The arts are in trouble. Many of the institutions that make the Bay Area's cultural scene so compelling are facing financial difficulties. Some are severely cutting programs; others are on the verge of closing. The arts are particularly vulnerable because they rely upon ticket sales and memberships, which are often among the first to be cut from consumer spending during an economic crisis. At the same time, the philanthropic revenues that arts organizations rely on - from government sources, foundations, corporations and individual contributions - all stand at risk today, given shrinking endowments and discretionary income.

Thankfully, arts leaders are applying their creative powers to these economic challenges, thus finding new ways to cut costs or raise revenues. For example, the Magic Theatre recently announced that it will be able to complete its season, thanks to an emergency fundraising campaign that brought in $455,000 from 1,100 donors. And the San Francisco Opera, in announcing its 2009-2010 season, was able to reduce its costs without compromising on artistic quality.

These organizations and their leaders deserve credit for doing whatever it takes to stay afloat. But all the creative ideas to keep the doors open won't be enough if we don't fundamentally change our collective understanding of why the arts matter. When times get tough and choices must be made, it is often the arts that lose. Why is this so? When compared to health or human service needs, the arts are often viewed as less important and therefore more discretionary in nature. But this line of thinking misses the point about why the arts are so important. Until we fully recognize how essential the arts are to the vitality of our communities and our quality of life, our cultural infrastructure will continue to be given short shrift. There are countless reasons why we should renew our commitment to the arts. Consider the following:

-- In the Bay Area, the arts create more than 31,000 jobs and generate $1.2 billion in economic activity every year.

-- The arts produce $105 million in local and state tax revenue for the Bay Area (far more than the government spends on the arts).

-- Surveys report that 93 percent of parents believe that the arts are essential to a well-rounded education.

-- Ten million new jobs in the next decade will be in the "creative class," according to economist Richard Florida. These are jobs that involve imagination and ingenuity which are best developed by experiencing the arts.

But the importance of the arts extends well beyond economics and education. The arts expand our horizons, unleash creativity and build social bonds. During this period of unsettling change, the arts can provide us with pleasure and comfort, while also challenging us to see the world in new ways. Two recent examples come to mind of the arts' power to build community and create a sense of common experience. First was the inauguration ceremony of President Obama. Where did we turn to put this historic moment in perspective, to build a common sense of pride and hope for the nation's future? We turned to the arts, of course, in the form of poetry, classical music and song, including performances by San Francisco's own Boys Chorus and Girls Chorus. Locally, the power and appeal of the arts was in evidence on a recent Sunday when dozens of museums and other cultural institutions opened their doors for free. Thousands of kids explored Asian culture at the Asian Art Museum, walked through a rainforest at the California Academy of Sciences, and explored world class art collections at the de Young Museum and SFMOMA. On this one day, people could experience the rich diversity of San Francisco's arts organizations, regardless of economic circumstance. But, for the rest of the year, maintaining our rich cultural landscape is anything but free. So, as your resources permit, attend a performance, buy a membership, and consider a contribution of any size. But also talk to your friends and neighbors about the transformative power of the arts and encourage them to support and advocate for the arts. The arts institutions that have created our cultural riches have done so much to help the Bay Area thrive. It's time for us to return the favor.

James E. Canales is president and chief executive officer of the James Irvine Foundation, a private foundation dedicated to expanding opportunity for the people of California. The Irvine Foundation is one of the largest private funders of the arts in California, with annual arts grant-making of approximately $20 million.

This article appeared on page A - 13 of the San Francisco Chronicle.. Read more on this article...

Karin Kloosterman

Karin is an editor, journalist and blogger living in Israe


My friend Karen Chernick, a Brandeis University alum, speaks about how her alma mater betrays the very principles on which it was founded.

Has America's culture eroded so deeply since the recent financial crisis, that national treasures are now being auctioned off to the highest bidder? Here are Karen's thoughts:

Having grown up as the daughter of a Brandeis University alumnus (Dr. Robert Chernick, '76), I have always been proud of my academic heritage - both before and after my own graduation from Brandeis in 2006. The decision made this week by the Board of Trustees and the manner in which it was determined and announced, however, have caused me to be deeply ashamed of the alma mater whose values I, until recently, held in such high regard.

The decision to close the Rose Art Museum and sell its entire 8000 work art collection is a short sighted solution to the current financial crisis. The decision not only betrays Brandeis University's core academic mission but also neglects its responsibility as an institution of higher learning to preserve our cultural heritage and further its research. Moreover, this act has already tainted the previously esteemed reputation of the university in the eyes of the public, of other educational institutions, of future students, and of future professors, and will forever damage its fundraising ability.

To claim that the sale of the Rose Art Museum's collection would not damage the academic mission of the university reveals a shockingly gross misunderstanding of its integrality to the fine arts curriculum on the part of the Board of Trustees. No other facility is more integral to the fine arts at Brandeis and no amount of verbal sugarcoating can conceal the true nature of this act. The Rose Art Museum is the most prized lecture hall, seminar room, library, and laboratory of the Fine Arts department. It is the equivalent of robbing the science departments of their microscopes or the English Department of its books. As such, this act can only be read as a statement on behalf of the Board of Trustees that it values fine arts education significantly less than it values other academic departments. I should hope that as a liberal arts university this distinction would never be made.

The academic catalogue surveying the entire Rose Art Museum collection that is currently being prepared for publication in 2010 testifies to the cultural and instructional significance of the museum's holdings. As one of the strongest collections of 20th century art in New England (if not the absolute finest), the first hand availability to students of works by illustrious artists such as Cezanne, Picasso, Warhol, Motherwell, Rauschenberg and de Kooning (to name a limited few) is unparalleled. As a university that is a self proclaimed supporter of the arts, Brandeis has a responsibility to its students to preserve this cultural landmark.

On a personal level, my own education at Brandeis as an art history major would not have been complete without the Rose Art Museum, which is one of the facilities that drew me to the university in the first place. More than my work in the classroom, it was the hands-on research that I did with the Rose Art Museum collection for my senior honors thesis and the curatorial mentorship that the museum facilitated that distinguished my education from Brandeis University. It was the experience that I acquired with that exceptional institution that led me to be hired as the director of a large art historical research project immediately upon graduation and which fueled my desire to enroll in a doctoral program in art history. I feel deeply betrayed to learn of the Board of Trustee's ignorance of one of Brandeis's most educationally - not fiscally - treasured assets. In stating that the sale of the Rose Art Museum collection will allow Brandeis to "focus and sustain its core academic mission," the Board of Trustees and President Reinharz are singlehandedly discrediting the education of every fine arts graduate of the university.

It is for these reasons that I join countless alumni who pledge to withhold support of Brandeis University until the decision to close the Rose Art Museum and sell its art collection is reversed.

Karen Chernick (Brandeis '06) is Director of the Reuven Rubin Catalogue Raisonné Project and a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU

* Financial Crisis

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These days, an increasing number of artists and arts advocates are demanding that more of their fellow Americans, and especially their elected leaders, start valuing them -- in ways that recognize their labor and help make it pay. As President Obama and lawmakers aim to open Uncle Sam’s pockets to stimulate the economy, artists and the nonprofit organizations that give them much of their employment are hoping that a goodly sum will materialize to boost hiring in creative fields.

They are stating their case with ad hoc online petition campaigns for the appointment of a national arts czar and for the arts to get 1% of any stimulus package. A bill approved this week by the House of Representatives calls for injecting $544 billion in economic stimulus spending into the economy, including $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts.

In addition, new grass-roots proposals are popping up suggesting that more artists be hired to teach in schools.

“If you’re going to bail out people who move numbers around in banks and put rivets in things, you should also be supporting artists in their work,” says Kiff Gallagher, a San Francisco-based independent singer-songwriter. The former Clinton White House staff member has launched the Music National Service Initiative, a fledgling nonprofit that aims to recruit, train and pay a subsistence wage and benefits to young musicians who would spend a year or two teaching their art in schools and community centers in poor neighborhoods.

“The arts get the shaft because they’re looked at as soft and fuzzy, not things we’re able to measure and count,” Gallagher says. “But the new president shows that a higher social, empathic intelligence is required to solve hard-core issues. Maybe it turns out the world is fuzzy and its problems are fuzzy. So it’s important we put music and arts back in the schools.”

“We have this huge sum of money and this brief window of opportunity” to secure some of it for the arts, says Michael D. Nolan, a San Francisco producer and former arts administrator who heads the newborn National Campaign to Hire Artists to Work in Schools and Communities, another initiative that envisions giving artists a chance to earn money sharing what they know and love.

With talk in the nation’s capital about the need to spend on “shovel-ready” projects that should pay off in immediate job creation, Nolan says, “compared to a lot of public works projects that need some ramp-up time, artists have their brushes and paints and can teach in the schools tomorrow.”

Meanwhile, advocates such as Americans for the Arts and the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies are pushing the president to create a high-ranking White House position with the responsibility of ensuring that arts policy is carried out coherently by the assorted federal departments that affect the arts, including Education, Labor, Commerce and, in cultural exchange programs, State. Another priority, says Robert Lynch, president of Americans for the Arts, is getting artists included under a proposed economic recovery provision that would provide health and unemployment benefits for part-time, low-wage workers.

If an infusion of federal arts money reaches Los Angeles, Laura Zucker, executive director of the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, says she’d love to use a chunk to fund a new matching-grant program that would help boost small arts organizations’ fundraising know-how while enabling them to commission new works.

And, if more money materialized for artists in schools, Zucker says, it would enter a well-established pipeline in L.A. that ensures local artists get at least 30 hours of training on how to work effectively in classrooms.

“The finest programs train artists to be very collaborative with classroom teachers, so they don’t show up and say, ‘I’m the grand pooh-bah of arts, and I’m going to tell you what you need to know,’” says Janet Eilber, artistic director of New York’s Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, who oversees a Dana Foundation program that helps place artists in schools in Los Angeles, New York City and Washington.

Not surprisingly, some arts educators worry that, aside from the training issues, mustering a corps of artists into the schools could boomerang. Rather than a useful adjunct to regular arts instruction, they fear, it could become a cheap substitute.

School officials “don’t rub their hands together and say, ‘I’m going to get rid of music education today.’ But if they’re making difficult decisions and somebody says, ‘Here’s a cheap and easy way out,’ of course they’re going to look at that,” says Mike Blakeslee, senior deputy executive director of the National Assn. of Music Education, a professional group for music teachers.

In any event, the stakes are high for getting arts education right. Even if the economy recovers, experts say, the arts will still face the long-term threat of a dwindling audience. These observers point to a decades-long retreat in arts education -- a widely assumed though not thoroughly documented trend in which schools increasingly have emphasized basics and treated the arts as an expendable extra.

Recent studies, including a Rand Corp. report last year, have warned that arts organizations are in danger of losing audiences because post-baby boomers haven’t been consistently exposed to the arts.

The last nationwide glimpse of students’ arts knowledge, in 1997, wasn’t rosy. That year, the federal Education Department’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as “The Nation’s Report Card,” was devoted to how eighth-graders had done in standardized tests in music and visual arts.

Among the findings: Fewer than half of the students had taken an art class, while two-thirds had taken music. Asked to write a brief analysis of a collage by Romare Bearden, virtually none of the students had a “complete” sense of what the artist was trying to communicate and only 22% were deemed to have gotten at least the gist of it.

With the Senate taking up the stimulus legislation, the results will suggest how much artists are deemed to matter to the nation’s economic well-being. A sequel to the sobering 1997 assessment of kids’ arts knowledge is due this spring: another Nation’s Report Card on the arts, this one based on tests taken by eighth-graders early in 2008.

“The timing is critically important,” says Deborah Reeve, executive director of the National Art Education Assn., a professional group for visual art teachers. “And the report will be very telling.”

-- Mike Boehm

Photo: In Nampa, Idaho, in December, leather artist Deana Attebery works with Idaho Arts Charter student Hannah Kafka as part of a school program that received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Credit: Mike Vogt / Idaho Press-Tribune. Read more on this article...

The Problem

No Child Left Behind Left the Money Behind: The goal of the law was the right one, but unfulfilled funding promises, inadequate implementation by the Education Department and shortcomings in the design of the law itself have limited its effectiveness and undercut its support. As a result, the law has failed to provide high-quality teachers in every classroom and failed to adequately support and pay those teachers.

Teacher Retention is a Problem: Thirty percent of new teachers leave within their first five years in the profession.

Soaring College Costs: College costs have grown nearly 40 percent in the past five years. The average graduate leaves college with over $19,000 in debt. And between 2001 and 2010, 2 million academically qualified students will not go to college because they cannot afford it. Finally, our complicated maze of tax credits and applications leaves too many students unaware of financial aid available to them.


Barack Obama and Joe Biden's Plan

Early Childhood Education

* Zero to Five Plan: The Obama-Biden comprehensive "Zero to Five" plan will provide critical support to young children and their parents. Unlike other early childhood education plans, the Obama-Biden plan places key emphasis at early care and education for infants, which is essential for children to be ready to enter kindergarten. Obama and Biden will create Early Learning Challenge Grants to promote state "zero to five" efforts and help states move toward voluntary, universal pre-school.
* Expand Early Head Start and Head Start: Obama and Biden will quadruple Early Head Start, increase Head Start funding and improve quality for both.
* Affordable, High-Quality Child Care: Obama and Biden will also provide affordable and high-quality child care to ease the burden on working families.

K-12

o Reform No Child Left Behind: Obama and Biden will reform NCLB, which starts by funding the law. Obama and Biden believe teachers should not be forced to spend the academic year preparing students to fill in bubbles on standardized tests. He will improve the assessments used to track student progress to measure readiness for college and the workplace and improve student learning in a timely, individualized manner. Obama and Biden will also improve NCLB's accountability system so that we are supporting schools that need improvement, rather than punishing them.
o Support High-Quality Schools and Close Low-Performing Charter Schools: Barack Obama and Joe Biden will double funding for the Federal Charter School Program to support the creation of more successful charter schools. An Obama-Biden administration will provide this expanded charter school funding only to states that improve accountability for charter schools, allow for interventions in struggling charter schools and have a clear process for closing down chronically underperforming charter schools. An Obama-Biden administration will also prioritize supporting states that help the most successful charter schools to expand to serve more students.
o Make Math and Science Education a National Priority: Obama and Biden will recruit math and science degree graduates to the teaching profession and will support efforts to help these teachers learn from professionals in the field. They will also work to ensure that all children have access to a strong science curriculum at all grade levels.
o Address the Dropout Crisis: Obama and Biden will address the dropout crisis by passing his legislation to provide funding to school districts to invest in intervention strategies in middle school - strategies such as personal academic plans, teaching teams, parent involvement, mentoring, intensive reading and math instruction, and extended learning time.
o Expand High-Quality Afterschool Opportunities: Obama and Biden will double funding for the main federal support for afterschool programs, the 21st Century Learning Centers program, to serve one million more children.
o Support College Outreach Programs: Obama and Biden support outreach programs like GEAR UP, TRIO and Upward Bound to encourage more young people from low-income families to consider and prepare for college.
o Support College Credit Initiatives: Barack Obama and Joe Biden will create a national "Make College A Reality" initiative that has a bold goal to increase students taking AP or college-level classes nationwide 50 percent by 2016, and will build on Obama's bipartisan proposal in the U.S. Senate to provide grants for students seeking college level credit at community colleges if their school does not provide those resources.
o Support English Language Learners: Obama and Biden support transitional bilingual education and will help Limited English Proficient students get ahead by holding schools accountable for making sure these students complete school.
Recruit, Prepare, Retain, and Reward America's Teachers
o Recruit Teachers: Obama and Biden will create new Teacher Service Scholarships that will cover four years of undergraduate or two years of graduate teacher education, including high-quality alternative programs for mid-career recruits in exchange for teaching for at least four years in a high-need field or location.
o Prepare Teachers: Obama and Biden will require all schools of education to be accredited. Obama and Biden will also create a voluntary national performance assessment so we can be sure that every new educator is trained and ready to walk into the classroom and start teaching effectively. Obama and Biden will also create Teacher Residency Programs that will supply 30,000 exceptionally well-prepared recruits to high-need schools.
o Retain Teachers: To support our teachers, the Obama-Biden plan will expand mentoring programs that pair experienced teachers with new recruits. They will also provide incentives to give teachers paid common planning time so they can collaborate to share best practices.
o Reward Teachers: Obama and Biden will promote new and innovative ways to increase teacher pay that are developed with teachers, not imposed on them. Districts will be able to design programs that reward accomplished educators who serve as a mentor to new teachers with a salary increase. Districts can reward teachers who work in underserved places like rural areas and inner cities. And if teachers consistently excel in the classroom, that work can be valued and rewarded as well.

Higher Education

o Create the American Opportunity Tax Credit: Obama and Biden will make college affordable for all Americans by creating a new American Opportunity Tax Credit. This universal and fully refundable credit will ensure that the first $4,000 of a college education is completely free for most Americans, and will cover two-thirds the cost of tuition at the average public college or university and make community college tuition completely free for most students. Recipients of the credit will be required to conduct 100 hours of community service.
o Simplify the Application Process for Financial Aid: Obama and Biden will streamline the financial aid process by eliminating the current federal financial aid application and enabling families to apply simply by checking a box on their tax form, authorizing their tax information to be used, and eliminating the need for a separate application.

Barack Obama's Record

Record of Advocacy: Obama has been a leader on educational issues throughout his career. In the Illinois State Senate, Obama was a leader on early childhood education, helping create the state's Early Learning Council. In the U.S. Senate, Obama has been a leader in working to make college more affordable. His very first bill sought to increase the maximum Pell Grant award to $5,100. As a member of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee, Obama helped pass legislation to achieve that goal in the recent improvements to the Higher Education Act. Obama has also introduced legislation to create Teacher Residency Programs and to increase federal support for summer learning opportunities.