Blog Posts for September 2011 Blog Salon

Thank you to the many people who have been blog contributors to, and readers of ArtsBlog over the years. ArtsBlog has long been a space where we uplifted stories from the field that demonstrated how the arts strengthen our communities socially, educationally, and economically; where trends and issues and controversies were called out; and advocacy tools were provided to help you make the case for more arts funding and favorable arts policies.

As part of Americans for the Arts’ recent Strategic Realignment Process, we were asked to evaluate our storytelling communications platforms and evolve the way we share content. As a result, we launched the Designing Our Destiny portal to explore new ways of telling stories and sharing information, one that is consistent with our longtime practice of, “No numbers without a story, and no stories without a number.”

As we put our energy into developing this platform and reevaluate our communications strategies, we have put ArtsBlog on hold. That is, you can read past blog posts, but we are not posting new ones. You can look to the Designing Our Destiny portal and our news items feed on the Americans for the Arts website for stories you would have seen in ArtsBlog in the past.

ArtsBlog will remain online through this year as we determine the best way to archive this valuable resource and the knowledge you’ve shared here.

As ever, we are grateful for your participation in ArtsBlog and thank you for your work in advancing the arts. It is important, and you are important for doing it.


Ms. Emily Peck

Supporting Arts Education is Good Business

Posted by Ms. Emily Peck, Sep 13, 2011 2 comments


Ms. Emily Peck

Emily Peck

Emily Peck

What is the role of business in ensuring that our educational system provides the workforce that they need?

Businesses have been addressing this concern in a number of ways including forming partnerships with arts organizations and creating signature arts education programs to prepare students from elementary school through college to be successful in careers in both the for-profit and nonprofit world.

Training the Future Workforce to be Creative and Innovative

Businesses have a vested interest in ensuring that the future workforce is prepared for jobs that might not even exist yet and one of the top skills this workforce needs is creativity. 1,500 CEOs interviewed by IBM picked creativity as the most important leadership attribute.

According to the study, “creative leaders invite disruptive innovation, encourage others to drop outdated approaches and take balanced risks. They are open-minded and inventive in expanding their management and communication styles.”

Some businesses have taken on the challenge of building the workforce that we need and created signature corporate philanthropy programs that are training the next generation of employees in creativity and innovation through the arts. Here are two examples but there are many more:

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Billie Jean Knight

Innovation: The Key to America’s Leading Edge

Posted by Billie Jean Knight, Sep 16, 2011 0 comments


Billie Jean Knight

Billie Jean Knight

Those who insist America’s position in the world is being diminished by global competition bombard us daily in the media. Fear, doubt, and worry are generated by a panic-stricken fear mongers who blame America’s schools for failing to prepare students to rise to the competitive challenge.

I take issue with the idea that America’s schools are failing in general, although many struggle.

I do believe that policymakers have failed to define and support what students need to be able to know and do for a newly defined global economy.

Yes, mastery of reading, writing, math, science, and social and historical perspective are of critical importance. However, these are only prerequisites for what is truly needed to be ultimately prepared.

The obsession with tangible low-level skills required to “pass the test” has driven American school systems out of curriculum balance to abandon important elements that made our nation a superpower in the first place: creativity and innovation.

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Sarah Murr

Arts Education Provides 'Survival Skills' Businesses Need

Posted by Sarah Murr, Sep 13, 2011 1 comment


Sarah Murr

Sarah Murr

In Tony Wagner’s book The Global Achievement Gap, he writes that “the Global Achievement Gap is the gap between what our best schools are teaching and testing versus the skills that all students will need for careers, college, and citizenship in the 21st century.”

Wagner based this book on extensive interviews not with educators, but with corporations.

Those interviews led Wagner to develop the “Seven Survival Skills...people need in order to discuss, understand, and offer leadership to solve some of the most pressing issues we face as a democracy in the 21st century":

1.    Critical thinking and problem solving
2.    Collaboration across networks and leading by influence
3.    Agility and adaptability
4.    Initiative and entrepreneurship
5.    Effective oral and written communication
6.    Accessing and analyzing information
7.    Curiosity and imagination

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Mr. Narric Rome

Uniting the Arts & Career and Technical Education

Posted by Mr. Narric Rome, Sep 16, 2011 0 comments


Mr. Narric Rome

Narric Rome

I recently attended a meeting of national arts education advocates and leaders from the career and technical education (CTE) community. It was a meeting designed to explore the policy efforts of both communities and to see if there was mutual interest in launching an initiative together.

It was clear from the 90 minutes we met that, from a national perspective, there is significant and deep parallels to our work and a joint approach has great potential.

Here’s what we discovered:

1)    Same Federal Challenges – At the federal level, both the arts and CTE have undergone similar treatment at the hands of the federal government. Like the Arts in Education program at the U.S. Department of Education, the federal CTE program was zeroed out annually in the Bush Administration budget, but funded by Congress each year. CTE programs are consistently targeted for reduction or termination, as they were in the recent H.R.1 legislation earlier this spring.

The similarities extend into our approaches to reauthorizing the Elementary & Secondary Education Act – CTE advocates would like to see greater use of multiple measures in assessments (addressing the narrowing of the curriculum which impacts us both), the promotion of our curriculum as a way to reduce the dropout rate, and a expansion of state data systems to provide greater insight into gaps of service and access issues.

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Victoria J. Plettner-Saunders

The Intersection of Local Businesses, School Districts, & Arts Education

Posted by Victoria J. Plettner-Saunders, Sep 13, 2011 2 comments


Victoria J. Plettner-Saunders

Victoria Plettner-Saunders

I'm a consultant in San Diego who specializes in capacity building for nonprofit arts organizations and the people who run them. I also do a fair amount of work in the realm of arts education, including currently serving as chair of the Arts Education Council at Americans for the Arts and the co-founder and chair of the San Diego Alliance for Arts Education.

It was with my "arts education hat" on that I attended a one-day symposium in San Diego called “Powering Innovation Economies” last week. One of the sessions was about the role of arts education, innovation, and the workforce.

Sarah Murr (my fellow blogger/Boeing's Global Corporate Citizenship community investor responsible for corporate giving to the arts in Southern California) was invited to be one of the panel members. Murr is well known in Southern California’s arts education community for the huge investment she’s made on Boeing’s behalf in supporting arts education in the Orange County area. She is also an active board member of the California Alliance for Arts Education.

Unfortunately, she was ultimately unable to participate and I got an email asking if I knew of someone in the local corporate community who could take her place.

As I sat there thinking about which local corporations support arts education as part of their community investment policy for strengthening workforce development, I came up empty handed.

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Stephanie Riven

Arts Education Provides Another 'Pathway to Prosperity'

Posted by Stephanie Riven, Sep 16, 2011 0 comments


Stephanie Riven

Stephanie Riven

One of the most compelling ideas related to workforce development is the report issued in February 2011 called Pathways to Prosperity by Robert Schwartz and Ron Ferguson of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

The report points out that every year, one million students leave school before earning a high school degree.

Many of these students say that they dropped out of high school because they felt their classes were not interesting and that school was unrelentingly boring. They say that they didn’t believe high school was relevant or provided a pathway to achieving their dreams.

According to the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University, the U.S. economy will create 47 million job openings over the 10-year period ending in 2018. Nearly two-thirds of these jobs will require that workers have at least some post-secondary education. Applicants with no more than a high school degree will fill just 36 percent of the job openings or just half the percentage of jobs they held in the early 1970s.

How can we reverse these trends?

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