Arts4All, Ltd.

Ever since arts education in the schools was well-funded, back in the 1950's and 60's, orchestras, museums and other cultural entities in the US have supported it by providing supplemental arts enrichment programs, modeled on Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts. Trouble is, in the decades that followed, school systems throughout this country lost their funding for arts education. The outside arts programs remained the same, but often with nothing left in the schools' curriculum to supplement. That sorry state of affairs has been changing, and a small company called Artsvision is a disproportionately large part of the reason why.

According to Artsvision's president, Mitchell Korn, "so much research now says arts education is key." But how to get around the continuing perception that music, art, drama and dance programs are fluffy extras? The answer is crucial to Artsvision's success: put the arts into the service of the "core subjects": science, math, history and language. Combined with instruction in specific techniques - playing an instrument, or painting, for example - and what Korn calls aesthetic context instruction - learning about the great works of diverse cultures and times - the result is a win for just about everybody. As one school principal in San Francisco put it, "Parents know that music and the arts are a piece of the curriculum that is the first to go with budget cuts…and the fact that we can provide this for our students gives the perception that we are really a special place."

One clever byproduct of the Artsvision approach is that it seems to attract big money. An area now blessed with support on both sides of the aisle in the United States Congress, arts education has become important again. Decades ago, the Cold-War-fueled need to grow scientists led this country to regard arts education as superfluous. Then budget strictures across the country closed down all such superfluities. Research meanwhile has emerged, demonstrating that the brains of scientists-to-be benefit, as do all children's brains, from preparations that include substantive arts education throughout childhood.

To build a better scientist you need to include the arts.

Sputnik, and the threat of Communist Russia's scientific and technical prowess it symbolized, has retained its influence, in an odd way. It's just that now, studies - scientific studies - are persuading elected officials, parents, teachers' unions, school boards and captains of industry alike that to build a better scientist you need to include the arts, as early and for as long as possible. It's not just future scientists who benefit, either.

Artsvision entices school systems and their business and philanthropic neighbors to participate in funding and building integrated arts education programs, with sensible arguments like these: Arts education helps kids learn all subjects, not just the arts. With arts education, school attendance and self-esteem flourish. Violence and drug and alcohol abuse decline. Cognitive growth increases. Academic achievement grows. Educated kids become better employees, employers, voters, parents, volunteers, investors, businesspeople, teachers and law-abiding citizens. From learning about and with the arts, students learn to develop long-term goals - vital in this short-attention-span media world, to glimpse cross-cultural perspectives, to experience layers of subtlety and power and to appreciate that life is for learning. An investment in integrated arts education in the short term, therefore, bears long-term interest and dividends.

The planners can wax poetic, too. In her foreword to Artsvision's New York City schools plan, Columbia Teachers College Professor Emerita of Philosophy and Education Maxine Greene put it this way: "[I]n an ideal city in an ideal world, the arts would be present, audible and visible in every school….No longer on the fringe of things, the solution of visual problems in the making of murals would tap the expertise of math teachers. Leaf-drawings would surround those studying botany; stories of great scientists would stud the science curriculum; students would be given cameras to photograph the houses in the community (and the empty lots….). There would be an ongoing dialogue among teachers and their students, among students and visiting artists; studios would stay open for parents, for people from the neighborhood. There would be centers for story-telling on the part of newcomers to the city, places where culturally unfamiliar dances and ceremonies would be taught."

Artsvision did not begin with the New York public school system. In 1994, after almost ten years of refining their methods, Korn and Artsvision were ready to persuade the public schools in New York - Korn's hometown - to bring back arts education system-wide. As it happened, Korn's big meeting with the city funders took place the day after Schools Chancellor Ray Cortines had resigned, following a very public struggle with the city's mayor. Korn says he took a deep breath and began the meeting by saying, "This plan has to be chancellor-proof." When Rudy Crew came in as the new chancellor, he embraced the program Korn had proposed. Later, Korn says, Crew declared that his most proud accomplishment in New York City was restoring arts education to the schools.

What brought Korn to this homecoming? It was a winding path, dotted with opportunities that rewarded preparedness. After a liberal arts education at Bard and Vassar, Korn found work as an outreach advocate for tenants' rights in dismal "SRO" (single room occupancy) housing on Manhattan's Upper West Side. At that time, in 1973, the SRO's were havens for despair, populated by down-and-out single men, mostly, many of them elderly, and nearly all without money, family or friends. Landlords were predictably absent, and unconcerned with niceties of housing laws. Part of a medical team from Roosevelt Hospital, Korn was a social worker helping tenants get their benefits, pay their bills, get medical help, and otherwise keep going. It was a colorful place and time for a college grad, Korn says. "I found lots of dead people, and was almost killed by a knife-wielding lunatic one time." Along the way he found there were artists and musicians living in the SRO's whom he could help regain their footing.

"I knew I had a tiger by the tail."

Working with artists and musicians came naturally to Korn, since he was a musician himself. He was an accomplished performer - of twelve-string classical guitar repertoire - and had begun composing as well. As time went on, his works were performed for dance and the theater, and, after releasing several commercial LP's, he reached the apex of his playing career in a solo performance at Carnegie Hall in 1985. Had he practiced, practiced, practiced? Of course: During the late 1970's, playing and teaching for a living, he had made his way for years as a resident artist all over the US, staying in a community, making music and getting to know the communicative power of the arts in people's lives.

These residencies were being funded by newly established nonprofit foundations and state arts councils, which had sprung up after late-1960's changes to the income tax laws had made charitable giving attractive to prosperous corporations and individuals. Affiliate Artists, the first program in the US to sponsor the arts with corporate funding, worked Korn hard - according to his c.v., he was "the most successful artist in their history." Korn says he would go in one day from the breakfast meeting of the local Optimists Club to the nearby coal mine when the shift was ending. "I played the same music, and realized I could make any audience get it. I'd talk to them and they'd talk back. Very powerful experiences began to happen, and I knew I had a tiger by the tail."

By 1979, Affiliate Artists and other new arts organizations had begun coming to Korn, asking him to train his colleagues - instrumentalists, actors, opera singers - how to reach any community with their art form. Adaptable, Korn agreed to apply what he had learned in practice and began teaching performing artists how to be teachers and leaders. This was where his company Artsvision found its roots. Korn began to find this kind of teaching even more satisfying than playing his guitar for audiences.

As government funding was slowing to a trickle for school arts education, private money was beginning to flow in, for the first time. It would take more time, however, to develop insight into the most effective ways to put the money to work. It would take still more time and preparation to plan, try and refine ways to make arts education programs that fit - that are not imposed from outside but rather succeed because their roots are local and deep enough to sustain perennial growth.

Married, and with a son born in 1984, Korn felt the need to fulfill a purpose and saw an opportunity to do that by teaching artists how to become effective arts builders in their communities. As this part of his life became more active, word began to spread; orchestras, dance companies and opera companies began to call him. By 1985 he had earned a Master's degree in Performing Arts in the Schools from Columbia University's Teacher's College. He needed to decide: "I forced myself to play guitar less and less, until the lines crossed and Artsvision took more and more time." His last concert was in 1987 at Stanford University's Lively Arts program. Regrets? No. "The decision was rational - Artsvision was more important than a concert career."

Make the children's education programs "as good as the band."

His new company was working with some of the big names, by now: the New York Philharmonic, Carnegie Hall, New York City Ballet, the San Francisco Symphony. The SFS came to Korn in 1987 with the mission to make its community education program "as good as the band." Artsvision complied. Korn says proudly that now, all elementary-grade children in the San Francisco schools experience that program, known as Adventures in Music, as part of their general education - it has been a success for over ten years.

From working with individual artists, and then the arts institutions, Korn saw that the next step was to approach the funders. He did a project with the Heinz endowment for the City of Pittsburgh, and then a really big one came along - the opportunity to work in Chicago. In the evaluation and planning phases to re-establish arts education in the Chicago schools, Korn worked with major funders like Marshall Field's, the MacArthur Foundation and the Chicago Community Trust. They presented persuasive evidence that the arts could regenerate student performance and motivation, and that overall school improvement could result from reinstituting arts education. A now well-known program came into being, called CAPE (Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education). The program, implemented by a coalition, has brought together schools, community organizations and arts institutions, united in the purpose to make arts experiences available to children at all grade levels in the city.

As with all of Artsvision's projects, Korn says, the first steps were to assess Chicago's particular needs and resources. It's not Artsvision's style, Korn says, to impose outside experts to run a new arts education program. "It's all about building relationships and getting consensus," and an effective way to do that is to identify the people and institutions already present, who can be involved in effecting change. "Often you find that the resources are there; they just need to be identified."

Once the needs and resources are clearly described, a typical Artsvision project moves on to planning the educational programming and how to pay for it. But sometimes performing and presenting organizations voice concern that any education programs will dilute their artistic mission. Too, local business and philanthropic leaders may question the validity of writing checks for yet another in a stream of misbegotten enrichment programs that disappear with no trace at the end of the first funding period. To address these worries, one of the first things Artsvision will cover with a new client is the value of going forward: the importance of arts education itself, and its regenerating effects, short- and long-term, on the surrounding community. This is also where connections are made to private sources of cash, volunteer service and in-kind support. They present compelling reasons for business and government to become partners - accountable partners - in the larger community on which the new arts education initiatives will rely. The National Endowment for the Arts and the controversies over using public funds for performances, paintings and photographs some judge offensive can be ignored here, in the world of integrated arts education curricula. In a lovely twist, it has become noncontroversial - safe, in fact - for politicians and high-profile philanthropists to support integrated arts education.

"Turn the philanthropic process on its head."

As Korn puts it, they have been "turning the philanthropic process on its head, changing the relationship of granters and grantees from hand outs to hand holding; from being afraid to look 'em in the eye to building relationships." Korn lectures annually on arts education policy at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, and leads seminars there on how to build arts programs in communities. As he tells his students, after several decades of growth and experience, the major arts funders - like Mellon, Heinz, Annenberg, MacArthur - are now setting arts education policy in what Korn calls a "synchronicity - [a] timely coming together of the policy of needs-driven arts in education with the emerging activist sentiments of numerous funders. The relationship of policy to sustained funding and support is the essence."

Just as they engage business and philanthropy with the substance of the arts initiatives, they cultivate the all-important relationships with classroom teachers. A central part of the planning process occurs as Artsvision listens to the teachers. They meet together, more than once, often for a day at a time, and talk about the state-mandated requirements they must satisfy each semester, their problems, frustrations, hopes for the future, wish lists. Then they begin to get into "creative mode, themselves," as Korn puts it. They might do call-and-response clapping games, then make "treasure trees" derived from the aboriginal Taino origin tales of Puerto Rico. "It becomes very holistic. They are uplifted. They learn things to bring to their classroom, plus they feel good that they did things themselves that day."

The Artsvision staff leave those initial meetings with enough information to work with, to begin to draft a curriculum - typically one grade-level at a time - that will connect to those teachers' needs and the program's aspirations. Designing this curriculum falls primarily to three people at Artsvision - Byron Thomas, Sally Partridge and Korn. Thomas came to the company from a music publishing house, where he was doing marketing and web design in the classical music education division. Partridge brought to the mix her years as a classroom teacher in the Austin, Texas public schools, where her knowledge and experience with all kinds of children and their problems added other necessary ingredients. Together, the three of them devise proposed curriculum units for each new arts program they undertake. Korn says they obey a "no-stretch" rule: If any one of them feels something in the draft program will be even a bit of a stretch for the teachers, they won't use it. They want the teachers to feel supported, not threatened.

Once a new curriculum is vetted, it's back to the teachers again, to familiarize them with the new ideas, materials and approaches. In Indianapolis, Korn recalls, the Community Conservatory curriculum had been finalized and approved, and it was time to train the teachers - in this case, symphony musicians. He began the instrumentalists' first day of training by standing up with a violin and a bow, and saying, "This is a violin. It is the smallest member of the string family in the orchestra. These are strings. This is a bow. I hold the bow in this hand and the violin like this. If I draw the bow across the strings, I make music. Now I will play a piece of music by Haydn. He was called 'Papa' Haydn." Laughter ensued. Korn had made his point.

Before the orchestra musicians go out to the Community Conservatory, they take the time to get ready, so they won't subject anyone to as inept a presentation as Korn acted out for them. The musicians learn about repertoire, about how kids learn, how kids talk, how to tie progress to mandated areas of the curriculum, and what to do before they go into the school for the first time. They even get a map, to show them where to go when they visit a school. As Korn points out, "Preparedness is part of the musician mentality. You wouldn't send them out unprepared for a concert, and you don't send them out unprepared for this."

Preparation is just as important for the classroom teacher who is starting out with new curriculum units that integrate arts education with their substantive pedagogic goals. Many of these teachers have had little or no arts background in their own lives, and even if they favor "arts education" as a general notion, are uncertain and uncomfortable with doing it themselves for the first time.

When a new arts curriculum is in place and ready to go, the teachers, having prepared for the changes, get something more. They receive a chest, full of everything they can use - books, paper, glue, a CD player if they need one - everything. Local business provides those CD players, instruments and supplies - such in-kind contributions are part of an Artsvision project budget. Korn says it's crucial to show the teachers they are supported fully. "You give them everything and remain at their side." A classroom teacher from San Francisco's Adventures in Music (AIM) program commented, "As a first year teacher, I appreciate how easy it is to pull out activities from the curriculum and put together a lesson plan. And considering my lack of background in the arts, it is comforting to have these materials in my classroom." A colleague added, "[T]he kids are always prepared" when an ensemble comes to their school to perform and meet with students, because the entire year's curriculum paves the way.

"You give them everything and remain at their side."

Spending time with the musicians permits children to ask questions, to find out, for instance, that many of the instrumentalists have been playing since childhood, themselves. The students learn to distinguish among instruments, musical genres and sounds. As well, music is tied to science and math lessons. A school principal said, "There has been an improvement and interest in math and science because of the experiments and the activities that go on before and after the [AIM] ensembles visit. Listening to vibrations, for example. This pulls in science. Or counting beats for math class. This really enhances these subjects….And statistics have proven that excitement and enjoyment in these areas lead to success." Another San Francisco principal noted, "We don't think of [music] as separate anymore, rather, as part of the day. You can walk down our hallways and see that music and art are incorporated into everything we do." It's not just the children and administrators who like the results, either. A violist in the Cleveland Orchestra's Learning through Music program told Korn the program changed his life. He explained that working with the schoolchildren had become more satisfying than playing in concert, because it reminded him why he trained to be a musician in the first place. There's a payoff of another kind, as well: Some of these programs have become profit centers, thereby buoying the fortunes of the entire parent school system or nonprofit organization.

Who is the client? With Artsvision, it varies from one project to another. Sometimes, as in Chicago and New York, it is the school system. In San Francisco and Indianapolis, it has been the symphony orchestra (in San Francisco, the San Francisco Ballet has also begun working with Artsvision). In Hartford, Connecticut, the client was The Bushnell - the concert hall. Korn speaks of that Hartford arts project as "transformational." The Bushnell, "an incredibly forward-looking institution," has made the program its own - "now it's replicating, creating its own initiatives," Korn says. "With support from private donors and the State of Connecticut, The Bushnell is building a training center, where teachers from all over the state will attend, to expand and change arts education statewide."

Who benefits from these programs? Who is harmed? To hear Korn tell it, there are no losers, except the occasional stick-in-the-mud factions - in politics, school governance, teacher groups, parent groups - whose power base is threatened by proposed changes to the status quo. But those with substantive objections to one feature or another of a proposed arts education program will come around, Korn finds, the better acquainted they become with the merits of each project.

To quote from Artsvision's proposal to the Portland, Oregon Public Schools, "The arts have always been a part of a well-rounded education. They bring joy to learning, hold students' interest in school and create community involvement. The arts teach teamwork, discipline, creative thinking and problem solving, all characteristics highly valued in today's workplace. In addition, national studies indicate that children regularly involved in the arts score better on tests."

Are teachers believing more in their abilities?

The recent desire, voiced loudly by some political players on the national stage, to create educational benchmarks, measurable by standardized multiple-choice tests, does not win much of a hearing from Korn. He says Artsvision's programs provide quantifiable results of a different sort. Their evaluation phase asks questions like: Are teachers believing more in their abilities? Are kids meeting goals? Are curriculum points being met? Are the materials and recommendations valuable? Assessments of the programs take place at the end of each year. The information gathered - by Artsvision or by third-party assessment services and/or local colleges and universities - is used in advocacy and fundraising efforts, and in refining future iterations of the program.

Korn writes, "I have always found the notion of art for art's sake disturbing. Historically and culturally untrue, the idea is relatively new and very Western by nature. Virtually all cultures, across period, style and culture have used the arts to educate their children. [H]istory and values; literacy and numeracy; and religion and relationships have always been taught through and about the arts." Meanwhile he often finds a city's main cultural organizations to be Eurocentric, at core, disdainful of the art forms of other cultures. To surpass those obstacles, curricula focus on comparative history and a variety of regional and social contexts. Also, their music, art and dance programs do not teach the art forms of the concert halls and museums to the exclusion of the rest of life. Visiting music ensembles include instrumentalists from the orchestra and from the community, all of them of high caliber. Visiting dance teachers bring vernacular dance forms from this country and around the globe, along with ballet and jazz.

Pluralistic and with home-grown roots - that seems to be the essence of Artsvision's mission. Do the homework, arrive at consensus, plan, budget, implement, evaluate, and plan some more. Keep all the players engaged. Be prepared to bring everyone - students and teachers, politicians and businesspeople, union members and professionals, philanthropists and community activists - into an interdependent and fruitful coalition, able to develop its own momentum for the long haul. The resulting programs are good preparation for anyone - preparation for life.

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About the Author:

Alberta Moraine is a frequent contributor to the Newsletter. The annual Music Memory competition in her hometown was a highlight of her in-school arts education. Luckily, she received extracurricular childhood arts education through family, friends and curiosity.

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Resources:

A companion piece from Rita Kohn, Music Matters in Indianapolis: The Symphony's Community Conservatory, appears elsewhere in this issue of the Newsletter.

A Flash™ animation is available at In Practice in this issue of the Newsletter, illustrating one component of a third-grade curriculum integrating arts education with core concepts of nonverbal communication through symbols. It was created by Arts4All, Ltd. (our Publisher), and is used with their permission. Arts4All and Artsvision are jointly developing lesson plans to meet educational goals and federal, state and local literacy standards.

The author thanks Mitchell Korn and Cathy Slesinski of Artsvision for their assistance. Korn was interviewed for this article on 18 and 31 May 2001.

Artsvision has offices in Rhinebeck, NY and Austin, TX. The Artsvision website is at http://www.artsvision.com. A link is provided there <http://www.artsvision.com/prharvard2.html> to Korn's 17 April 2000 speech at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, from which this article quotes. In the site's "Projects" section <http://www.artsvision.com/projects.html> program descriptions and some plan documents are available for review and/or download.

The story of Columbus McGriff, a wire sculptor in the West African galimoto tradition, with whom Korn worked in the 1970's at a Manhattan SRO, is available at: http://garnet.acns.fsu.edu/~jroche/unsigned_unsung1.html
http://garnet.acns.fsu.edu/~jroche/Columbus.JPG

Former New York City Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew's remarks on the importance of arts education can be found in the recently released Getty Trust - MacArthur Foundation - Geraldine R Dodge Trust study, Learning and the Arts - Crossing Boundaries. The report can be downloaded at no cost as a pdf document from the website for Grantmakers in the Arts http://www.giarts.org/Learning.pdf [Acrobat Reader™ software can be downloaded for free and is necessary to access the pdf document on your computer. See the Newsletter's Internet Software You Can Use page for more assistance.]

See http://aep-arts.org/partinfo/reports/r061799.html reporting on Arts Education Partnership meeting, June 1999.

An annotated bibliography of sources of information supporting the importance of arts education is available from the Artsvision site at http://www.artsvision.com/resources.html#bibliography

New York City's arts education program is described at http://www.annenbergchallenge.org/sites/nyc_arts.html Artsvision's plan document is available for download (in pdf format) from http://www.artsvision.com/nyc.pdf [See the Newsletter's Internet Software You Can Use page for a link to free Adobe Acrobat Reader™ software.]

The Annenberg Challenge organization's own Newsletter contains specific illustrations of other integrated arts curricula at http://www.annenbergchallenge.org/pubs/cj/v3n1/pg2.html

The San Francisco Symphony's Adventures in Music program in the city's schools is described at http://www.sfsymphony.org/templates/basic.asp?nodeid=160

The website for Chicago's CAPE program is at http://www.capeweb.org/cape/capenav.nsf?Open

The Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra's Community Conservatory is described at http://www.indyorch.org/community-frame.html

The Dance in Schools program of the San Francisco Ballet is at http://www.sfballet.com/about/community_education.php

The Bushnell, in Hartford, Connecticut, has a website at http://www.bushnell.org Artsvision describes their arts education programming at http://www.artsvision.com/fpbushnell.html

The Cleveland Orchestra's website features its educational programs at
http://www.clevelandorchestra.com/c-scripts/serve.pl?d=education%2Fschools.html
[scroll down the page to the "Learning through Music" section]