Arts Education

"Ahead of the 2022–2023 school year, the College Board rolled out a pilot version of its new Advanced Placement (AP) African American Studies course. The class had been in the works for over a decade, and this pilot version is currently offered to students at only 60 high schools across the country," said Elaine Velie for Hyperallergic. "Last week, the College Board announced an updated official curriculum framework in advance of the course’s expansion into hundreds more schools that some critics say is missing a host of important artists, writers, and concepts."

From Tooshar Swain for AFTA's ARTS blog, "National Arts in Education Week is upon us, and it is a wonderful time to reflect on where arts education has been and where it can go with impassioned arts advocacy. K-12 arts students and educators have endured a rocky road through the pandemic, and their perseverance must continue as we head into a new normal of education in the United States."

"The visual arts sector continues to grow at a rapid rate integrating applications of artistic and technological talent into the entertainment, fashion, and marketing industries across the world," said Rob Berger for Forbes. "Students are clamoring for more educational opportunities to get a head start on careers that often begin well before cap and gown ceremonies at the hand of doodlers across the nation."

"Senate Bill 681 was signed into law in July 2020, officially creating an arts high school graduation requirement in North Carolina. This graduation requirement begins this school year with entering sixth grade students," said Caroline Parker for EducationNC. "All 50 states and the District of Columbia have content or performance standards for arts education, but only 32 define the arts as a core or academic subject, according to the The Arts Education Partnership (AEP)."

"The anemic California polling numbers for this past primary election (12 percent of the population voted) don’t bode well for the fall, but there is a long-sought arts initiative on the Nov. 8 ballot," said author Michael Zwiebach for Classical Voice. "The California Art and Music K-12 Education Funding Initiative has qualified for the general election; as the name states, it’s meant to bolster school arts programs."

Candid interviewed Amanda Moniz, Ph.D., the David M. Rubenstein Curator of Philanthropy at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, who is responsible for, "[building] a collection of objects telling stories about Americans’ giving throughout our history." The museum's new exhibition, Giving in America, "includes one of the first copies of [the] Foundation Directory."

Amy Sherald, the artist behind the 2020 Vanity Fair cover portrait of Breonna Taylor, announced a donation of, “$1 million to start the Brandeis Law School’s Breonna Taylor Legacy Fellowship and the Breonna Taylor Legacy Scholarship for undergraduates.”

President Biden paid a rare visit to Marín Elementary School in North Philadelphia, a program that received funding from the American Rescue Plan. ArtistYear teaching artist fellow Coco Allred reflected on her experience of having the American leader come to the classroom.

"For decades, arts and music education in California has been dying a slow death in many schools, strangled by budget cuts amid an ongoing emphasis on core subjects like reading and math and test scores as the measure of student success," reports Louis Freedberg in EdSource.

Frances Phillips reviews research about an arts education program the Walter & Elise Haas Foundation participated in over the past year responding to the idea of Emily Garvie from the Clarence E. Heller Charitable Foundation "of organizing arts nonprofits to lead subsidized pods for students who lacked access to consistent arts learning and schoolwork support."