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.

The New Play Sector Talked (and talked, and talked, and talked) in the Capital

This special guest blogpost from Playwrights Foundation Artistic Director Amy Mueller first appeared on Playwrights Foundation's Blogspot. Special thanks to Amy for letting us repost.



Recently, I represented Playwrights Foundation at the New Play Convening at Arena Stage’s new Mead Center for American Theater, hosted by the Bay Area’s own David Dower, founder of Z Space Studio, who is now Arena’s the Associate Artistic Director and architect of the American Voices New Play Institute at Arena Stage. It was an incredibly full four days, with a powerfully eclectic range of people from very different aesthetic/geographic/gender/age/cultural/ethnic identities, representing producing theaters of all sizes from all over, individual playwrights, ensemble theater makers, presenters, festivals, and yes, new play development labs and organizations like Playwrights Foundation.

We did a lot of talking together, and a lot of listening. And those many conversations were a part of a national dialogue, all recorded, tweeted and livestreamed across the country. But all that listening and talking led us somewhere – somewhere that is intangible, and very hard to talk about succinctly. Nonetheless, the momentum of this event will, I believe, succeed in pushing the national agenda about the practices of developing and producing new work and the learning about ourselves and our (un)common work forward.

Not everyone who deserved to be in this circle got to be, and I feel a responsibility to keep writing about it, to share my experience and bring your thoughts and words into the dialogue. If you were in the third circle, on twitter or live stream video, or, if you weren’t, and you want to tell me your thoughts, please respond to my posts here or on Playwrights Foundation’s Blogspot.

It seems fitting that we met up in DC where our elected reps are right now fighting tooth and nail to keep the NEA from becoming irrelevant. The NEA (a relatively tiny agency) plays a critical role in upholding our nation’s value for the arts, and its meaning to “We, The People” in a Democracy. If you haven’t expressed your opinion about cutting the NEA yet, please take this opportunity to do so! I did it in 5 minutes yesterday, and yeah, I felt that glow of citizenship wash over me. No, really, it is extremely important for us to speak up! Do it NOW, and then finish reading this. Okay, so...

Online there is a rich debate raging about NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman’s controversial and frank discussion on the issue of supply and demand in the American theater. You can read lots of interesting commentary on these links Diane Ragsdale and Arena Stage Blog and NEA Blog and I suggest you do. These are some awesomely challenging times for us. It is dangerous, I think, to be dismissive of the firestorm of anti-intellectual, anti-culture backlash. To imagine that our relevancy to the majority is a shared value is myopic. But in the face of a real and present danger, losing faith is not an option. As cultural workers, as the planters and sowers of cultural seedlings, we are damn sure we are relevant but are challenged by issues of solvency.

One of my favorite quotes from the New Play Convening was from Diane Ragsdale, who herself was quoting a professor: “A model is the representation of your beliefs about causality.” Think about it. I don't know about you, but at PF, we are constantly questioning our beliefs about our outcomes, and by inference our models of development. We are constantly making, deconstructing and redesigning our 'model(s)' (for organizational structure, staff roles, governance, and programs for play and playwright advancement). I love the notion that at the heart of all those developing models is belief about impact, a belief about what we mean to cause and how.

So we new play makers are stuck here between blind, passionate belief and the requirement to quantify our impact. Believing in our work, believing it actually does make a difference, in so many ways, as we so claim, believing in art as a transformative experience of beauty, is absolutely essential to making the work – and yet, (and yet), we must become experts in making the case for its relevancy, and become savvy in the business of solvency.

For me, sitting together with colleagues, new and old friends, and talking about our shared passion and our shared responsibility for carrying this work forward, that is, making new theater possible, was exhilarating and inspirational. I did cry a few times, and laughed a lot. Mostly, I listened, actively, heartfully, thoughtfully. It turns out that listening was itself the springboard. And you can listen, too: it's all available at #newplaytv.

Here's to: carrying the flame of passion, the innocence of blind belief, and the wicked ass savvy of financial know-how.

- Amy Mueller
Artistic Director, Playwrights Foundation

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.

The Responsibility of Art Is Not Just Internal

When I was sitting at the Dynamic Adaptability conference a couple months ago, at one point an artist got on stage ostensibly as part of a panel on how to raise money for individual projects. He led a rousing 10-minute example of how to engage an audience to donate money to a hypothetical project and encouraged audience members to shout out questions about the project, things like “what is your budget,” “what is the format of the event,” and some variation of “what is the point off this event.” And it’s this last one that caught me, because in response, without hesitation, and to the great joy of the many artists in the audience, the speaker said, “Art does not need a reason to exist; art does not need to be justified.”

As an advocate for the arts, and as a person with a mind for marketing, I find this line of argument both reductive and damaging. Of course art needs to justify its existence, just like any other potential investment opportunity – to claim otherwise is simply to say to claim that art sits above all other aspects of the world. To argue that the simple existence of a piece makes the world a better place, regardless of the quality, message, aesthetic and form of that piece is the same as saying that the mushroom scrubber is in fact a useful invention simply for the fact that it exists. And ultimately, I think such an attitude, of choosing to say “if you don’t get it, too bad” as opposed to trying to puzzle out the intricacies of translating the vocabulary of an artist to that of a lay person, is at the heart of a lot of the perceived irrelevancy and marginalization of the field in the larger population.

I get extremely agitated when I hear a person in one sentence say that they make art from a personal place and feel no need to understand how it engages or doesn’t engage with the community, and in the next sentence say that they want to (or, often, “deserve”) to make a living doing just that.

When it comes down to it, I feel that there are certain people, the greatest artists of all time, for whom such an attitude might be true (although, to point it out, many of those artists did not in fact make a living off of their work during that time, and were instead only celebrated later). And I don’t claim to be able to judge which of the many thousands of individual artists in the city are the ones most likely to be the next great, society-touching savant. But I know, for me, that I love being an artist – taking photographs, designing quilts, writing short stories, painting, drawing, doing theatre – and I don’t especially feel a need to create that work with the world at large in mind. The difference, I think, is that I also don’t have any expectations that a room full of people will throw money from the balconies at me simply because I tell them to, nor that were I in that position, I would not have to answer that person in the third row who shouts out, “Why does this deserve to exist?”

No, really, we must start thinking about diversity!

I feel like I've been going on forever about how white populations are precipitously heading toward the minority in the Bay Area, since I saw this presentation from the San Francisco Foundation that said, well, that white populations would in fact be the minority in all five Bay Area counties SFF serves by 2050. In fact, there will be no majority population much more quickly than that, and certain counties like Contra Costa and Alameda will reach a Hispanic majority within the next 20 years.

And now here's this New York Times story by Sam Roberts that essentially outlines the same projections for the entire country, per the U.S. Census Bureau. Depending on whether immigration continues at the same level as it has been or continues at a slower pace (those are really the two options), whites will be in the minority nationally between 2040 and 2050.

Why is this important? It is faulty logic to think that an arts infrastructure that creates work for and relies primarily on the attendance of white audiences will be able to sustain itself when projections are showing 20-30 percent drops in white population in the next 40 years. And right now, no one seems to care. Recently, we did a study of how our 100 Free Night of Theater companies are approaching non-white audiences. Here are some bullet points from the study, which is still being processed:

• 39% of companies claimed no African-American or Asian-American audience share. Almost half (44%) claimed no Hispanic audience share. For comparison, the SFF study puts the current ethnic distributions for those three communities as 8% African-American, 23% Asian-American, and 22% Hispanic in the 5 Bay Area counties.


• Of those that claimed some non-white audience share, the average claim was 7% for African-American and Hispanic, and 12% for Asian-American.


• 85% of companies were producing shows that they self-reported as not particularly resonating with non-white audiences of any ethnicity.


• 88% of companies were planning no particular outreach to non-white populations.

I find these numbers incredibly frustrating. I know it's hard, and I know there's a lot of nuance in the conversation. And I know it's such a hard conversation to have with companies, especially because there are few stories of organizations who have (1) had the impetus to become more inclusive and (2) succeeded. But this isn't a thought exercise anymore.

Mission Paradox, in a post spawned from discussions on Arena Stage's diversity conference (read more at their New Play Development Program blog), argues that companies all fall into one of the following groups, and then suggests a path forward:

1. The Sincere Effort Group - They have the support, the money and the time. At most these groups will need help and guidance on the strategy side of the ledger. They want to diversify, but they may not be sure how, or confident in their ability to do so. This group deserves all the help, encouragement and guidance they can get.

2. The Scared - These people have some sort of fear barrier stopping them from diversifying. Fear of losing audience. Fear of losing money. Whatever. This group should be supported and encouraged . . . to a point. Some organizations spend their entire life cycle scared, that's just how it goes.

3. The "Other Priority" Group - These organizations have decided, for whatever reasons, that other initiatives are more important then a diversity effort. I think we, as an industry, should respect the decision this group makes. Maybe it's a bad decision. Hell, it is probably a bad decision. But groups have the right to make bad decisions.

4. The "No Desire" Group - This group has no desire to diversify. Who really cares why they feel that way? The only thing that matters is that they made that choice.
Again, that's a perfectly acceptable decision to make.

I think our job as a field is to look at each organization and figure out which "diversity category" they fit in.

Then we deal with them accordingly.

Our job is not to move people from one category to another. That's a choice only they can make. Embrace the ones that want change. Support the ones that need help. Wish the rest of them the best of luck and send them on their merry way.

It's a hard line, but honestly if we're talking about a crisis of relevance (and when aren't we talking about a crisis of relevance?) then diversity has to be part of the conversation.

What group do you belong to?