This report, commissioned by Irvine and written by Public/Private Ventures, examines the program improvement strategies, step-by-step, that allowed the Foundation’s CORAL initiative to achieve the levels of quality needed to boost the academic success of young students. The report also makes specific policy and funding suggestions for improving program performance. Communities Organizing Resources to Advance Learning (CORAL) was an eight-year, $58 million after-school initiative aimed at improving education achievement in low-performing schools in five California cities.
Arts Education/Youth
After-School Toolkit: Tips, Techniques and Templates for Improving Program Quality
This toolkit, commissioned by Irvine and developed by Public/Private Ventures, offers program managers a practical, hands-on guide for implementing quality programming in the after-school hours. The kit includes the tools and techniques that increased the quality of literacy-focused programming and helped improve student reading gains in the Foundation’s Communities Organizing Resources to Advance Learning (CORAL) initiative–an eight-year, $58 million after-school endeavor to improve education achievement in low-performing schools in five California cities.
Learning, Arts, and the Brain
In the Dana Consortium study, researchers grappled with a fundamental question: Are smart people drawn to the arts or does arts training make people smarter? For the first time, coordinated, multi-university scientific research brings us closer to answering that question. Learning, Arts, and the Brain, a study three years in the making, is the result of research by cognitive neuroscientists from seven leading universities across the United States. It advances our understanding of the effects of music, dance, and drama education on other types of learning. Children motivated in the arts develop attention skills and strategies for memory retrieval that also apply to other subject areas. Also see the article on the study from the Dana Foundation website.
The Art of Collaboration: Promising Practices for Integrating the Arts and School Reform (2008)
This second publication in the Arts Education Partnership’s research and policy brief series describes promising practices for building community partnerships that integrate the arts into urban education systems. The publication, which is the result of a roundtable conversation among the directors of eight of the demonstration sites participating in The Ford Foundation’s Integrating the Arts and Education Reform Initiative, details the sites’ early strategies and successes in the areas of organizational infrastructure; partnership development; integrated arts education; and communications and advocacy.
Teaching the Art of Writing
Teaching the Art of Writing: An arts-based approach to writing captivates reluctant writers.
Arts Instruction of Public School Students in the First and Third Grades
This Issue Brief uses the First- and Third-Grade Spring Teacher Questionnaires of the ECLS-K to examine the changes over time from first to third grade in how often young children are exposed to arts education in the general classroom. In both first and third grade, most public school students received instruction in music and art at least weekly, while instruction in dance and theater occurred less often within each year. About 32 percent of students in high poverty public schools never received theater instruction in either grade compared with 24 percent of students in low poverty public schools.
