer. If the arts programs are engaging parents and the community and you have a support system, when the funds begin to slip away, you have a network of people who are going to stand up for you.

CAROL FINEBERG: Janet, may I just add one little thing to that? When people are required to do the public relations for their own projects, it is very burdensome. We were talking about parent involvement before. Here is a perfect example where parents can take some of that burden off the people who are doing the arts education themselves and get the news out and send it to people.

JANET ELBERG: Carol, I want to get on to evaluation, because I have a beef about it. When I was dancing and filling out grant applications, there were the hoops to jump through about evaluating our programs. People showed up, they bought tickets, they applauded, and we got reviewed the next day. How much more evaluation did we need? But how do you evaluate evaluation? Is a survey that is filled out by third-graders really objective enough? Internal? Do you have to have external evaluation?

ELLEN RUDOLPH: Can I just say one thing before you answer that? You just shortchanged in a way the kind of evaluation dancers do all the time, in the making of the work, the introspection that goes on, the daily critiquing, the self-assessment, the measure against impossible ideals of what you want your work to be, the articulation of that with your fellow dancers and musicians and the producers who are hiring your company. I think part of our problem is that we have not found the way to articulate and share what that process is that the artists go through on a daily basis in making their work as rigorous as it is.

CAROL FINEBERG: Unfortunately, we all agree. And as Bill said to us when we started out, we need a little conflict here. Well, evaluation is a great place to start. I make my living, in part, evaluating arts education programs, in that I work with arts organizations who want to know the degree to which they are having a positive impact on the people they are working with. That is a really nice way to run one's life.

But in the process of looking at evaluation, I have found more inappropriate practices, more inappropriate designs, designed to tell people who do not know the difference anyway that the arts are doing something miraculous in 10 sessions held once a week. There is a lot of money wasted on evaluating programs, when that money should be used to train the people within the organization that is providing the service to look at the quality of their service.

It is not so much impact on kids that needs to be evaluated, in my view, as it is the quality of the services that are being offered to the schools. How good are they? How well matched are the arts partners with the people in the schools? Dancers, anybody in the performing arts, are under scrutiny, as Ellen and Janet have said, all the time. It is not about that. It is about how well are they working in the schools and how do we prove that it is doing a good job.

JANET ELBERG: Is this more for professional development? Do teachers need to be trained to evaluate?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I think that there is a step before this discussion, which is what is it you want to get and what do you want to accomplish.

CAROL FINEBERG: And for whom.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: If it is that you want the teachers to work effectively with the arts community that they are bringing in for the benefit of the students, or for whatever the purpose may be, then professional development on both sides is necessary, and it is really more collaborative planning, discussion, laying out what it is that you need to do. So then, when you work it through, you can look back and say, well, we set out with this goal in mind. We brought this partner in to work with us. Let's look now at the outcome for who is the target. And what did we expect the students to know and be able to do at the end of this? What did we expect the teachers and the artists to do at the end of this?

So, what is that you are evaluating? I understand that you need to evaluate the quality of the group, but that is a very lopsided view. I know that is not your intention here. But it is not just whether or not the service they provide is good. It is whether or not what they did in collaboration with the teachers reached the outcome that they together set for the students or the parents.

CAROL FINEBERG: But, Sharon, the one thing that I find lacking over and over again is a high standard of accountability. So often people evaluate the quality of the planning without looking at the quality of the outcome — and you mentioned both.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I have to say one more thing. Go back to teacher preparation. One of the things I used to go around saying when I was an arts coordinator in a district was that the principals do not know what they do not know. They do not know what a quality dance performance is. So, if a dancer comes in and dances, that is great. So, who is evaluating and what is the knowledge base of the evaluator? You are asking a teacher to say this is a good service. If he has never seen a fine dance performance and has no way to determine it, then you are going to be evaluating poor service.

CAROL FINEBERG: Amen to you.

JANET ELBERG: Ellen, this is a good time for you to jump in.

ELLEN RUDOLPH: This is good transition. There was a question there, though?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I was just going to ask, doesn't that mean that it might be better to concentrate more on formative evaluation rather than summative evaluation?

ELLEN RUDOLPH: That is another good transition. Yes, I am yearning for the transition. I will give you one minute of background of how the Surdna Foundation got into this piece of evaluation. And I am not representing foundations here as a community. I am talking about one foundation's approach to finding out how they themselves were doing with their funding and, in asking that question, what the impact of their funding was, what the impact of the design of their funding programs was, what was wrong or right about the design,

They next found that what was being identified were the characteristics of very strong arts program. That answer came back to us by looking at the programs, by looking at the work that we were funding. The Surdna Foundation is a family foundation. It was begun in about 1917, and it funds in the environment and community development in an area called effective citizenry.

And one of its programs that is relatively new is the arts program. The focus of the arts program is very narrow. It is teenagers getting the chance to make art, working with accomplished artists in long-term art-making programs, and programs where the artists as well as the students, something happens, something grows, something is fed in their art-making by working together in long-term circumstances.

These programs happen in schools. They happen in after-school centers. They happen in summer festivals. They can happen anywhere. The center of it is what was happening for the student and was that student really being served and really developing an artistic voice that would help that student get where they wanted to get in the arts. Some of the programs are for kids who have already been identified as very gifted in the arts and some of them were for kids who were just having their first experiences in the arts.

In 2000, we hired a consultant to work with us, Richard Evans from EMC Arts, to look at the design and impact of the programs. Out of that, what he came back to us with was he said that some of the programs were so effective not because of Surdna but because of the practitioners and the students and the artists out in the field. They were so effective that they wanted to give us a framework that they saw for effective programs, that identified effective programs.

They saw that there were certain characteristics, some negotiable and some not, that absolutely were central to effective art-making programs for teens.

WILLIAM SAFIRE: Like what?

ELLEN RUDOLPH: They were programs like Artists for Humanity, which is a visual arts program that takes place in artist studios in Boston. There is an executive director and there are about 40 students who come after school and on weekends. And these students, with the executive director, articulate themselves what it is they want to learn, what they are after, where they want to get. They are already kids who are interested in visual arts.

And what made this program particularly strong was that the organization then provided first-class experienced resources, artists of all kinds, on an ongoing basis, to those students for the art that those students wanted to make. In addition, they chose their commissions together. I guess the short answer is that it was a program that both gave them really serious artistic resources with really serious artistic problems to solve, matched with artists and teachers and professional staff who really cared about the kids.

So, there was a dual emphasis on aesthetic goals and social learning goals, aesthetic goals and participation in life and community goals. I guess the main thing Surdna was looking at in all of its programs were — well, what the evaluators, of course, confirmed was that the social goals are not met unless the artistic goals were rigorous and demanding and there were high expectations of what the students were going after artistically as well as socially.

So, it was this dual emphasis, sort of holistic education on, yes, you are a wonderful artist and I want to know who you are and what you have to offer me, but I am only really interested in working with you if you are also interested in me and if you are going to take the time to find out who I am. It was that kind of learning and mutual exchange that let the artists make work. They made their own work during many of these projects as well as helping the students make their work.

I do not know if that answers that question. But what happened, just to get to what is in the book here, Carol and Janet came to us because we had just, at Surdna, put out the findings of these evaluators in a monograph called "Powerful Voices." And this is available to you also free. It is on the Surdna Web site. It is www.surdna.org. You can get this report off the Web site. You can also e-mail us at powerfulvoices@surdna.org.

We learned so much from this. It helped us articulate. Foundations have their own problems internally convincing their boards of the value of the arts programs, convincing the community of the value of the arts programs. So, we also were looking for a document that did not help us sell the arts but helped us articulate what the challenges were, what the values were, what the struggles were for the artists who make this work in a serious way.

They took the framework of the effective programs and they developed a self-assessment tool that organizations could use to see where are they as strong as they need to be and where do they really need to get stronger. It was designed as a introspection tool or to start the conversation among board members, among artists, among staff people. We did not realize it was going to also tell us where we had left out a huge hole. We left out your voice in this self-assessment tool.

In the book you will see it suggests board people get together with the artists, with the program staff, to look at where they are strong and where they are weak. Well, the Artists For Humanity students just this past week got in touch with Surdna and said that the self-assessment tool that was in here, which of course the executive director shared with the students, is missing our questions for ourselves, our questions for the organizations that are supposedly serving us well, our own questions for how we are progressing in our own art-making.

And they just this week sent us the most articulate questions I have ever seen in the field, looking at the impact of this work. We are going to take those students' questions and add them as an insert to this and, in the next printing, make sure that it is part of the text, because the questions were so articulate.

WILLIAM SAFIRE: Carol, there is a question sort of hanging here that this gentlemen over here asked that we have not addressed. What about incarcerated people, bad kids or kids who have been in reform schools, as we used to call them? Can the arts reach them in such a way that they can be turned around?

CAROL FINEBERG: Well, interestingly enough, in New York City, which is where I live, there are a number of arts organizations and people within the schools for incarcerated kids who have formed partnerships to provide kids with an opportunity to make plays, murals, do all kinds of improvisations with a theatrical purpose, and also to make music, both to compose music and to sing in choruses and so forth. The result of those partnerships is documented in the Center For Art Education's Annenberg Grants documentation.

What I am more interested in is not only is the program working but why is it working, so that people who want to replicate those programs learn from the process. One of the reasons that the programs that work work is because there is a shared commitment to the value of the program. It is not bootlegged into the institution. It is because the head of the institution really wants it and will support it.

Another reason that the programs that work work — because there are some that don't — is an understanding of the kids themselves. And this is what Ellen's research and her instrument are about. The kids are invested in the program and encouraged to strengthen their skills in those areas.

WILLIAM SAFIRE: Ron, do you have any problems along those lines?

RONALD TREANOR: Well, as I said before when we were talking about special ed students at our school, a lot of them who came in had a lot of problems at home and were going from school to school and failing at each of these particular schools because they were placed in an academic environment and not really understanding their own problems or their own potential.

What we would do at Woodrow Wilson is that we would try to find out where the student was coming from, what is the student all about, what is his background, and really key in on this. Most of the special ed students we had — and we are talking about the upper-grade students, in our seventh and eighth grade — they really got into drama. We have a dramatist on board. And what they would do during language arts with whatever they were reading, he would actually have these students act it out. And they would create their own dialogue as a result of it. Some of it was congruent to the lesson obviously, but a lot of it had to do with some of their personal problems that would come out with this.

As I said, because of the strength of drama in this particular case, these students have actually become leaders in our school. They went on to high school, and it is nice to know that they did really well academically at the high school level, and then they went on to college. We have a great amount of success with special ed students in our school as a result of this.

ELLEN RUDOLPH: Can I add one more thing about the self-assessment tool that is in the book. When it was designed, it was written with the organizations that we mostly support in mind. And these are arts institutions working with teens; they are not necessarily schools. What we found is that they have been very helpful to arts teachers and supervisors in schools in helping them not only look at their own teaching and where they can be stronger and where they are particularly strong but also helping them think about who they want their partners to be when they bring artists into the schools.

The point of Surdna's evaluation and way of looking at evaluation — someone said formative evaluation — was not to prove perfection. The evaluation was valuable if it helped the participants do better work. It was evaluation to help inspire and help question and help self-examine so that we could do best work we can do in field we cared about. And it was self-evaluation on everyone's part, including the students.

There is a fellowship program at Surdna that Carol actually helped us design for arts teachers in arts high schools. It was to help arts teachers in public arts high schools get back in touch with the art-making parts of themselves, with the absolute belief that that helps strengthen teaching down the road.

So, all of this talk about evaluation is not meaningful from my point of view unless it really is all about helping better work happen. We have come up with a lot of very faulty evaluations, if we start out by trying to prove a point with the evaluations. It never gets us there.

JANET ELBERG: I promised a little more time for questions and answers. We have focused on arts integration and evaluation because we have the world's leading experts here. But the book focuses on many facets of the planning of an arts-centered school. Many of them touch on essential elements and key needs and overlap. They talk about professional development in a number of different ways and, quite often, how important leadership is. That is in a number of chapters. So, it is a resource that you do not need to just pick out the one chapter that you are concerned about and go through it. You will find that many of the essential elements overlap in all of these chapters.

Are there any questions about anything in the book, because Carol can answer any of those not just evaluation, but anything else anyone would like to contribute?

[No response]

JANET ELBERG: We have all said everything we want to say?

WILLIAM SAFIRE: I want to say that this is a part of an ongoing education of people in the media obviously and people in education who toss arts programs out the window as number one to be cut when the budget is cut. It is also a challenge when this happens for private foundations to move in and do their best to get some things going. That is what some of us are doing. The trick really is to narrow your target. I think teaching artists how to teach in schools is a central, defined need. Training teachers or professionally developing teachers to welcome artists in the schools, use them, and follow-up with them, that is another big, important, specific need.

These are not terribly expensive programs, and that is the kind of thing that we are doing. I just want you to know that a lot of us, both in the media and in the foundation world, are looking to these particular aspects of arts education as central to our cause.

So, we will be publishing things like this book, and we have another symposium coming up and we will do a book on that, and knock heads together and try to get people going. Because sooner or later, the public and the world of education, and the world of art, is going to realize that the world of art and the world of education can do a lot for each other.

And thank you very much for coming today.

[Applause]

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