Talking About Declining Arts Education, Armed with New Numbers

Recapping Research: the SPPA Follow-Up Monographs, Part 1

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to listen in on a two-hour presentation hosted by Sunil Iyengar, the head of research at the NEA. The topic was three monographs the NEA commissioned to delve into the data gathered from the Survey on Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA). This benchmark report, which is fielded every four years, looks at the arts attendance habits of just under 20,000 people across the country in order to understand who’s going to what, who’s not going at all, and what that all means.

In the case of these three monographs, the researchers were asked not only to delve into the 2008 data, but also to place it in context with the large trove of data gathered by the SPPA since it was first administered in 1982.

These recaps take a while, so this just covers the first one…I’ll cover the other two next week.

The three monographs were:

• Arts Education in America: What the Declines Mean for Arts Participation, by Nick Rabkin and Eric Hedberg of the NORC Center at the University of Chicago.
• Age and Arts Participation: A Case Against Demographic Destiny, by Mark Stern of the University of Pennsylvania.
• Beyond Attendance: A Multi-Modal Understanding of Arts Participation, by Jennifer Novak-Leonard and Alan Brown of WolfBrown

All of these, as well as a useful summary document, can be found at http://www.arts.gov/research.

Arts Education in America
Building off of an initial study commissioned by the NEA in 1992 that indicated that arts education was the most powerful predictor of arts attendance in adults, this study analyzed the data in the SPPA since 1982 to understand more fully exactly how central arts education is in the creation of future arts patrons.

Nick Rabkin eased us in with some basic graphs demonstrating facts we sort of already know – that those who repot having had classes in art are far more likely to report they’ve also attended arts events across the life of the SPPA, and then that general education is itself a correlated indicator of arts attendance (more education = more attendance).

Then things got interesting. Rabkin analyzed the number of art forms respondents indicated they had studied, both as a child and as an adult, and found that an increase not only in any arts education, but of a diverse arts education yielded higher average rates of arts attendance in respondents – and that the effect was even more evident with art forms studied as an adult. To pause here for a second, this seems to go against the current prevailing mutterings from some circles that the current adult generation may be simply lost to arts apathy, and that the focus should instead completely divert to children. Here’s the graph (taken from their presentation):

F1. Arts Attendance Rate Predictions Based on Amount of Arts Attendance

Taking, then, the fact that arts education is indeed quite important, Rabkin and Hedberg began an analysis of what has happened to arts education over the course of the SPPA, and indeed, over the last century.

Starting simply, they looked at the percentage of 18-year-olds in each SPPA since 1982 who said they had had arts education as children. The numbers starkly declined from a 1982 high of 64% to a low in 2008 of 49.5%. The pace of decline is increasing precipitously as well. This itself indicates something of an issue, but then Rabkin and Hedberg did something fascinating. They extrapolated the ages of each of the respondents on every SPPA since 1982, and where from there able to figure out the year at which each person turned 18. Using that as an anchor, they laid out the percentage of respondents who experienced arts education as children for every year between 1930 and 2008, with this result:

F2. Percentage of Childhood Arts Education, 1930-2008


What this graph shows is that in 1930, about 20% of children had any arts education. The number steadily rose until 1985, when it was at about 65%. It then began a consistent downward trend, passing through 50% in 2000. Per Rabkin, this downturn was precipitated by:

• Widespread opposition to taxes associated with arts education, beginning with Prop 13 (right here in California).
• The emergence of school reform as a high national priority. The report that spurred this reform effort was called “Nation at Risk,” and was published in 1983. It encouraged raising standards and rigorous testing, and included practically no discussion of arts education. Per Rabkin, arts education has been marginalized ever since.

A 15% decline is upsetting, but the problem is actually even more disasterous than on first look. The issue is that that decline is disproportionately affecting non-white populations, and not just a little. Since 1982, arts education for white has essentially stayed constant at about 58% of students. African-Americans and Hispanics, on the other hand, have seen a decline from around 50% of students in 1982 to half (!) that in 2008. The graph is incredibly disheartening:

F3. % of Respondents Reporting Arts Education As Children by Race

I’ve written at length about the terribly disproportionate impact of arts education cuts on non-white populations. Essentially, it is a situation of discrimination by default—schools in less affluent districts (districts where neither the local municipality nor the parents can afford to shoulder the financial burden of providing arts education to their children) suffer more than schools in more affluent districts, and less affluent districts are disproportionately non-white. As I said in an article on this subject last year:

In a country where, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the 2006 median household income for a whlte family was 158% that of a black family and 135% that of an Hispanic family, the fact that ubiquity of arts education is directly tied to affluence means that it’s de facto tied to race.

Rabkin closed with some thoughts on the relationship between the decline in interest in the arts and the decline in arts education, and cautioned not to draw instant, direct connections between the two – at least not only in one direction. Declining arts education may contribute to declining interest in the arts, but it can also go the other way, becoming what Rabkin called “a bi-directional issue.”

Rabkin also cautioned us to understand that moaning about arts attendance and its ties to arts education isn’t going to get us very far with our legislators. In his term, he expected such arguments to be viewed as “trivial.” Rather, we need to advocate for arts education on its own terms, secure in the knowledge that instituting such reform will likely generate some increase in arts attendance in the years to come.

Perils of Free?

In Friday's You've Cott Mail, way down at the bottom, Thomas Cott includes a quick quote from Public Theater artistic director Oskar Eustis, given as part of a larger article in Crane's New York about how major New York arts organizations are engaging the younger generation. Eustis' quote hits pretty close to home in terms of innovative audience development, not because what he's talking about is revolutionary, but because he speaks about the shortcomings of one of the most-well-known free-ticketed events in the country, Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park. Here's the quote, with some extra context pulled from the article:

Oskar Eustis, artistic director of The Public Theater, said the arts need to be more accessible for everyone. Even the nonprofit theater's free Shakespeare in the Park creates barriers.

“By giving Shakespeare away for free, it has become inaccessible for many,” Mr. Eustis said. “Tell someone they have to wait six to 36 hours in line for a ticket and it erases 90% of population that would have considered going.”

In some ways, this is a quote that one can react strongly to without really being empathic about the Public's situation--after all, we're not all just sitting there with drastically popular, massively funded free programming where the demand highly exceeds the supply. But, here at Theatre Bay Area, we're in the enviable or unenviable position of having a similar issue. We've been grappling with this same (relative) issue in the context of our Free Night of Theater program, in which we annually distribute about 5,000 to 6,000 free theatre tickets, and also annually disappoint between 20,000 and 30,000 unlucky people who don't get tickets, don't get the tickets they want, or get overly frustrated by the (admittedly arduous, or at least not hoop-free) process of getting the tickets.



We've tried various ways to "share the wealth" of the program--we do targeted giveaways to businesses whose employees seem likely candidates to become repeat arts consumers while also setting up various roadblocks to dissuade repeat Free Nighters from being able to easily access the tickets. But it's hard, and so when I saw Eustis' quote it got me thinking.



How can we, as artists, arts administrators and (yes) businesspeople balance success with access? How can we make sure, in the case of Free Night, that we're continuing to make the arts available to new people while also ensuring, for the companies' sakes, that we're getting those tickets to audiences that are likely to return (and pay)? What does it say when the leader of one of the biggest free theatrical events in the world essentially says that the very "freeness" of the event "erases 90% of the population that would have considered going?"



In the case of the Public, they're addressing this inequity by creating a "mobile Shakespeare" unit, the goal of which is to take the art to some subset of those people who can't or won't wait in line. And in our case, we're looking at turning Free Night upside down over the course of the next year and seeing if there's a way to keep the success of the program while also improving some of the inherent problems we've tried and failed to solve in the last six years. We'll see how it goes...but we're open to suggestions.

A summary of Audience 2.0, the new report on tech and the arts from the NEA

Last week, the NEA came out with Audience 2.0: How Technology Influences Arts Participation, a 150-page report discussing, as you might expect, the effect of technology on different types of artsgoing. The report uses data from the 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA), and is dense, fascinating and prescient—and as NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman notes, “In the arts, we are deeply invested in the…necessity of the live experience. Technology is often seen as our nemesis.”

Right off the bat, the report lays out its main finding, which is that “people who engage with art through media technologies attend live performances or arts exhibits at two to three times the rate of non-media arts participants.” This finding is repeated over and over in various contexts in the report, and the data seems to at least show a correlation between the use of technology to appreciate art and the frequency of attendance at live arts/exhibitions. What seems unclear to me is how much that can be attributed to technological assistance leading to more tech-based arts experiences and in turn more live arts experiences, and how much it’s simply that people who like art like art of all kinds, more and more often, than those who don’t.

Of note is that, according to this report, arts participation through media does not seem to replace live arts participation, personal arts creation or performance. In fact, the report points out, arts engagement through media is correlated with higher rates of participation in those activities. This again leads me to question whether this just means people who like theatre in real life are more likely to track down that YouTube performance of Patty Lupone, but the report suggests that that relationship needs much further prodding to fully understand it.

As Audience 2.0 goes on to note, “It’s is unclear…whether participating in the arts through electronic media directly leads to live attendance at arts events. Other possibilities are…live attendance leads to arts participation through electronic media or arts participation through electronic media and arts participating through other means reinforce each other.” Indeed.

Despite the inability to actually definitively link non-live attendance causally to more live attendance, which is going to involve some much more in-depth research, this report’s a good read, and it is interesting to see the NEA palpably trying to dispel the fears associated with the internet and other media for arts organizations of all stripes—something which is obviously particularly evident for theatre companies, artists and unions.

Here are some of the report’s more fascinating findings about what percentage of people that have participated in a performance through electronic or digital media:

• 21% of US adults say they’ve used the internet to view/download an arts performance
  8% and 7% of US adults say they’ve watched a musical or play, respectively, through electronic or digital media (fascinating given that only about 16% and 9.5% of the entire adult American population attends musicals and plays in a given year)


• 22% of US adults participated in both media and live performances—more on what doing both may do to frequency of attendance later


• A full 50% of the entire American adult population seems to take part in no art of any sort—media-based or not—a problem particularly prominent for Hispanics and African Americans, in which populations 61% and 59% respectively “neither attended live events nor used media to engage in arts activities.”

The report also adds nuance to one of the most startling findings from the 2008 SPPA: according to the 2008 SPPA, “In 2008, 67 percent of people with graduate degrees attended at least one benchmark activity, compared with only 38 percent of people with some college education and 19 percent of people with only a high school diploma.”

Audience 2.0 overlays the media aspect and finds something sort of startling—while that same negative correlation between education and attendance exists if you’re looking at people who both attend live and media-based arts experiences, if you look at people who only experience art through non-live media, the correlation actually flips, and people with less education and lower income tended to show higher rates of viewing/listening to art than those with higher incomes/education levels. While the obvious answer here is simply that if you’ve got the education and income, you probably can afford to attend live events in the way others can’t, and so you do, it’s still interesting to note that media accessibility means that art of all forms is now flowing more directly out to many of the constituencies our live events simply can’t touch.

Given this info, it’s probably not surprising that, when you zoom in particularly on theatre, specifically (surprisingly enough) straight plays, non-whites “attend” (watch/listen to on media) non-live theatre performances at a higher rate than they attend live theatre events, and in fact match fairly closely to the overall population of the country. Take a look:



Note particularly the drastic jump in Hispanics and African Americans who say they have experienced a straight play via non-live media (13.5% and 14.7%) versus those who say they've experienced a straight play live (6.1% and 6.6%). Also worth noting, almost twice as many African Americans have experienced a musical via non-live media than have seen one live (10.2% versus 5.8%).

So what does this mean? The takeaway for me, which isn’t new, but is perhaps now more urgent, is that there is a percentage of the population who wants theatre, but is currently only getting it, in whatever limited way, through non-live media. That percentage of the population is mostly non-white, mostly less affluent, and mostly more rural (another finding of the study), and it seems to me that this report serves as a call-to-arms of sorts to get it in gear and figure out how to translate our place-based medium into something that can function as powerfully and impactfully online.

To read the full report, visit Theatre Bay Area’s DataPoint Research page.

Taking Intrinsic Impact to the Next Level

This morning, in You've Cott Mail (which if you aren't subscribed to, you should be!), Thomas Cott highlighted an article from the Guardian UK about some work being done there on measuring the emotional response of audiences to theatre. What was so interesting about the article is that it mirrors some major research we’re about to launch here at Theatre Bay Area and in six cities across the US.

The article is a summary of a new effort in the UK to measure the emotional response of audiences to art. Working with WolfBrown, the research firm that piloted a lot of this intrinsic impact research (as it’s called), we’ll be building a similar survey and doing follow-up research with 25 theatre companies in six cities (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, New York, and Charleston). Throughout the 2010/2011 season, we, with arts service organization partners in each city (LA Stage Alliance, Theatre Puget Sound, ART/New York, League of Chicago Theatres, League of Charleston Theatres), will be working with the theatre companies to set intrinsic impact goals for three productions in a season, measure the effect of each of those productions using the survey, and then generate a final report for each company and work through, with the artistic, administrative and marketing staff, the implications of the research and how it matches (or doesn’t match) the company's hoped-for goals.

In addition, as part of this work, we’ll be developing a web-based interface that we hope will eventually allow any theatre across the country access to an affordable, fee-for-service program in intrinsic impact. Companies will be able to produce the survey themselves, learn how to set goals for the various axes of intrinsic impact, and then log the results themselves and see how they stack up. They’ll be able to develop a portfolio of their impact on their audiences, with a lot of possible implications as more companies participate. Over time, by making this an affordable service [which it currently decidedly is not – this research project, with projected generous funding from three national foundations and assorted local foundations (more news on that once the contracts are signed), will have a total budget upwards of $400,000], we hope to provide companies with a new way of measuring the effectiveness of their work on audiences. In addition, we hope these measurements eventually will become an alternative way of demonstrating worth to funders, audiences and trustees.

Our work will begin over the summer as staff from Theatre Bay Area and WolfBrown begin traveling to the partner cities, identifying theatre companies with the partner ASOs, and beginning the induction process. We’re incredibly excited about this new work – especially now that we see that there’s a parallel effort going on in the UK. We expect to be able to report out on this, at least preliminary results, in time for our Annual Conference next spring, and plan on doing final reporting on the project at TCG and NAMP in 2011.

P.S. As some of you know, we did a pilot of this project a few years ago around Free Night. The results of that pilot are available here. It’s the report called "Assessing the Intrinsic Impact of the Bay Area Free Night of Theater Program."