Establishing Creative Education as a Fundamental Right
Part of the 2024 GIA Conference Blog
Rachel Dukes
Arts education is a big part of funding for K-12 schools. Some of the proven benefits of funding arts education in schools are children who develop innovative and creative thinking skills, leading to greater opportunities for employment. When we as a society position arts as a need to have vs. art as a nice to have, we pour into a new dynamic group of citizens to help with the overall societal process. The two presenters used their work in California as a model and invitation to openly discuss strategies to ignite statewide conversations on arts education funding. This panel highlighted the challenges in ensuring “high-quality” and “culturally responsive” arts education to all children despite race, ability, or native language other than English.
Josy Miller, the Arts Program Manager at the California Arts Council, and Abe Flores, Deputy Director of Policy and Programs at Create CA led the group in the discussion around equitable arts education funding. They both discussed the impact of California Proposition 28, Art and Music K-12 Education Funding Initiative (2022) which secured ongoing funding dedicated to art and music education for all K-12 public schools in the state. Furthermore, the state requires that a greater portion of the funding be distributed to schools that serve economically disadvantaged students. Both speakers pointed to the core societal value that creative education is a fundamental right, and a student's access to this education should not depend on their location or socio-economic background. Instead of othering these students, the claim of increased arts education is a new sense of belonging, different approaches to teaching students to help with unique learning styles, and the overall enrichment and fullness of these students.
Our group discussed different strategies that their organizations and states have employed to address the same issues. One of the guiding discussion topics was thinking through the strategies that funders have used to develop relationships with public schools so they are able to take advantage of the funding. Many folks expressed success in prioritizing and listening to community voices when trying to understand the needs of students within that region. One respondent offered, “As we were developing the guidelines and application to be an administering organization, we had conversations in each of the nine regions around the state with representatives. Then each of them selected one member of that round table to act as sort of a focus group that helped us develop the guidelines. And really all of those conversations were about what are the needs, what are the values, and what are the opportunities in your community?” At the inception of any of this work, the prioritization of community voices is what led to the successful administration of arts-focused programs in schools. Ensuring that all stakeholders are being heard is what gives the best results for students.
ABOUT THE SESSION
Establishing Creative Education as a Fundamental Right: How Do We Make Systems Change Now?
Abe Flores and Josy Miller
Funders of arts education and Creative Youth Development programs invest in thousands of model programs each year that serve hundreds of thousands of students nationwide. However, structurally, the field is falling far short of providing high-quality, culturally responsive creative education for all students. Students of color, low-income students, English learners, students with disabilities, and system-engaged youth have markedly less access and rates of participation in these programs. Given the substantive body of research on the discrepancies in overall outcomes for students with and without this access – from academic achievement to mental health – the lack of universal creative education is fundamentally a question of social justice.
This conversation will consider what levers exist for us as funders to begin to make this kind of system change. What investment and other support strategies are we employing to begin making this change? How are we intersecting with formal education entities? How are we establishing alongside systems? What partnerships are we engaging in to make this change? What can we envision the outcomes of these efforts will look like next year? In five years? In ten years?
