Approach II

Approach II for The Big Canvas Issue Guide
Nurture Children's Future

Supporters of this choice believe that public money for arts and culture will always be limited. Therefore, the wisest strategy is to target any new money to the cause that generates the broadest buy-in and offers the most long-term benefits: youth.
In this view, arts programs for youth – out of school as well as in – have multiple benefits that justify public support. Arts and culture activities can expand young horizons, snare the interest of nontraditional learners, motivate kids to stay in school, and open them up to new career prospects.

A focus on youth is also good for cultural organizations feeling economic strains. Bringing youth into arts venues builds audience both in the short term (parents go where their kids go) and, most important, in the long term. Ample research shows that children exposed consistently and well to the arts at an early age become the most enthusiastic arts patrons as adults.

Advocates of this choice believe that national educational policy, with its testing mania under No Child Left Behind, has lost sight of the enduring value of arts education. In this view, the Philadelphia region can reap long-term benefits from taking aggressive steps to repair locally the ill effects of this national mistake.

This approach also addresses concerns about the “wired” generations now coming of age, which can seem addicted to technology, short on attention and patience. It notes that the Web and digital technologies enable young people to make remarkably polished multimedia art. Recognizing that many young people will step into the arts only through a digital door, this approach wants to invest in ways to help them take that step.

This approach’s bottom line: Investing in youth is simply the smartest long-term strategy.

HOW TO RAISE MONEY FOR THESE GOALS:
Supporters of this choice would be happy to see a regional fund set up to fulfill this mission. But that would take a lot of time and political capital; rather than wait, they’d prefer to begin differently. First, create a coherent, compelling strategy for bringing the benefits of arts and culture to the region’s youth, particularly the disadvantaged. Then, sell that strategy to a variety of funders in the public, private and philanthropic sectors.

This a la carte strategy to finding money for initiatives will probably bear fruit more quickly than the uphill climb of getting a regional fund approved, advocates of this choice believe. And, they remind us all, needy kids are waiting.

SUPPORTERS TEND TO FAVOR THESE ACTIONS:
■ Provide matching funds for school districts that agree to pick up a majority percentage of the cost of hiring new arts and music teachers.
■ Underwrite artist-in-residence programs in schools.
■ Create a Kids Passport to the arts, a card granting discounted youth admissions to a host of cultural venues throughout the region. Every child would be eligible for the pass, but the cost of the pass would be discounted or eliminated for lower-income youth. The regional fund would underwrite this subsidy; cultural attractions would provide the base discounts for the passport as a loss leader.
■ Fund arts-oriented after-school, summer and weekend programs.
■ Help schools and other youth programs obtain the high-tech equipment and Web access that enable young people to experiment with new forms of multimedia art.
■ Make grants to school districts to allay the fuel costs associated with arts and culture field trips.
■ Create programs to train the arts educators needed to make this strategy work, and give young people incentives to enter the field.
■ Make grants to institutions to do innovative outreach and education programming for disadvantaged youth.
■ Underwrite internships and summer jobs for local youth with arts and culture organizations.
■ Fund youth art contests, juried exhibitions and galleries, with a stress on Web-based, multimedia arts.

ARGUMENTS FOR THIS APPROACH:
✓ Taxpayers as a rule don’t care about the staffing and money woes of cultural organizations. But they do care about children. Pleas to invest in youth have a much better chance of earning tax support.
✓ A multipronged strategy that doesn’t just send money to public schools will be more likely to get support from taxpayers suspicious of school bureaucracies.
✓ Exposing children consistently, from an early age, to arts and culture expands their horizons, instills a taste for art, and creates the audience on which artists and organizations will depend in the future.
✓ Arts and culture experiences help children learn in all subjects. They encourage right-brain learners; teach discipline, collaboration and planning; motivate students to stay in school and to learn basic academic skills that are needed to master their favorite art forms.
✓ Arts and culture build self-esteem and a sense of possible futures that can help steer children away from drugs and crime, and toward community and ambition.
✓ This approach counters the testing mania fueled by No Child Left Behind that has damaged arts and music education in many school districts.

ARGUMENTS AGAINST THIS APPROACH:
✗ Programs for youth are obviously popular, but they usually get set up as an add-on that strains arts organizations, actually worsening their structural budget and staffing woes.
✗ Despite the rah-rah rhetoric, research is at best sketchy and at worst unconvincing that arts provide the academic benefits this choice claims.
✗ The public is suspicious, with good reason, of any plan to pour new money into unaccountable public school districts.
✗ The lack of qualified, trained arts educators is severe. A strategy that doesn’t address this problem first and fully is doomed.
✗ Plenty of suburban communities do a fine job on youth arts already. Absent a coordinating regional entity, this strategy could result in the rich – i.e. those communities with a strong youth arts infrastructure in place – just getting richer.
✗ Lots of people have no children, or their children are grown up. Are they to be left out of the region’s cultural strategy?
✗ The crying need that these kids will have when they grow up is a job. That’s where the focus should be, on bringing good jobs to the region.

(Illustration by Tim Ogline. Photos from the art education program at The Brandywine River Museum.)