In per capita funding for the arts, the State
of Oregon has
been bottom crawling for so long that the development of this past summer is astonishing.
In allocating the surplus, the governor increased the budget of the Oregon Arts
Commission more than two fold to 4.1 million. By its charter, the Arts
Commission may fund non-profit arts organizations and artists in the form of
fellowships. So tell your friends in the field and, while you’re at it,
encourage the Arts Commission to invest a little money in getting the word out
about its programs and activities around the state. As it is, grant and
fellowship recipients are to inform their local newspaper, but that obviously
doesn’t reach out very far.
Note: every dollar the Arts
Commission receives is turned into two or three dollars, perhaps more, in the
public as a result of the grants program. Specifically, when a non-profit arts
organization receives a grant for a project, that money is matched many times
over by contributions from businesses, private individuals, and foundations,
plus the income that some projects generate. This capacity to generate dollars
is the very way by which the grant is evaluated, along with its artistic merit,
by the Arts Commission. For example, a grant award of $1500 may make possible a
local project with a total budget of $4,500. Arts are good business, as well as
a big help to communities.
How about the mother lode of
all state arts agencies, the National Endowment for the Arts? What is it up to?
Well, the NEA decided recently to try to enhance literacy. (Traditionally,
literacy is not a part of the NEA’s mission, but the
NEA has apparently made it so.) Both of the new NEA programs have come to Oregon: “The Big Read”
and “Poetry Out Loud.” Two years ago, the NEA made grants available to
non-profit arts organizations to galvanize a community into reading a book from
the NEA list. Grant applicants to “The Big Read” program chose from “Their Eyes
Are Watching God,” “Fahrenheit 451,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and “The Great
Gatsby” and then explained how they intended to round up the community into a
cooperative effort. Fishtrap, the arts organization
of Wallowa County -- which presents, among other things,
“Fishtrap, the Summer Gathering” and “Winter Fishtrap”-- selected “Fahrenheit 451,” applied, and was one
of ten such organizations around the country to receive! a grant this first
year.
The grant award was $15,000.
Fishtrap assembled a local committee, established
strong ties with the schools and libraries, and gave away 720 copies of the
book to a populace of 7,000. 100 of these copies went to students in three
schools districts: Wallowa, Joseph, and Enterprise.
Several movies attracted large audiences of various ages. The community, Fishtrap, and the NEA all judged the project to be a
stunning success. There aren’t many folks in Wallowa County,
but they get things done.
The second year, last year,
the NEA expanded their list of books. Fishtrap chose
“Grapes of Wrath,” applied, and again was selected, this time from among 70
applications, with a matching grant award of about $9,000. To this funding, Fishtrap added funding from the Oregon Arts Commission and
the Wildhorse Foundation. Fishtrap
subsidized purchases at local bookstores. Thus, people bought the $16.00
“Grapes of Wrath” for $8.00. Also, more copies found their way into the
libraries. Again, Fishtrap’s primary contribution was
staff time, reports Fishtrap director Rich Wandschneider, who added that the English teachers in Enterprise changed course
planning in mid-year to put on the play “Grapes of Wrath” as the spring
production. “The trick,” Rich Wandschneider offered,
“is to get partners: schools, photo and film clubs, libraries, granges, social
service agencies, bookstores, newspapers, and radio stations.” Such partnering
is built up over many years of cooperation and trust.
What about this year? Fishtrap is not applying for NEA project funding because it
has chosen to do a book not on the NEA list, Craig Lesley’s “Riversong.” Apparently, the local schools will have this
novel in their curriculum this year.
The other NEA program in Oregon is “Poetry Out
Loud.” In 2005/2006 the NEA, in cooperation with the Poetry Foundation, gave
each state arts agency $8,000 to sponsor a statewide competition in poetry recitation.
Only high schools may participate; they sign up in the fall and receive from
the NEA, in turn, the anthology of poems, a CD of the poems, and a teacher’s
guide that includes suggestions for how to run an in-school contest. Here in Oregon, the Oregon Arts
Commission adds a curriculum guide that connects the program to Oregon Language
Arts and Arts Contest Standards, and helps further with suggestions of who
might be good judges. The school selects the judges and runs its contest. In April,
the winners from each school trek to Salem
to compete for the state title. Finally, the 51 state winners convene on Washington D.C.
for the national competition.
In the first year, due to a
late start, only four Oregon
high schools participated. Last year, the second year, 14 high schools took
part, and the NEA “Poetry Out Loud” grant award to each state rose to $10,000.
This next year, the funding rises to $15,000, and Oregon hopes to attract
20-30 schools, reports Vicki Poppen, Arts Education
Coordinator at the Oregon Arts Commission. She explains that the purpose of the
program is for the students “to learn about great poetry through memorization,
performance, and competition. The goal is to help students with public speaking
skills and self-confidence and to learn about their literary heritage.”
There is no doubt that
“Poetry Out Loud” goes a long ways in accomplishing these goals, and,
obviously, each year the program grows. But isn’t the recitation of poetry a
matter of an English course? Doesn’t such a project belong then under the
National Endowment for the Humanities or simply under the Department of
Education? Well, this is the issue the NEA took on in its decision to try to
help out the national effort to improve literacy. That doesn’t really answer
the question what is the NEA doing working on literacy?
Let’s say for the moment
that for the NEA to take up the cause of improving literacy in this country is
not only appropriate but laudable. Why didn’t the NEA set up “Poetry Out Loud”
like “The Big Read” in which grants are made directly to arts organizations all
over the country? In turn, these organizations might collaborate with local schools
and help run recitation contests in each school. The question with such an
arrangement would be: could the NEA count on getting many good applications?
How many art organizations are interested in running poetry recitation contests
in high schools? The last thing the NEA wants to do is to make funds available
for a new program, one that they very much value, and then receive few if any
grant applications. No, the NEA needed a better scheme of implementation.
What about making the funds
available directly to high schools? The same problem might arise: how is the
NEA to interest high schools in running a poetry recitation program? And who is
going to run the state contest? The NEA does not, by itself, have such reach.
It could try to enlist the support of the state departments of education. The
legality question aside, is this recitation program really of interest to
departments of education, to the extent that they would take on the
administration of it? If departments of education are not the ideal partner,
how is the NEA to generate multiple high school applications per state as well as
run 51 state contests and send the winners on to the nationals?
As the NEA has done many
times before, it turned to its partners across the country, namely the state
arts agencies (i.e., the Oregon Arts Commission) and asked that “Poetry Out
Loud” be run through each state arts agency’s Arts Education program. Each
state agency has not only such a program but also an AIE coordinator who regularly
works with high schools across the state in setting up artist residencies and
other arts activities. A paid staff person is critical to the success of any program.
This delivery system removes much of the program management burden from the
NEA.
But who is to say that every
state arts agency wants to apply to the NEA for dollars to run its own “Poetry
Out Loud” program? Solution: don’t have a competitive grant program. Instead,
give funding to each state arts agency. This is precisely what the NEA did. Now
this additional funding is included in the Basic State Grant to each state arts
agency and “Poetry Out Loud” is in every state.
The choice of the AIE
coordinators as the instate program managers for “Poetry Out Loud” is not just
a managerial preference. It is also pedagogical, at least on the NEA’s part. The NEA likes “Poetry Out Loud” to be housed in
the state AIE programs because the NEA sees these AIE programs as the natural
home of literacy work. The NEA regards cultural literacy as the centerpiece of
arts education. To foster greater understanding among students of our cultural
heritage is to strengthen cultural literacy. The NEA likes to be in the arts
education business. It makes them relevant, as they see it, to national
initiatives in education.
This trend is not new. Over
the past two decades the NEA has done all it can to transform its AIE program
and, in turn, those of the states toward arts education from artist residency
providers to “education based arts activities.” So what started as an NEA
initiative years ago to place poets in the schools to
stimulate student writing has now become a haven for arts education. The first
program, called Poets in the Schools, became Artists in the Schools, which
became Artists in Education, which became Arts in Education -- and now Arts
Learning. Where is George Orwell when we need him? On the other hand, name
changes signal policy changes.
On this critical question --
which we might represent as the difference between arts in education and arts
learning -- there is not full accord between the NEA and the state arts agencies.
A decade ago, state arts agencies relied, by and large, on the program’s
traditional capacity to place artists (and writers) in schools. I understand
that this reliance is no longer the norm, and that the term “Arts Learning” reflects
the broader range of arts activities promoted in the schools and communities
centers. This reliance came about because many rural communities received state
arts agency funding only through AIE, namely through arts activities in
schools. This specific reach into rural communities is important because the
more communities a state arts agency may show it is serving, then the better it
is reaching out to the entire citizenry. A state legislature, in evaluating a
state arts agency’s performance, looks closely at this capacity to distribute
funds. In making its pitch for funding to its state legislature, a state arts
agency may see its AIE program as invaluable.
Whether a state arts agency
wants to expand its Arts Learning (AIE) program to include a national literacy
initiative is up to the state arts agency. Given that the state arts agency
receives a major block of funding from the Endowment, turning down a paid-for
program would be difficult at best. Whether the NEA and its state arts agencies
should be spending its limited time and resources promoting poetry recitation
is another matter. Moreover, is it the role of the NEA to say what our literary
heritage consist of? Students may only pick poems from the NEA anthology. But
in fairness to the NEA, there are 138 pages of poems and more on the website:
www.poetryoutloud.org> Still, if this heritage is so important, why can’t it
be stimulus to writing poems, not just memorizing existing poems? One gets the
impression that the term Arts Learning signals a major policy shift away from
such creative work and towards more learning about the arts. There may be
benefits to this cultural d! rift to ward the priority
of knowledge acquisition, but it is a shame in that there is so little support
of creativity in the schools in the first place and the few activities that
used to be funding are disappearing like endangered species. The arts are not
alone in this regard. Libraries and exercise are fading, too.
And what
about the major component of “Poetry Out Loud,” the competition? The question about “Poetry Out Loud” may not be the
focus on memorization rather than creating, but the competition component. What is the point of the competition when the
purpose is learning about our cultural heritage? Who is to say that instead of
enhancing the learning, the competition doesn’t diffuse it? What begins as a
benign memorization activity turns into a performance and a show. If a school
wants to have a competition, that should be its choice -- and if it doesn’t
want to, it shouldn’t be ineligible. As for a state finals
and then a national finals, there is no need for that, not unless the basis of the
program is an event like a spelling bee or a poetry slam. Such an event creates
publicity. Then again, what sort of little poetry program could produce such
publicity without a grand layering of competition?