STATE OF THE STATE

This state has lost ground in arts education

by Jennifer Davis

At the beginning of the decade, Illinois was a leader in arts education. We were one of the first states to include the arts in our education standards and one of the first to talk about testing. But, arts educators say, while we were talking, other states were acting.

In short, we've lost that leadership role. Illinois' students are the losers.

Advocates believe teaching music, painting, theater and dance can help every student integrate creativity into all aspects of their lives. Minnesota, South Carolina and Kentucky recognized that by requiring their schools to teach the arts, and then testing their students on what they've learned.

Illinois hasn't. "For a number of years, [Illinois] just encouraged schools to develop an arts curriculum," says Merv Brennan of the Illinois State Board of Education. The state has discussed testing in the arts since the early '80s, but last year was the first time it was done. And only a sampling of students were tested. Another sampling will be tested again this year.

In fairness, testing in the arts is a controversial concept. Some education officials, including some arts educators, doubted that proficiency in dance, music, theater and the visual arts could be measured with traditional tests. Then, once the tests were developed, Illinois officials faced a Catch-22:
"Principals were saying, 'You can't test us. We're not teaching that,'" says Roberta Volkmann, past president of the Illinois Alliance for Arts Education. "But if it's not tested, they don't feel like they have to teach it."

Illinois broke new ground for arts education just a decade ago. We've lost that leadership role.

Volkmann spent nine years as the Illinois State Board of Education's arts education consultant and now advises schools across the state on ways to develop and assess programs. She can point to a number of reasons why Illinois only ranks in the top third of states for arts education. "Keeping arts education in schools has always been a struggle. We're one of the first things to get cut generally," says Volkmann. "As the years have gone by, the resources have dwindled even more."

Indeed, schools have few options when it comes to funding arts education. They can allot for it in their base budget or apply for a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency with a $14.1 million budget to support Illinois art. Still, only $650,000 of that is for arts education. That's up from fiscal year 1996, though, when the council had about $480,000 for art in schools. "We only spend 63 cents per person in Illinois on the arts," says Kassie Davis, the council's executive director. The national average is $1.02.

Minnesota spends $1.49 per person. That state's governor, Republican Arne Carlson, just gave the state's arts board an additional $12 million. Another $3.2 million foundation grant combined with state matching funds will support a four-year, $10 million arts education project. A new $7 million building for the Minnesota Center for Arts Education also is under construction. That state-funded center, which combines an arts high school with a professional development institute, is the only one of its kind in the country.

"We do not offer just pre-professional [arts] programs for the gifted," says the center's executive director David O'Fallon. "We do have some kids who go on to Juilliard, but we've also had four graduates go to [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] and some to Stanford and everywhere else in between."

What O'Fallon's school does is integrate the arts into every curriculum:
math, science, history. There's no required grade point average to get in. And O'Fallon says his school saves many kids who would otherwise fail or drop out of traditional classes.

"The arts, for many of these kids, is the only way they tie in to the rest of the world. One of my favorite stories is of a young lady from a small Minnesota town who wrote on her application form that she wanted to come here because she'd already done everything at her school. She'd been in the junior and senior play, and the band and the orchestra. And she'd built an arts studio in her home because there wasn't room at her school. But, here's the great part: Her career goal? She wants to be a pediatrician. And she will. She'll be a great one."

What Minnesota is doing is new, and yet it's not. "Before the turn of the century, learning was a seamless whole," explains Doug Herbert, director of arts education for the National Endowment for the Arts. It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution, "when we started putting people on assembly lines, that we developed a penchant for compartmentalizing our curriculum."

6/ December 1997 Illinois Issues

Once separated, the arts became vulnerable. Better to cut band than math, theater than English. Complicating matters further, arts advocates touting the importance of arts education are often talking to policy-makers who never had art.

"We're into our second and third generation of school administrators, parents and voters who have not had a good arts education experience," says Volkmann. "And because they haven't had it, they don't understand it."

They may have made clay ashtrays in grade school, but it's likely they didn't have classes that stressed art history or interpretative dance. According to art advocates, that's part of what a true arts education entails.

"Based on our experience in the '80s, I don't think a law from the top will change things," Volkmann adds. Instead, more and more arts educators believe, as she does, that the answer lies in getting communities excited about the arts. "It's just getting them to that commitment stage that's so difficult."

Not that it can't be done. Take Decatur. After budget cuts forced that district to cut the arts, one activist used her connections to build coalitions among leaders in business, the local university and other groups. She then combined that support with federal dollars to develop the nationally recognized Project HEART: "Helping Education through Art Resources for Teachers."

The program no longer exists. When the coordinator left town, that innovative program "pretty much went with her," says Robert Stake, professor of educational psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

That is where testing helps. Kentucky, like Illinois, used to merely encourage the arts. It wasn't until that state was forced into testing the arts that things changed. Now, says Jimmie Dee Kelley of the Kentucky Department of Education, the state has embraced an arts curriculum, requiring a history and appreciation course in both the visual and performing arts as a high school graduation requirement. The requirement will be implemented with the freshman class of 1998.

"The arts had always certainly been recommended, but in reality they weren't being taught at every school," says Kelley, an arts and humanities consultant. "When the arts and humanities began to be tested in 1992, we saw a drastic difference. People started looking at [the arts] differently, especially schools which were scoring well in all areas but the arts. The past couple years especially, we've just seen this bursting forth of interest in the arts."

SPEAKING OF ART "The arts are a major area of human cognition, one of the ways in which we know about the world and express our knowledge." — Howard Gardner, author of Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences "Mankind's most enduring achievement is art. At its best, it reveals the nobility that coexists in human nature along with flaws and evils, and the beauty and truth it can perceive. Whether in music or architecture, literature, painting or sculpture, art opens our eyes and ears and feelings to something beyond ourselves, something we cannot experience without the artist's vision and the genius of his craft." — Barbara Tuchman, Pulitzer Prize- winning historian "Our schools must be concerned about developing the intellectual and spiritual strengths and judgments that knit together the very fabric of our society, and that foster a common culture, especially in a country that prides itself on pluralism and individual freedom." — Scott Matheson, former governor of Utah "Art and the encouragement of art is political in the most profound sense, not as a weapon in the struggle, but as an instrument of understanding of the futility of struggle between those who share man's faith. Aeschylus and Plato are remembered today long after the triumphs of imperial Athens are gone. Dante outlived the ambitions of 13th century Florence. Goethe stands serenely above the politics of Germany, and I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over our cities, we too will be remembered not for victories or defeats in battle or politics, but for our contribution to the human spirit." — John F. Kennedy

Still, all this change is because Kentucky's school system was found unconstitutional seven years ago and new educational standards, including the arts, had to be adopted.

South Carolina is another state that has taken arts education seriously. The National Conference of State Legislatures, a bipartisan organization known for its research on state policies, says that state has been a leader in that arena since 1984. But, again, much of South Carolina's success stems from the state's efforts to reform a failing educational system.

In 1989, the state adopted the Arts in Basic Curriculum plan and pumped $1.3 million into the effort, which in part mandates that students demonstrate competence in the arts. Art specialists are required in every school. (Many states, Illinois included, do not have that requirement. In fact, the Illinois State Board of Education can't even say which schools offer arts education.)

Former South Carolina Gov. Richard Riley, now U.S. secretary of education, has always stressed the importance of the arts in education. It is, he says, "at the heart of education reform in the 1990s."

In fact, states like South Carolina and Minnesota, where the governors and legislatures are arts advocates, are doing a better job of teaching arts in the schools, says Laura Loyacono, NCSL's program director for arts, tourism and cultural resources. "These states and others where the state board of education has more control are also doing a good job," says Loyacono, who still credits Illinois as being "a really strong state in terms of appreciation and awareness of the arts in general."

But when it comes to our schools, our progress has been slow. "You've got a stick," she says, referring to Illinois' inclusion of the arts in our state educational standards. "The question is whether you're willing to use it." 

Illinois Issues December 1997 /7