Dance students at the Ramone C. Cortines School of Visual and Performing Arts

LA Unified officials yesterday unveiled results of the Arts Equity Index, the most comprehensive arts inventory the district has ever taken, and the findings show the district has a bad case of “art poverty.”

Very few of the district’s 650,000 students have access to robust and uninterrupted arts programs from elementary school through high school, the index found. And the poorest kids have it the worst.

“What we find ourselves doing sometimes is putting the fewest amount of dollars in the schools where the students need it the most,” Rory Pullens, the district’s head of arts education, told the audience at a “State of the Arts” event hosted by Arts for LA at Berendo Middle School.

Pullens, a charismatic speaker who called himself “a theater kid,” combed through the results of the Index and LA Unified’s declining support for the arts for over an hour, keeping the audience in rapt attention despite the dismal data.

The Index measures student access to arts instruction using a filter of 12 factors that include local income levels, the number of foster youth and English Language Learners enrolled at a school, existing arts programs and professional development for teachers in arts pedagogy.

Based on the data, a school can fall into one of six categories that measure availability of arts education: non-existent, basic, emerging, developing, strong, and excelling. The outcomes of the index were calculated using principal’s responses to a survey. In all, 639 schools participated.

Sixty percent of elementary schools received an “emerging” ranking or lower on the index, which rated each school on a point system ranging from zero (non-existent) to 62 (“excelling”). Only 13 schools register as “excelling.”

The scoring for middle and high school is slightly different, with a maximum score of 73. Fifty-four percent schools registered at “emerging” or below line. Only five made it into the “excelling” category.

Four of the 10 most underserved elementary school are located in board District 1, an area that spans much of south LA, stretching north to Hollywood and south to Gardena. Four of the best arts programs are within board District 4, which covers a swath of the Westside from Hollywood to Pacific Palisades.

Board District 3 in the northwest San Fernando Valley contains three of the most underserved and top rated high schools. Although many of the top 10 programs are either magnet schools or have arts concentrations.

“It is our goal that within a three-year period all schools will be at the ‘developing’ level or higher,” Pullens declared.

Another ubiquitous problem identified in the study is that arts education programs are not available as students change schools. For example, vocal music programs are popular among elementary school students, but few middle schools offer it as an option, and only about 14 percent of high schools continue a vocal program.

“This is not a good investment,” Pullens said.

A key component to expanding arts instruction, according to Pullens, are changes in funding, requiring what he calls a “paradigm shift”  in the way the district pays for arts education.

Arts funding is currently based on student enrollment. Under this system, large schools have more to spend while smaller campuses receive very little financial support. Further, the district has, if not forbidden, then strongly discouraged school principals from allocating Title I federal dollars generated by low-income students to subsidize arts instruction.

That’s changing. Beginning next year, principals will have the freedom to redirect this money to integrate the arts in core academic classes to support academic achievement.

“We are not playing Robin Hood where we steal from the rich and give to the poor,” Pullens said. “We want to lift those who are underdeveloped, who are under-resourced to that level of excelling.”

The Index is the latest effort by the district to improve arts instruction, which has been decimated through years of economic recession. At its highest, the budget reached $48 million under former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Today, it’s been reduced to $18 million.

In October 2012, the school board unanimously approved a measure declaring the arts a core subject. It also prohibited further cuts to the program and directed the district to hire more arts teachers and increase student exposure to the arts.

“Though we may have been a little slow moving, we are ready to launch into moving forward in arts education,” Pullens said.

A group of 250 high school students from LA Unified and the surrounding area are putting finishing touches on their art projects this week under the guidance of college faculty and graduate students from California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), a university focused on visual and performing arts.

Administered through Community Arts Partnership (CAP), an off-shoot of CalArts, the summer program is a three week intensive study for high school students with an arts passion. They work under the guidance of 28 CalArts students, and seven CalArts faculty members on the Ramone C. Cortines School of Visual and Performing Arts campus in downtown LA.

Courses are offered, tuition-free, in seven disciplines – theatre, dance, music, visual arts, photography, creative writing and animation.

According to KPCC’s findings, only 70 out of more than 500 elementary schools in the district will provide all four forms of arts education required by California law.

This is the first comprehensive survey of arts access in LA Unified in recent years. We at LA School Report think this is a really neat tool, and that you should take a look.

For a look at the map, click here, and to read the full story, here.

School board member Steve Zimmer, who proposed the idea at the board meeting Tuesday, called it the most comprehensive arts inventory the district has ever taken.

To determine where arts programs are in greatest need, the Index will consider existing arts instruction at a school, proximity to arts centers or places that offer community based arts activities, and levels of poverty (among other factors which have not yet been defined). The results are intended to generate support in the form of district money, foundation grants, private donations and partnerships with local arts facilities.

“Until now access to arts education has been really about entitlement and luck,” Zimmer told LA School Report. “There are some rockstar arts programs that are concentrated in areas of high poverty, but you have other schools in areas of mid-range need that only get one hour of arts instruction a week.”

For example, schools in downtown LA, which are regarded as high needs campuses in most respects, have access to Inner City Arts, a non-profit arts education provider for many LA Unified schools. These schools, according to Zimmer, would fall to a lower position on the arts index.

The district is counting on incoming executive director of LA Unified’s arts education program, Rory Pullens, to implement the funding phase of the of the arts expansion plan.

Pullens was lured away from his post as the head of the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, D.C. to “lead the effort to identify and design district-wide strategies to address areas of need in arts education; developing strategies to increase the number of students participating in arts education; and manages the arts education budget.”

Over eight years at Duke Ellington, Pullens raised millions of dollars for the school including $17.2 million endowment from the Eugene B. Casey Foundation to benefit the vocal and instrumental departments. He also founded a non-profit dedicated exclusively to raising funds for the school.

“We started programs like the Performance Series of Legends where I called upon top-tier entertainers including Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, Smoky Robinson and Earth, Wind, and Fire, to donate their time and services to raise money,” he told LA School Report.

“We can definitely do something similar in LA — it’s the entertainment capital of the world,” he said. “It’s not that people [here] are not willing to help but someone needs to articulate how there can be a beneficial relationship between the entertainment industry, the various artists in LA and students in schools.”

The adoption of the Arts Equity Index and the addition of Pullens as a high ranking district official reflect a major shift in the district’s approach to arts education. After years of brutal budget cuts that reduced funding by 76 percent to $18.6 million from a 2007 high of $78.6 million, the district appears to be shifting away from an arts integration instruction plan to one that champions discrete arts education.

Superintendent John Deasy is expected to finalize the Arts Equity Index formula in September and present actual index will be presented to the board in December.

“That gives us time to target the elementary and middle schools that need our help the most before the end of the year,” Zimmer said.

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Steve Zimmer and Kate Anderson

LA School Report has learned a little of the backstory behind a recent election-focused post that was published on former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch’s blog.

As you may know, Ravitch urged her readers to support District 4 (Hollywood and Westside) incumbent Steve Zimmer and oppose his challenger Kate Anderson, based in large part on an email from a Zimmer supporter who accused Anderson’s canvassers of “spreading lies” — specifically, that “Zimmer is against the arts.”

The email Ravitch posted came from a former LAUSD employee, and the canvasser wasn’t with the official Anderson campaign. The Coalition for School Reform won’t verify it was one its canvassers, but the claim against Zimmer resembles its most recent District 4 TV ad. The Zimmer campaign claims that its candidate is a strong supporter of the arts.

A longtime school reform advocate who worked in the Bush Administration before changing her views on education issues, the New York City-based Ravitch shared an email about an upsetting encounter with what was presumed to be an Anderson canvasser:

“Yesterday, one of her (presumably paid) canvassers made the unfortunate mistake of knocking on our door and telling my husband to vote for her because “Steve Zimmer is against the arts”!

Lithgow says she never meant for her email to reach the media, and that she’s “sorry I wrote that before I’d spoken with the campaign.” She says she wrote the email because she used to work closely with Zimmer, and that he “was one of the Board members the arts branch could always rely on.”

“Anderson’s campaign called me back and said the canvasser wasn’t one of theirs, and that they would never say that,” Lithgow said.

Indeed, Anderson’s campaign manager, Madeleine Moore, confirmed it: “No, it was not someone from our campaign.”

LA School Report contacted the Coalition for School Reform, which made a similar claim about Zimmer in a just-launched TV ad, which says Zimmer “voted… to cut basics like art.” However, the Coalition would not verify that its canvassers discuss Zimmer and the arts.

When asked to comment on this story, Zimmer’s campaign manager, Ari Ruiz, said that “Steve Zimmer is a supporter of the arts,” pointing out that Zimmer was one of the co-sponsors of LAUSD Board Member Nury Martinez’s Arts Core Resolution, which established the arts as a core part of the curriculum in LAUSD schools.

Previous posts: Coalition TV Ad Attacks Zimmer over Robert Kennedy School; District 4 Candidates Air YouTube Ads, Schedule Appearances

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John Baldessari’s LA Fund bus design. Source: LAUSD

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TV News covered the speech as well, including CBS, ABC, and KTLA Channel 5:

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