Arts education partnerships: sources of harmony and dissonance with cultural institutions’ collaborative efforts

ABSTRACT

Due to budget constraints, schools in the United States have increasingly turned to community arts organizations for support. School-community arts partnership stakeholders collaborate because of shared missions to provide students with valuable arts learning experiences. Investigations of these initiatives indicate that these partnerships improve arts learning opportunities and increase public support and resources for arts education. However, not much is known about the experiences and perspectives of the arts organizations that participate in these partnerships. Coordinating collective efforts with a multitude of institutions and interests poses challenges. In this study, we examine survey data collected from arts organization administrators who participated in a large-scale school-community arts partnership initiative. We find that these organizations are generally positive about their impacts on students’ educational outcomes, but there is substantial variation in these views. We also find that organizations differ in their levels of support for these collective efforts. Sources of this variation appear to be attributable to organizations’ preexisting resources and extent to which they are established. While this difference in levels of support is potentially inevitable, we find evidence that the operations handled by the “backbone” organization, i.e. the initiative’s facilitators and overseers, can significantly influence organizations’ levels of support for these efforts. Organizations are more likely to support these collaborative efforts when they believe the backbone organization ensures transparency with initiative operations, provides regular, effective communication, and effectively resolves competing priorities.

KEYWORDS:

• Arts education
• cultural organizations
• education policy
• school-community partnerships
• teaching-artist residencies
• mixed-method evaluation

Notes on contributors

Daniel H. Bowen is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Educational Administration and Human Resource Development at Texas A&M University and a Research Affiliate of the Houston Education Research Consortium, a researcher-practitioner partnership between Houston’s Independent School District and Rice University. His research employs experimental and quasi-experimental methods to investigate the broader impacts of culturally enriching, school-sponsored programs and policies. His work has been featured in renown media outlets, such as The New York Times, NBC Nightly News, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and CNN.

Brian Kisida is an Assistant Professor in the Truman School of Public Affairs at the University of Missouri. He focuses on education policy, experimental design, and causal inference. His research has examined the broad educational benefits of school partnerships with cultural institutions and community arts organizations, teacher diversity, and school integration. His work has been cited in congressional testimony before the U.S. House and Senate, and it has appeared in numerous media outlets, including The New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and CNN.

ORCID

Daniel H. Bowen http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9762-7499

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Houston Endowment, National Endowment for the Arts, and Spencer Foundation.