“There is no more valuable position than that of a teacher.”- Nicola Benedetti, professional violinist
Arts education is something that has been imperatively important to my own journey in getting to where I am in life, including to this course. Similarly, I think the narrative of being supported and inspired by arts teachers is one that many students experience, whether or not they choose to go on in the arts beyond primary education. The Arts Education Partnership (AEP) is an organization that was founded in 1995 as an interagency agreement between the National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. Department of Education. The AEP has over 100 partners throughout the country that have agreed to support their mission, vision, and the 2020 Action Agenda. [1] In addition to these partners, the AEP also has an advisory council made up of arts organizations, associations, and education departments, an annual convening, and a biweekly news digest. The AEP believes that shaping the arts in America’s youth will shape a stronger, brighter future. In this way, they believe that the arts are a fundamental part of American values, and by extension of protecting American democracy.
Jamie Kasper, the current director of AEP, told us in our meeting that because of the position of the organization in the government, they have to be very careful about the language they use in their platform. Due to the nature of bipartisanship, they are unable to propose strong opinions in either direction politically. Since 2015, the Education Commission of the States (ECS) has been the host of the AEP. The chair of the ECS switches between a Republican and a Democrat every year, and this furthers the need for the AEP to maintain a neutral stance on policy. [2] This position of neutrality was something that Jamie emphasized several times in our meeting as being an important part of learning to do her job effectively.
Some of the struggles of the organization that Jamie talked about in our meeting that I did not necessarily expect were a relative lack of data that could be used to prove the usefulness of their programs, and policy implementation. One of the reasons that it can be hard to collect data about schools is that the arts are difficult to assess in themselves, because there are few objective ways of measuring creative thinking. It is also difficult, although not impossible, to measure the affect of arts education on success in other academic subjects. One article (that I found using the AEP’s search tool ArtsEdSearch), stated that “The arts integration program had a positive statistically significant effect on student standardized state test scores as compared to control schools.” [3] The idea of policy implementation came up from a question from one of my classmates about policy barriers. Jamie explained that the biggest barrier is the way that people think about the structure of a classroom day, and not actual policies. Most states actually have no barriers to having education based in the arts, where the main classroom is an art, theater, dance, or music classroom.
This experience talking about arts education gave me the chance to reflect on my own experience in the arts in a rural, public high school. I had the interesting experience of being highly supported, both in spirit and monetarily by my music teachers and by the administration. I was lucky enough to have the support of my parents throughout my childhood in taking music lessons, which allowed me to play at a level above most of my peers who did not have access to music lessons. Because I was able to excel, my school principal supported me by paying for stuff like sending me to the NafME All-Eastern Honors Orchestra in Atlantic City, NJ, paying the entrance fees, and sending with two bus drivers and a school van on the 5 1/2 hour drive. I had support from not just the orchestra teacher, who I am still close with to this day, but also from the band director and the choir director in finding me performance opportunities, letting me use the school facilities to practice before, during, and after school hours, and helping me to understand what the music world was like after high school. While I will be eternally grateful for all of this support, I can’t help but acknowledge that having come into Horseheads High School with considerable privilege, and left with perhaps even more.