Talia Gibas

Working in K-12 arts education is like trying to choreograph a dance during a slow, rolling earthquake. You’re determined to take your next step, but spend a lot of time and energy fighting to stay upright. As the ground shifts beneath your feet, you never know when something unwieldy – a new set of standards, a reduced funding stream – may tumble in your direction.

Working in this environment requires you have a resource in your community to keep an eye on changing policies and boil them down to what you need to know. The better your understanding of the “big picture” of education and how it affects the arts, the easier it is to keep enough balance to dance amidst the chaos.

Recent changes to California’s education funding, and the arts education community’s response, provides a case study of how this works. Last June, Governor Jerry Brown signed a state budget that included a sweeping overhaul of school funding.  The new formula, called Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), replaced California’s prior categorical line items for education. These line items included the Art and Music Block grant that for years had been the state’s dedicated source of arts education funding.

A loss for arts education? Not necessarily. LCFF reflects a paradigm shift away from a narrow focus on test scores, toward a much more dynamic and holistic vision of what educators and students should think about and demonstrate in order to be “successful.” So while LCFF doesn’t seem to have a lot to do with arts education, it presents an opportunity for arts educators and schools leaders to highlight how the arts can impact metrics like student and parent engagement, and expand and experiment with arts-related strategies.

I started reading about LCFF in the fall, and realized that a) arts educators needed to understand the language and implications of this new formula to better partner with schools, and b) school leaders needed to think about how the arts could fit in with this shift. Luckily, two fantastic partner agencies, Arts for LA and the California Alliance for Arts Education agreed. Together, we sketched out a plan to combine efforts to educate our varied constituents, which include school district leaders on Arts for All’s side to parents and community advocates on Arts for LA’s and CAAE’s sides.

Fast forward to April. We now have several webinars and an online toolkit under our belts, as well as a sample Local Control Accountability Plan template that offers school districts sample arts education strategies  they can adapt for inclusion in the plans they will have to submit to the state by the end of June. Best of all, the policy firm issuing LCFF support materials on behalf of the state included our arts education toolkit as a prominent resource in official guideline documents released last month. We hadn’t asked that our materials be included, but were thrilled to see them alongside resources developed by other education heavyweights like the ACLU and California School Board Association.

The simple lesson in all of this is that getting front of broad policy shifts, rather than reacting to them after the fact, pays off in spades. By paying attention and working together, Arts for All, Arts for LA and the California Alliance swiftly created resources that will help arts educators and their community supporters keep their feet firmly planted through this particular quake. With luck, our efforts will help ensure that the arts play a prominent role in California’s new education paradigm.