After devoting much of the 1990s to working on boosting teacher quality, Wallace in 2000 shifted its focus to boosting education leadership. We did this out of the idea that effective leaders were essential to improving public education. Our analysis of the field revealed that previous school reform efforts had neglected leadership, that school leader training was weak and ill-suited to modern-day demands, that there existed an enormous knowledge gap about the role leaders could play in improving student learning, and that awareness of that role needed to be raised among educators, policymakers and the public. We also thought change would most likely occur and last if states and districts worked together. This represented a dramatic departure from most reform efforts, which focused primarily on selected schools in a district.

As the initiative developed, our work concentrated on trying to effect change in three areas:

Standards – to focus on the skills principals need in order to succeed, and to then use that knowledge to influence both licensure and accreditation of leadership preparation programs.
Training – to provide principals with the skills to manage complex organizational change and to improve teaching and learning throughout schools.
Conditions – to create the right supports and incentives for principals and superintendents to perform as effective leaders.

OVERALL ASSESSMENT

Successes: Leadership, considered a marginal issue by many policymakers a decade ago, is today widely recognized as a necessary ingredient in school reform. Moreover, research has clarified why leadership matters, what school leaders can do to improve student learning and how state-district coordination helps strengthen leadership. On the ground, new leadership standards, revised with Wallace support, are helping to reshape licensure rules and guide improvements in principal preparation programs. New training programs have emerged, built on research that identified and explored the specifics of effective programs. Mentoring is much more common nationwide. Finally, with Wallace support a research-based performance assessment tool, which measures leadership behaviors in school principals, has been developed and is being marketed across the country.

But: Improving the conditions under which leadership operates has proven very difficult. The most progress has occurred in using data, developing new methods for assessing principals’ performance and adding time for principals to focus on instruction. We’ve seen less progress in providing principals with more authority over resources – time, money and people – in all likelihood because doing so often requires changes in political or contractual arrangements. Today we also face the reality of the effect on state and local budgets of the nation’s worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. For states and districts to sustain the work we helped them start will not be easy.

II. STRATEGY MILESTONES

2000:

The State Action for Education Leadership Project (SAELP) was launched; A national consortium of five organizations was formed, led by The Council of Chief State School Officers, to manage the state initiative and build field support for the work. A “Ventures Fund” to seed innovation with small grants and publicize the initiative was created.

2001:

The 15 original SAELP states were selected.
Leadership for Educational Achievement in Districts (LEAD) was launched in 10 districts located in SAELP states (Jefferson County and the former NYC District 10 in the Bronx were added in 2002); the initial LEAD grants were significantly larger than state grants and supported districts to address a comprehensive range of policies and practices affecting both superintendents and principals.
Wallace funded a new executive training program for superintendents at Harvard’s Kennedy School to address the scarcity of quality training programs for superintendents and to create a learning network for top leaders of LEAD districts.

2002:

Staff assessment concluded that (1) SAELP and LEAD sites were focused mainly on training but far less on leadership conditions; (2) districts needed technical assistance in areas including how to strengthen university training programs and ensure alignment with state policies; (3) there was a need to create a more cohesive network among LEAD districts to share learning and make them a more potent force for national change. Initial funding to Education Development Center provided technical assistance to districts.

2003-4:

Wallace was an original funder of the NYC Leadership Academy, an innovative training model outside the university setting.
Staff assessment of SAELP found that the work to date was overly broad, had not yet tackled the toughest challenges, had not sufficiently engaged top state leaders and had achieved only limited state-district policy coordination. Based on those assessments, two states were dropped from the initiative owing to lack of progress and weak plans. Staff also concluded that Wallace needed to directly engage state leaders rather than work solely through our national consortium partners.
Staff assessment of LEAD pointed to the need to (1) greatly dial up emphasis on improving conditions for effective leadership; (2) develop measures to enable Wallace staff to identify trends among LEAD districts, provide evidence of progress, and share lessons beyond LEAD districts; (3) take greater advantage of other sources of knowledge in the initiative such as the Southern Regional Education Board and (4) facilitate the collection and sharing of promising work.
SAELP II was launched. State and district funding was consolidated into single grants to promote greater statewide collaboration and policy alignment. Grant renewals in 2004 required work at the state and district levels to concentrate on two to three well-focused “breakthrough ideas” that catalyzed statewide change, integrated both leadership training and conditions, and were “feasible, measurable and sustainable.” Wallace assumed direct management of states from the national consortium and focused the NC instead on providing technical assistance to sites.
Three key urban districts (Chicago; Boston; Portland, OR) were added to the initiative to propel the leadership work in their states. With the addition of nine new SAELP II states and the three new districts, the number of initiative sites reached its peak in November 2004: 22 states, 15 districts.
The publication of How Leadership Influences Learning provided research validation of the core Wallace initiative message that leadership is a powerful catalyst, second only to teaching among school-related factors, in improving student achievement.

2005:

We decided to make principals (not principals and superintendents) the primary target of our initiative and to put more emphasis on changing principals’ conditions. Those shifts reflected our calculation that some 75 percent of state and district initiative spending had been directed at principal training, combined with mixed reception to executive leadership training by many participating superintendents.
Wallace funded executive leadership programs at Harvard and University of Virginia to provide state and district leadership teams with high-quality training drawing on the expertise of both education and business faculty, and to promote greater cohesion and dialogue within those teams.
Leadership Issue Groups were created to bring together Wallace states and districts and key researchers around six critical issues in policy, practice and research that, if addressed, could accelerate and expand sites’ funded efforts.

2006-7:

Leadership for Learning (2006) described our “cohesive leadership system” hypothesis, which became our basis for determining progress in funded sites.
Preparing School Leaders for a Changing World by Linda Darling-Hammond et al., (2007) provided a research-based identification of best practices in training school leaders.

2008:

Wallace site funding was differentiated based on state and district progress toward cohesive leadership systems; the number of large site grants was reduced by more than half to 16 by June 2008; national consortium funding shifted to emphasize sharing Wallace knowledge with governors, state chiefs, boards and legislators.
To share initiative lessons with key practitioner audiences, we launched four new communication partnerships with the American Association of School Administrators, the Education Trust, the National Staff Development Council, and the University Council for Educational Administration.

2009:

The board approved the first “next generation grants” intended to maintain our presence in the field: to Harvard to create a new doctoral degree in education leadership; and to the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards to develop a new advanced certification for principals.

Washington, D.C. schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and Mayor Adrian Fenty answered questions posed by PBS NewsHour education correspondent John Merrow at Wallace’s national education leadership conference in October 2009.

III. RESULTS

Since we began the initiative, education leadership has become more widely accepted as necessary to school reform.¹ Top leaders in 48 states strongly believe leadership is important to improving student achievement: they rate it 5.8 on a scale of 6 in states where Wallace works; 5.5 among leaders in other states.² Washington, too, has embraced the idea. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has publicly proclaimed the importance of leadership in turning around low-performing schools and has added better leadership to better teaching as a centerpiece of new federal reform priorities.

One reason for the growing recognition of education leadership may be that more is known about the subject. Over the last decade, more than 70 Wallace-supported publications and other resources have helped fill the knowledge gap about school leadership and how it can work to prepare and support talented teachers. Grantees and non-grantees rate these materials highly for their usefulness.

STANDARDS

States have adopted revised leadership standards that have helped turn the field’s discussion from what leaders need to know to what they actually have to do to successfully improve teaching and learning throughout schools.

All 14 states where Wallace has worked most closely have adopted an updated set of standards for principals and other school administrators. These revised standards were developed, with Wallace support, by the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium, known as ISLLC, under the aegis of the Council of Chief State School Officers. They are guiding many states and districts in revising licensure requirements and principal training curriculums, re-accrediting university leadership programs and evaluating principal performance.

TRAINING

Applying new research, states and districts are beginning to explore principal training to address longstanding quality weaknesses and provide more continuous support to principals after they are hired.

Some 24 training programs in Wallace-supported districts have been identified as high quality by virtue of having used exemplary practices identified in Stanford University research that was commissioned by the foundation. Eighteen of them offer full-time internships, previously an area of weakness for many programs.

Wallace-supported school districts including Chicago, Boston and Fort Wayne, Indiana, are exerting more influence on the content, relevance and delivery of principal training at area universities. Two Wallace-supported districts, New York City and Atlanta, have opened innovative leadership academies that employ methods common in other types of professional education, such as role play and case study.

Mentoring, too, has become more prevalent in the field. More than half of all states – and 11 of 14 where Wallace works most closely – now require principal mentoring; practically none did when our initiative began in 2000. Nine of the 11 require mentoring to incorporate the quality criteria identified by Wallace’s 2007 publication Getting Principal Mentoring Right. Top education leaders in all states now rate the importance of training and mentoring principals highly – 5.9 on a scale of 6 in Wallace states; 5.5 in non-Wallace states.³

CONDITIONS

States and districts have made progress in improving some of the conditions under which school leaders work. Among other things, they have provided school leaders with useful data and tested new ways both to assess principal performance and to increase the amount of time principals devote to improving classroom instruction. Less progress has occurred on conditions requiring difficult political or contractual changes, such as providing principals with more authority over time, money and people. Key indicators include:

Twelve of the 14 states where Wallace works most closely have enacted laws creating statewide data warehouses, student data management systems and “balanced scorecards,” that is, planning tools that use data to assess how well positioned an organization is for the future. These sites have also acted to provide training to leaders in data use. A majority of principals in 10 Wallace-supported states surveyed by the RAND Corporation are satisfied with available data – but dissatisfied with its timeliness.
Some 315 schools in 10 states are participating in the School Administration Manager (SAM) program, which is designed to enable principals to focus more time on instruction. Some 75 principals in the program at least a year increased the average time they spent on instructional matters by nearly an hour daily.
Nine of 14 states have passed new principal evaluation laws since the beginning of their grants. To date six have begun to use the Wallace-funded VAL-ED, the first research-based evaluation system focused squarely on instructional leadership.

IV. REFLECTIONS

The timing of our decision to make leadership the sole focus of our education work was opportune and a key factor in explaining the field’s eventual receptivity to our initiative.
The Goals 2000 Educate America Act under the Clinton administration and later the No Child Left Behind Act in the early Bush administration years set a bipartisan agenda for tougher standards and greater accountability. Those policies placed huge new pressures on education leaders to perform. The championing of leadership by the Obama administration as a key plank in its reform agenda has further fueled the field’s interest in our work. With the current strains on state and district budgets, the case is stronger than ever for investing in better leadership as a cost-effective means of achieving broad improvements in teaching and learning.

At the same time, pressing for better leadership over the years was no easy task, and progress in the early part of the decade was hampered by a weak knowledge base and the absence of a clearly articulated theory of how to effect change or measure progress.
With little research to guide the work of our funded states and districts and without a clear sense of what changes to prioritize or assess, it took years to settle on a clear hypothesis for change that we could comfortably use to manage our initiative. Absent such a hypothesis, we chose instead to be responsive to funding what our grantees decided to prioritize. As a result, the state-district efforts in the first half of our initiative avoided some of the more difficult but important issues of leader conditions. The work also got ahead of research findings that might have helped guide and propel it – for example, the Stanford research on principal training, which was published seven years after our initiative began.

Experience and research lend support to the “cohesive leadership system” theory that became the basis for our site work in the latter half of the initiative. But such systems are very difficult to establish and sustain.
Our “cohesive leadership system” hypothesis – holding that harmonizing state and district education leadership policies and practices could strengthen school leadership – was a milestone in our initiative when it was published in 2006. It was also a benefit to the field, providing much-needed clarification of our areas of strategic focus, our desired outcomes and progress metrics. A newly-published evaluation by RAND confirmed our belief that well-coordinated state-district policies can be an effective way to improve, on a large scale, leadership training and the conditions under which principals work. Specifically, RAND found that where progress toward a cohesive system has been greatest, principals feel better able to devote more time to improving instruction and more empowered to control resources. However, given political and practical challenges and obstacles, it is questionable whether more than a handful of states will make substantial progress in establishing and sustaining such systems.

The impetus and direction for statewide leadership improvement can come from a variety of places.
Early assumptions in our initiative that the sole drivers for achieving statewide improvements in school leadership would be state-level leaders or state education agencies proved wrong. To the contrary, we learned that the primary force for advancing wide-scale leadership improvement can come from different levels of public education or even outside government, depending on where the authority, expertise, political weight and willpower happen to be in a given state. In Delaware, for example, state leaders championed the work; in Iowa, state agencies worked with nongovernmental professional organizations; in Kentucky, leadership for the initiative came from both state leaders and the Jefferson County Schools; in Georgia, a district –Atlanta – has provided much of the impetus for statewide leadership improvements.

ARTS PARTICIPATION

I. SUMMARY

BACKGROUND

The idea of making the arts a part of many more people’s lives has animated Wallace’s work since our founding. During the 1990s, we built a national reputation as a leading arts funder by providing grants to hundreds of arts organizations nationwide to adopt effective audience-centered practices. Nonetheless, by the end of that decade we concluded that the impact of our work had been limited, both on specific organizations and on the field as a whole. From 2000 on, we sought to promote more widespread results in what we came to call “building arts participation,” and we have used two approaches to that end:

Working directly with a diverse set of arts organizations to develop effective ways to expand participation and then document and share the credible lessons with others in the field – our Wallace Excellence Awards initiative.
Developing partnerships with institutions that we thought might be able to influence arts organizations to place higher priority on building participation. Initially we worked with community foundations and later on with state arts agencies, in our State Arts Partnerships for Cultural Participation (START) initiative.

OVERALL ASSESSMENT

Successes: Through the Excellence Awards, arts organizations have launched varied efforts to build participation in the arts – using online social networking to attract more of the under-30 crowd (the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston), for example, or making contemporary dance, theater and other performances widely available through a low-cost online pay-per-view series (On the Boards in Seattle). These arts groups are also developing, or honing, the ability to gather and use data to track their progress toward participation goals, and then assess the impact of their efforts on attendance. This will enable us for the first time to document and share credible lessons about effective practices. So far, signs are promising: the majority of Wallace Excellence Award grantees have seen gains in participation that exceeded national averages despite a weakening economy. Our work with state arts agencies to promote participation building more broadly enabled most of the 13 agencies we funded to reorient their practices toward building arts participation, and the field nationwide has learned from their efforts.

But: In our WEA work with arts organizations, we were slow to realize that groups needed help to do an effective job of collecting and analyzing the data necessary to assess whether their new participation-building plans were, in fact, working. This inability of arts groups until very recently to produce data-rich success stories in turn badly hindered our efforts to promote the benefits of participation-building more broadly. In our START work, too, we were slow to define precisely what we hoped the impact of the state arts agencies work would be and how we would measure it.

II. STRATEGY MILESTONES

2000:

We adopted a three-pronged strategy to expand the impact of our participation-building work: (1) fund individual cultural organizations to help them innovate effective participation-building practices; (2) launch a communication and knowledge-sharing effort, including a new Arts4AllPeople website; and (3) create partnerships with states and other funders to increase arts participation among a larger range of arts providers.
Community Partnerships for Cultural Participation (CPCP), begun in 1998, was a major effort to develop partnerships with 10 community foundations to expand local arts participation beyond single organizations.

2001-2003:

LEAP (Leadership and Excellence in Arts Participation), a new organization-focused initiative, provided multi-year grants to 58 arts institutions from 2001 to 2003. It differed from previous initiatives (which were organized by artistic discipline) by including a diverse range of arts organizations in terms of size, geography, disciplines and target audiences, with the goal of developing broadly relevant participation-building lessons.
State Arts Partnerships for Cultural Participation (START) was launched in 2001; 13 state arts agencies received grants to help them develop “new standards of participation-building practice” and encourage their widespread adoption among arts organizations in their states.
RAND’s A New Framework for Building Participation in the Arts (2001) attracted wide, sustained attention by applying basic management and marketing concepts to the challenge of increasing arts participation.
A 2003 staff review of LEAP concluded that while there had been accomplishments, the initiative had largely failed to capture evidence of effectiveness or spread lessons learned.
A staff review of the CPCP initiative concluded that community foundations had limited capacity for or interest in being partners for this work. CPCP also revealed the difficulties of developing and sustaining participation-building partnerships between arts and non-arts organizations, or among arts organizations of differing sizes and missions.

2004:

RAND’s Gifts of the Muse presented evidence that frequent participation in high quality arts experiences by children is the best predictor of adult participation and also produces immediate benefits.
The Wallace Excellence Awards (WEA) program was launched. To ensure that WEA grants would be used to sustain participation-building work once Wallace funding ended, awards had a matching requirement and had to be used to create permanent endowments or revolving cash reserves for participation-building purposes.
University of Chicago researchers were selected to produce case studies about participation-building practices among LEAP grantees; the study, published in 2008, included qualitative descriptions but very limited quantitative evidence of results.

2005-2006:

WEA underwent major shifts to make it more inclusive, more oriented toward producing credible evidence about participation-building, and more influential with arts organizations throughout entire cities. We moved back to project funding and ended the matching requirement. Grantees were drawn from an open competition within targeted cities instead of a more select national pool. We provided WEA recipients with technical assistance to enable them to track progress and provide credible evidence on what works. We added a new strategy to help create citywide “learning networks” enabling both grantee and non-grantee organizations to share lessons. The networks were organized by partner organizations, mainly community foundations, in each city where we worked.

Chicago and Boston were selected as the first WEA host cities; 16 multi-year grants were awarded, and the Boston Foundation and Chicago Community Trust received grants to organize learning networks in those cities.

2007-2009:

Philadelphia and San Francisco became the next two WEA cities in 2007, with The Philadelphia Foundation, working with the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, and The San Francisco Foundation serving as partners; Seattle and Minneapolis/St. Paul were named as the fifth and sixth sites in 2008, with the Washington State Arts Commission and the Minnesota Community Foundation, working with Arts Midwest, as Wallace partners. The total number of WEA grants since 2004 reached 74 (54 of which were located in the six WEA cities).

Taking advantage of the increasing ability of WEA grantees to accurately track their progress with data, we funded an effort to produce credible case studies documenting effective participation-building practices; publication expected in 2011.

III. RESULTS

The Wallace Excellence Awards initiative, launched in 2004, was overhauled in 2006 so that it focuses today on helping arts institutions in selected cities test participation-building techniques and use data to inform and measure the effectiveness of these efforts. Six cities – Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Seattle – serve as Excellence Awards sites, and within them 54 arts groups, ranging from opera companies to film festivals, are award recipients.

Through START, which ran from 2001 to 2006, 13 of the nation’s 56 state arts agencies – small government offices that play a key role in distributing federal and state arts funding – worked to encourage arts groups to focus on participation-building. A Wallace-commissioned publication that grew out of START, the RAND Corporation’s Cultivating Demand for the Arts: Arts Learning, Arts Engagement, and State Arts Policy, has become the Wallace website’s most downloaded arts publication, owing to its novel analysis of how institutions and policy could work to stimulate more public engagement in the arts. Another Wallace-commissioned RAND report has become a landmark in the field; A New Framework for Building Participation in the Arts, published in 2001, offers arts groups a methodical way to develop participation-building strategies and has provided the field with a nuanced definition of participation-building: broadening, deepening and diversifying audiences.

ARTS ORGANIZATIONS

Wallace Excellence Award grantees are demonstrating that organizations that use market research to inform their goal-setting and that have the ability to gather and analyze reliable data to track their progress tend to have above-average attendance gains.¹

With Wallace’s support, the 32 grantees that have participated longest in the Excellence Awards are now producing credible year-over-year data on their progress toward participation goals, up from 23 in 2008. Dating from the year that each organization joined our initiative, these 32 have had median participation gains of 31 percent among the groups that were the targets of their efforts. In 2008-2009 alone, the median gain was 10 percent.²

Furthermore, these gains exceed national trends despite the weak economy. For example:

Among the six theaters in our initiative, median attendance grew 23 percent in 2008-2009, while theater attendance nationwide has been slipping.³
The five museums among the grantees with credible data increased participation by targeted groups at a median rate of eight percent in 2008-9; nationwide, museum attendance has been relatively flat.⁴

Grantees (19 organizations) that focused on increasing participation of a specific target group had a median year-to-year increase of 31 percent versus 2 percent for those that sought to increase overall participation (13 organizations).

Finally, grantees that used market research to shape their Wallace-funded strategies (11 organizations) had a median increase in year-over-year participation of 35 percent, compared to 6 percent among those that didn’t use market research (21 organizations).⁵

ARTS FUNDERS

The START initiative, which formally ended in 2006, succeeded in spurring a majority of the 13 funded state arts agencies to reorient practices toward building arts participation and develop ways to try to draw new audiences to the arts. Some 82 percent of Wallace-funded state arts agencies⁶ say START prompted them to fund new grant programs aimed specifically at boosting participation, for example, while two-thirds altered staff responsibilities to stress participation. In addition, many of the initiative’s key lessons stuck; the New Jersey Council on the Arts 2009-10 grant criteria, for example, include a requirement that arts organizations “identify and remove barriers to building broader, more diverse audiences and deeper arts experiences.” What remains uncertain, however, is whether these changes have led to a substantial shift in the agencies’ funding toward participation-building. Also unknown is the ultimate impact of the effort on getting arts organizations to place a higher priority on building participation.

IV. REFLECTIONS

The development of a city-based strategy for Wallace Excellence Awards in 2006, coupled with our decision to select grantees primarily for their potential to contribute participation-building lessons, helped remedy several longstanding problems in our arts organization-focused work.

Prior to 2006, we chose grantees for the awards and similar initiatives from an invitation-only national pool, which had the unintended effect of excluding many organizations that might have had innovative ideas. The city-based strategy focuses more sharply on seeking out a diverse set of grantees that can help us create a “portfolio” of ideas and information big enough to contain lessons for arts organizations regardless of their size or art form.

Another aspect of this work has been the development in each award city of a “learning network” that gathers together grantees and non-grantees to discuss and share knowledge about participation building. These modestly funded efforts are established and managed by an organization that agrees to work with Wallace, generally a community foundation. Attendance at learning network programs has mostly met expectations, and the organizing groups have made small grants to help non-Excellence Award recipients undertake participation projects. However, the learning networks concept did not include ways to measure progress or results, so we cannot assess just how effective the networks are.

We were slow in recognizing how serious an obstacle the weaknesses in data-gathering and analysis among arts organizations were – both to achieving their participation goals, and to our ability to document and share success stories with the rest of the field.
It was not until 2007 that we provided technical support and funding to grantees to enable them to gather and use data to track their progress toward participation goals and produce solid evidence of their results. As a result, Wallace grant-making to arts organizations has to-date yielded only anecdotal or journalistic accounts of participation-building strategies. Now that we have provided the award organizations assistance in data collection and analysis, it is likely that we will be able to reap widely-useful information for the field. But the lack of data-based success stories until now has made it more difficult to build field-wide acceptance for the idea that participation-building is fully compatible with artistic excellence, has tangible organizational payoffs and therefore ought to be a top priority.

Our two efforts to form partnerships with external arts funders to spread participation – first with community foundations and later with state arts agencies – demonstrated how difficult it is to identify funders that are not only open to making participation-building a priority, but have the capacity, resources and field influence to do so effectively.
Our first partnership effort with 10 community foundations initially seemed a good fit because they were a fast-growing sub-set of philanthropy with strong local ties and considerable interest and experience in collaborating with national foundations. The partnership ultimately fell short, however, in part because those we chose to participate in it lacked the expertise to work on building participation or provide local arts organizations with the needed technical assistance.

In the case of our later partnership with state arts agencies, a key challenge – which we didn’t immediately recognize or address – was the effect of the recession of the early 2000s. With deep state and federal budget cuts a real possibility, the agencies faced the difficulty of navigating rough political waters to ensure they could stay afloat. This meant that they found themselves in the early years of the initiative struggling to make the case for their survival in the political arena while working to refocus their priorities on participation-building as our initiative called for. In that challenging setting, one 2002 decision proved particularly timely: to have Mark Moore, a Harvard University expert in public policy and management, provide the agencies’ leaders with training to more clearly define and articulate the public benefits their agencies could deliver. As previously discussed, state arts agencies that were part of the Wallace initiative have reoriented many of their own policies and practices toward participation building. What remains unclear, however, is whether these small agencies with their limited resources have the clout or the reach to further the ultimate objective of our partnership: influencing arts organizations in their states to prioritize expanding participation.

ARTS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE

I. SUMMARY

BACKGROUND

Launched in Dallas in 2006, Arts for Young People is The Wallace Foundation’s youngest major initiative. With its focus on improving arts learning for children whatever the venue – the public school classroom or after-school program – it bridges the foundation’s interests in education and out-of-school time.

The initiative aims to reverse a 30-year decline in children’s arts education that began when municipal fiscal crises led to big cuts in public school arts instruction in the late 1970s. Because of budget constraints today as well – and test-driven demands that teachers spend more time on reading, math and other “core” subjects – many schools continue to marginalize arts education. To help children get the arts instruction they need, Arts for Young People supports “coordinated arts learning efforts,” ventures knitting together schools, city agencies, arts groups and others to work as one to improve arts learning in school, outside it or in both settings. By “improve,” we mean three things: bringing arts instruction to more children, distributing it equitably and ensuring its quality.

The initiative is currently under way in five urban areas. In Boston, Los Angeles County, the Los Angeles Unified School District (a separate jurisdiction from Los Angeles County) and Minneapolis, Wallace is supporting planning efforts. In Dallas, Wallace is supporting measures including instructor training and the development of new curriculum guides to improve the quality of arts instruction in both classrooms and out-of-school time programs.

II. RESULTS

Dallas’ Thriving Minds, a city-wide initiative managed by Big Thought, a nonprofit arts education organization, has become a national model for how to improve arts education for city children. Less than a decade ago, more than half of Dallas’ public elementary school children received limited if any weekly arts instruction; Thriving Minds played a central role in spreading arts education to all Dallas public elementary schools and expanding the time devoted to it to at least 90 minutes weekly, split between music and visual arts. Thriving Minds has also broken ground in assessing the quality of arts instruction and making arts teaching more available outside school.

A major Wallace-commissioned study looking at the coordinated approach, the RAND Corporation’s Revitalizing Arts Education Through Community-Wide Coordination, was published in 2008. It documented some successes with six coordinated efforts it examined, but also noted both significant obstacles and risks encountered, including shifting education policies and lack of adequate resources in schools and out-of-school time programs. The report concluded that coordination is “a sometimes powerful, but also fragile approach.”¹

III. REFLECTIONS

Dallas has shown that through community-wide coordination it is possible to make major strides in improving and expanding arts education for children in cities. But this work is no easy undertaking. The roots of the Thriving Minds’ initiative go back to the 1990s. Whether its highly coordinated approach, which required time, resources and cooperation from many sources, can be stitched into the civic life of many of the nation’s cities is a big unanswered question – especially during economic hard times.

Although improving arts learning through coordinated efforts requires the support of a large swath of community leaders, firm backing from superintendents, principals and other school officials is especially important because the public schools are the only way to reach a majority of a city’s children. But city education leaders often have a short tenure – the average for large city urban superintendents is 3.5 years, according to the Council of Great City Schools – and policies can change with them. Those who hope to sustain improvements in arts learning, therefore, will also have to find ways to sustain commitment to arts learning by the city’s education leadership.

OUT-OF-SCHOOL TIME LEARNING

I. SUMMARY

BACKGROUND

Millions of American children and teenagers spend their time after school unsupervised, and yet millions of parents say they would enroll their sons and daughters in after-school activities if programs were available.¹ That programs are not is testimony to an enormous missed opportunity for learning and enrichment beyond the school day, especially for young people most in need. To change that picture, Wallace long supported out-of-school time (OST) programs in such places as libraries, urban parks and science museums. However, after assessing our efforts in 1999, we concluded that funding individual programs had had limited long-term impact. This realization prodded us to start thinking about finding sustainable ways to enhance out-of-school time programs throughout cities. The idea was to try to make sure that OST programs were of high enough quality to benefit children and ensure that these quality programs were accessible to families, especially those with the greatest need.

After studying the issue for several years, we wondered if cities could put into place policies and practices that would improve access throughout their communities to high quality OST services. Thus was born our current initiative to work directly with cities to plan and implement citywide strategies – such as data collection and establishment of standards – aimed at increasing participation in OST programs and improving their quality. We launched the initiative first in Providence, Rhode Island in 2003. Within several years, four other cities had joined the effort: Boston, Chicago, New York City and Washington, D.C.

OVERALL ASSESSMENT

Successes: Our identification of necessary elements for building what amounts to citywide OST “systems” – including mechanisms to improve program quality citywide and vehicles for continuously collecting data on basics like how often children participate in programs – has gained the notice of city, state and OST field leaders nationwide. In addition, the initiative has helped focus attention not just on increasing enrollment but also on boosting OST program attendance, an indicator of how well the programs are serving children. Today, our grantees are recognized as national leaders in building citywide OST systems as a means of making high-quality programs available to more children in need.

But: Although access to OST has been boosted, progress in lifting the quality of OST programs has been uneven. Among other things, for much of our initiative we overestimated the ability of OST organizations to improve program quality because we underestimated their need for stronger financial management. And, the prospects for having our work picked up elsewhere are uncertain, especially in light of the weak economy and resulting government budget cuts.

II. STRATEGY MILESTONES

2002-2003:

We launched our new city-based initiative to help build more effective OST systems, using strategies that were highly unusual at the time:

requiring the active commitment of top city leaders and cross-agency cooperation;
requiring an intensive planning process informed by: – mapping of OST programs available to different student populations; – market research to understand the needs of parents and students; and
creating a management information system to collect data on program quality and student participation.

Providence and New York City were the two places first chosen to participate in the initial planning required by the initiative.

2004:

Wallace’s board approved five-year implementation funding to Providence and New York City, following successful planning in those sites. The Providence After-School Alliance (PASA), a public-private intermediary agency led by the mayor, was created to manage and coordinate the work in that city. Planning and coordinating in New York City were assumed by a city agency and focused on consolidating the city’s OST services, developing outcome measurements and improving program quality.
All Work and No Play?, a Wallace-funded national survey by Public Agenda, drew attention to our new OST work and provided first-of-its kind information about the needs and wishes of parents and children.

2005:

Planning grants were awarded to three more cities – Boston, Chicago and Washington – to broaden the reach and relevance of the initiative’s lessons.
RAND’s Making Out-of-School Time Matter provided research-based evidence for Wallace’s emerging messages about the importance of quality in securing public funding for OST and the need to build local OST systems.
Wallace hosted a symposium in Washington, D.C. that gathered more than 100 national field leaders. It featured the new RAND report and early evidence from our initiative that helped stake out Wallace’s public position about the importance of improving program quality and of taking the full cost of quality into account.

2006:

Based on the strength of their business planning, Boston, Chicago and Washington were awarded three-year implementation funding. Plans in those cities had a mix of targeted participants: elementary school-based OST programs in Boston; middle-schoolers in Washington and high school teens in Chicago.
A staff review led to the decision to place more emphasis on the harder aspects of OST where progress had been slowest, particularly improving program quality.

2007-2008:

To share emerging lessons with top city leaders, Wallace launched a communications partnership with the National League of Cities.
The Wallace initiatives in Boston and Washington were greatly expanded in 2008 as the school systems in both cities assumed responsibility for ongoing planning and management and began applying the improvement methods developed by the original Wallace-funded programs in those cities to many more programs.
A Place to Grow and Learn (2008) articulated the key elements of OST system-building and our OST theory of change based on our city-based work.
With research showing that financial management weaknesses were preventing many OST providers from improving program quality, Wallace launched an initiative in Chicago to provide training and other support to 26 organizations to address those weaknesses.

2009:

The board approved additional grants to Chicago and Providence for new work to improve program quality on a wide scale and expand on newly developed management information systems to enhance their usefulness.
We created a first-of-its-kind online OST cost calculator and published a much-awaited study of the costs of providing high-quality OST. Through 2009, some 6,700 website visitors have used the Cost Calculator.

Recognizing the increasing importance of state-level OST action, we supported the Afterschool Alliance to enhance the ability of statewide OST networks in the four states² where Wallace is working to help spread emerging lessons from our site work and promote effective use by states of OST funding contained in the federal stimulus program.

III. RESULTS³

The five Wallace-funded OST efforts have succeeded in putting in place many or all of the key elements of an OST system: strong leadership; continuous planning; a designated coordinating body to lead the effort; a management information system that can provide reliable citywide data on matters including program participation and quality; measures to improve program quality; and efforts to boost participation in programs. We also have seen several signs of growing interest in the system-building approach beyond the cities where we’ve been working. Membership in the Afterschool Policy Advisers Network of the National league of Cities (a partner of ours) has increased sharply in three years from 22 cities in 2005, to 230 in 2007 to 350 in 2009, for example. And Wallace’s report describing the systems approach, A Place to Grow and Learn, has become our second most frequently sought publication, with about 31,000 downloads through 2009.

Each of the five cities has found its own way to organize the initiative, depending on its needs and circumstances. Decision-making and funding in New York City, for example, were successfully consolidated under a single municipal agency, while in Providence, the task of coordination was undertaken by a private nonprofit that went on to successfully plan and build a citywide, neighborhood-based infrastructure for middle-school OST where none previously existed. In Boston and Washington, D.C., the locus of coordination shifted over time from nonprofits to the public school system. In Chicago, coordination has been carried out jointly by four city agencies and a major OST program provider.

MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS

All five sites are collecting and using OST programming and participant data, information about matters including enrollment, attendance and demographics. The management information systems the sites have established are becoming the backbone of much of their decision-making, helping cities in such crucial matters as pinpointing programs with declining attendance so that remedies can be found.

But putting management information systems together for OST can be painstaking work, requiring answers to questions including what information the various players in coordinated systems are willing to collect and share with others, and what degree of training staffers at myriad program sites will need to make sure the system is providing up-to-date, accurate information. At the same time, as shown in Chicago – where coordination is shared by five partners – the development of a management information system that all major OST players have a role in shaping can help build the cooperation needed for an enterprise that demands many hands.

PROGRAM QUALITY

Wallace cities are employing a number of methods to improve program quality, including the development of standards, the use of assessments to gauge whether those standards are being met and the provision of OST staff training. They have also found that improving program quality is challenging work. It requires much trust-building and effort to get the organizations that provide OST programs to agree to a common set of quality standards, for example. Smaller OST providers can find it difficult to free up time for staffers to attend professional development sessions. And introducing the most appropriate set of activities for a particular group of children presents its own set of complications; one area of weakness in some sites, for example, has been a lack of hands-on learning experiences, especially in programs for older children.

Also, even the largest organizations that provide OST programs can suffer from administrative and management weaknesses that can ultimately affect programming. This insight spurred Wallace, in 2009, to launch a new OST initiative aimed squarely at helping leading OST providers in Chicago improve their financial management.

PROGRAM PARTICIPATION

Wallace cities are focusing more attention on increasing children’s and teens’ average weekly attendance in programs, not just enrollments. The number of days per week participants attend is a telling indicator of program quality, accessibility, effective outreach and the likelihood of producing learning benefits. Progress has proven most difficult for OST programs serving students beyond elementary school age. The Providence effort, for example, succeeded in more than tripling enrollments in after-school programs for middle-school students, but is looking for ways to stave a drop off in enrollment by the oldest children in the programming, eighth graders. In Chicago, the After School Matters teen apprenticeship program is a standout nationwide among programs serving older youth owing to high quality, stipends to attendees and mandatory attendance requirements.

IV. REFLECTIONS

The citywide strategies pioneered by Wallace grantees have shown promise as a way of making quality programs available to more children and have earned national attention. Whether other cities can successfully build similar systems without considerable outside support remains to be seen.

Our initiative – and the systems approach we developed – came at a time of unprecedented attention and funding for OST, particularly with the passage of the federal 21st Century Community Learning Centers program, which provided states with some $1 billion a year in additional OST funding. Lacking evidence of clear benefits when our initiative began, however, leaders in Wallace-funded sites didn’t immediately gravitate to the need for ongoing OST planning. We also know that our initial funding of the efforts was an important factor in getting them started. Thus, while there are clear signs of national interest in our systems approach, such as the popularity of our publications on the issue, it will take continued encouragement for other cities to adopt one or more of its key elements. As cities and states face budget shortfalls, OST system supporters will have to be adept at making a persuasive case for funding for management information systems and other resources that, although important to the OST systems, are a step or two removed from OST programs and children.

Developing sustainable ways to improve OST program quality remains a tough challenge.
A key benefit of the system-building approach has been that it has given city leaders a strong factual basis to pinpoint the number of children being served, program shortcomings and obstacles to improvement. These include weak financial management at even the largest OST providers, uncertain public revenue streams, and difficulty attracting and retaining high-quality OST program staff. Wallace and its partner cities have taken steps to begin to address these issues – by developing citywide quality measures, for example. Nonetheless, it remains unclear whether cities or OST organizations themselves will be able to go far enough to devote the necessary resources to achieve sustained, wide-scale quality improvements. Nor is it clear whether cities will adopt tough enough accountability measures to ensure that scarce public dollars go only to quality programs.

School systems and their leaders can be invaluable allies in building citywide OST systems and promoting participation. But the relationship can also carry risks.
Because school buildings are often the places that house out-of-school time programs, principal and superintendent buy-in and cooperation are important signs of successful system-building. School leaders can provide much-needed political support and pipelines to parents and students. They can also offer OST programs facilities and, in cities like Providence, bus transportation for OST participants. In Boston and Washington, school districts and their leaders have assumed more management and data-gathering responsibilities over city-funded OST programs. A potential risk for OST providers, however, is that the more closely their public value becomes tied to school system agendas, the more possible it is that over time they may be judged – and supported or not – by whether they can prove they contribute measurably to school agendas. It’s therefore important to ensure that alliances between schools and OST providers preserve what has been a great strength of OST: the ability to provide a variety of enrichment activities.

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References

Education Leadership

1. Sources: 2008 Grantee Perception Survey by Center for Effective Philanthropy; survey of non-grantees by Academy for Educational Development in 2009; staff assessments.

2. August 2009 survey of top state leaders by Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Association of State Boards of Education.

3. August 2009 survey of state education leaders by the Council of Chief State School Officers.

Arts Participation

1. Sources: Wallace staff analyses of grantee reports; national comparison data from the American Association of Museums, Theatre Communications Group (TCG), and the NEA’s 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA).

2. In 2008-9, 24 organizations showed gains while eight had participation declines.

3. National data on theater attendance from the 2008 SPPA report found that the percentage of adults attending musical plays was down 0.4 percent and down 2.9 percent for non-musical plays since the previous survey in 2002.

4. The most current data from the American Association of Museums show little year-to-year change in median attendance nationwide: 26,500 in FY’08; 26,696 in FY’07; and 27,500 in FY’06. According to AAM: “While there were small fluctuations in median attendance between 2006 and 2008…none of the changes was significant.”

5. The fact that some WEA grantees have used market research and others have not was not necessarily a function of their willingness to do so but more a matter of timing. We selected WEA organizations on the strength of pre-existing strategies; some of those strategies were based on market research done before the Wallace grant, while others were not. After joining our initiative, some organizations that had not already done market research chose to do so early enough in the grant period to shape or refine their strategies, but others proceeded straight to implementation.

6. Percentages are from the 2009 Wallace survey of 13 START state arts agency officials; officials from 11 of the 13 agencies responded.

Arts for Young People

1. Susan J. Bodilly and Catherine H. Augustine with Laura Zakaras, Revitalizing Arts Education Through Community-Wide Coordination, RAND Corporation, 2008, p. 79.

Out-of-School Time Learning

1. America After 3PM, 2009 survey of 30,000 families by the Afterschool Alliance http://www.afterschoolalliance.org/documents/AA3PM_Key_Findings_2009.pdf

2. Illinois, Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island

3. Sources: Wallace staff critical site assessments; draft RAND evaluation of OST progress and site interviews; three-part evaluation of New York City OST initiative by Policy Studies Associates; draft evaluation of Providence AfterZones by Public/Private Ventures; and draft RAND assessment of progress in developing management information systems in eight cities, including all five Wallace-funded OST sites.

Ten Years In Review - Wallace's Report '09: Appraising a Decade

Contents

EDUCATION LEADERSHIP

I. SUMMARY

II. STRATEGY MILESTONES

III. RESULTS

IV. REFLECTIONS

ARTS PARTICIPATION

I. SUMMARY

II. STRATEGY MILESTONES

III. RESULTS

IV. REFLECTIONS

ARTS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE

I. SUMMARY

II. RESULTS

III. REFLECTIONS

OUT-OF-SCHOOL TIME LEARNING

I. SUMMARY

II. STRATEGY MILESTONES

III. RESULTS3

IV. REFLECTIONS

References

III. RESULTS³