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Stop, Look and Listen
By Pat Boyd, Executive Director, South Dakotans for
the Arts
Advocates for arts education do well
to remember the advice delivered to generations of school children learning to
safely navigate the streets of their communities. With all the cross-talk about
education -- quality, effectiveness, accessibility, accountability, need for
improvement, opt-out, buy-in, cost, cost, cost -- the traffic can leave you
spinning in the middle of the intersection and getting nowhere.
Stop! Stop arguing the benefits of the arts in education. There is no argument
any more, there are only statements of fact. Read and print out the studies and
statistics, and put them in your advocacy tool kit for reference. The fine arts
are a core curriculum subject. It is the law. The arts are an effective tool for
teaching and learning “from cradle to grave”. No one is going to argue with that
message, unless you call them names while delivering it. A recent Harris poll
reveals that 93 percent of Americans believe that the arts are vital to
providing a well-rounded education. We have won the argument. The facts, the law
and public opinion back us up. Now what? How do we get more art in our schools,
in our lives? What are the ways and means available? The focus of our energies
now is to find the best route to a complete education for every child in every
South Dakota community. It is time to stop spinning around in the educational
intersection and start directing traffic.
Look! Look at your community as the results of its educational systems. This can
be frightening, but have courage. Taxpayers pay for education. Many taxpayers do
not have children or even grandchildren in the schools they fund, but they do
live with the results of the education they have provided. That is why it is
important to keep looking until you have the whole picture. Americans for the
Arts has a national awareness campaign themed, “The less art kids get, the more
it shows”. Although the public service announcements prepared for this campaign
feature today’s kids and their parents, just two generations, the message can be
extended to include the whole community. What shows in your community…pride,
beauty, creativity, vision, energy, commerce, and accomplishment? Are the
schools keeping it coming? Or is the picture very different, and the schools are
just trying to keep going? It is not just the two generations immediately
involved in our schools whose lives and futures are at stake. Everyone’s quality
of life is on the line, right now. Look out for their interests. The arts can
and do help to improve schools and communities, and it shows.
Listen! Listening may be the most important part of this old lesson for all of
us. It reminds us that we can take a good look around and still not be aware of
what is coming around the corner. When we consider the relationships between the
schools and the community, the many stakeholders in the vitality of the
community, and most importantly the life and future of every student we educate,
opportunities for improvement and innovation start appearing from around those
corners. The South Dakota Department of Education and the South Dakota Arts
Council work to create and foster many of those opportunities. Taking successful
advantage of their programs requires leadership and work on the local level, and
active listening to determine how best to adapt and apply them in our own
schools. We also listen for opportunities to work in educational partnerships
with businesses and organizations who have a real interest in the health and
future of the community, and its schools. And since not everything coming our
way is going to be fun to run into, heeding the stop, look and listen warnings
can help us avoid collisions. After all, there are still seven percent of folks
out there who don’t know we won the argument.
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Many thanks for your very successful advocacy efforts over the
summer. Thanks to you, to our Congressional delegation who listened to you, and
their counterparts across the nation, the National Endowments for the Arts and
the Humanities each received an increase in funding, and Public Broadcasting
survived an attempt to slash its funding. The final version of the bill to fund
PBS, as well as the Senate Appropriations Committee recommendation for a
$100,000 increase (to $35 million) in Federal Arts Education funding, are being
considered in September. Direct contact from constituents is very important, and
very effective. Thank you for speaking out from South Dakota.