23 Arts Groups From The Fourth District Receive Grants From The Arts Commission

Los Angeles County’s Arts for All Initiative, which is a 10-year plan to return comprehensive, sequential arts education to all 80 of the County’s school districts, was recognized as a national model in a recent RAND Corporation study.

The study, “Revitalizing Arts Education Through Community-Wide Coordination,” cites Arts for All as an outstanding example of “how organizations that pool resources and coordinate activities can make it possible for more children to benefit from arts learning.” Leadership is identified as a key factor in the success of such efforts and the study underscores Arts for All’s setting of standards for collaborative approaches and particularly its success in garnering community-wide support for the initiative.

Among the key partners in the initiative, helmed by the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, are the Music Center, the California Alliance for Arts Education, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Warner Bros. Entertainment and The Getty Foundation.

Since 2002, when the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors adopted Arts for All, the initiative has made great strides:
 

- Arts for All is now at work in 28 of the County’s 80 school districts, representing 410,066 K-12 public school students or 40% of the County’s public school population minus the Los Angeles Unified School District, which has its own arts education initiative launched prior to Arts for All.
 

- 16 of the districts now have arts coordinators at the district level, one of the five critical success factors for arts education for all students in a district.
 

- Arts for All, through coordination with the school districts, leveraged the historic arts education allocations from the state of California in 2006-07 and 2007-08 to expand and deepen the work of the initiative. Nine districts joined the program in 2007-08 as compared to four the previous school year. Districts that were already part of Arts for All were able to accelerate the implementation of key strategies.

Los Angeles County was one of six initiatives in the country examined in the study; the others were in Boston, Chicago, Dallas, New York City and Alameda County in Northern California. Los Angeles County’s initiative is the largest in number of students and schools (p. 26 of the report) and the only one driven by a local arts agency.

The study highlights Los Angeles, Alameda, and Dallas as the three case studies that “deliberately combined several strategies, especially in their attempts to improve access.” They all “conducted audits, set a goal of access for all, developed strategic plans, made a case for arts education and advocated for the arts… these activities complement each other well and are more powerful in combination than in isolation” (p. 77).

The study was commissioned by The Wallace Foundation and conducted by RAND, a non-profit research organization. The complete study is available at www.rand.org

For more information about the Arts Commission and Arts for All may be found at www.lacountyarts.org