Reform or Enrichment: Policy Mandates and Program Goals in Community Youth Arts

This paper examines community youth arts (CYA) in the context of the current out-of-school-time movement. Education policies position the arts as recreation or enrichment, rather than academic or arts education during out-of-school-time hours, and view the arts as an effective and important component in the lives of youth. Trends in funding support CYA[1] as a means to “develop,” “save” or “connect” youth and their communities. Community youth arts are, as yet, uncomfortably situated in the nexus of prevention, reform, enrichment, the arts and social and economic development. As a body of research develops connecting the out-of-school-time (OST) and community arts fields, an opportunity arises to intentionally align policies and funding with best practices and model program development. In this paper, I argue that changing policies in the Out-of-School Time/Afterschool movement have implications for community youth arts policies and practices. I present policies connected to nonschool-based youth arts as afterschool enrichment programs, as reform for high-risk kids, and as a critical component of youth and community development resources. Further, evidence points to the need to examine training and staffing for the rapidly increasing afterschool field, which has implications for the community youth arts field.

In the youth arts field, the last six years have seen a dramatic shift in youth arts research and policy that has historically focused almost exclusively on in-school learning, extending the discussion to arts learning that takes place outside of school hours. Research from policy and research centers, as well as foundations, is articulating the value of learning in the arts for youth outside of school hours. Nonschool-based arts learning has traditionally been viewed as an opportunity to reform high-risk youth, or as “enrichment,” which lacks the rigor of school-based arts learning. Regardless, federal programs and policies increasingly encourage afterschool programs that include the arts as substantive opportunities for enrichment and youth development[2].

Is it Reform? Risk and the Arts during OST

Statistics about the rise of juvenile crime, incarceration and youth drop-out indicate that increasingly youth are turning to crime and the streets. Youth are more likely to be involved in or victims of violent crimes between the hours of 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. The Afterschool Alliance reports that 14.3 million children in the United States are “alone and unsupervised in the hours afterschool”[3]. There is a lack of available services, adult involvement and safe places for youth to go after school. The Afterschool Alliance maintains that 15 million children have no place to go after school (3). The U.S. Department of Labor cites that 28 million youth have parents who work outside the home (Afterschool Alliance Action Kit 4). Americans for the Arts cites the following statistics: “Everyday 2,833 children drop out of school; Youth account for 18 percent of all violent crime in the U.S.; Every day 135,000 children carry a gun to school” (U.S. NEA 2).

The last years have seen a shift in questions in youth arts communities from “Can we rescue the arts for America’s children?"[4] to “Can we rescue America’s children through the arts?” Informal arts and out-of-school-time programs that take place in community centers, youth organizations and recreation programs are receiving increasing national attention and federal and local support. Between working families and early-release programs in junior high and high schools, youth spend much of their time outside of school in unstructured activities and without adult involvement. Community youth organizations (CYOs) are helping to bridge the gap that exists for youth between institutional time (such as school time) and family/caregiver time in the evenings.

Recent research supports the role of the arts in successful afterschool programs, especially for high-risk youth. Youth who participate in afterschool programs that include the arts are less likely to engage in poor school achievement and risk behaviors such as drug use. According to Americans for the Arts, “art holds a key” to the startling statistics about youth crime and youth at risk. Afterschool programs, community organizations and youth organizations are using the arts to “divert youth from gangs, drugs; reduce truancy and improve academic performance; and, build critical self-discipline, communication and job skills” (“Arts Programs” 2). The arts are a tough deterrent to crime, and youth arts programs as “powerful crime prevention tools” (2). Arts programs attract and retrain “even the toughest kids. These youth — including gang members and previously incarcerated teens - join arts programs and return time and again” (5).

A 2000 NEA and the U.S. Department of Education (USDOE) report, titled “How the Arts Can Enhance After-School Programs,” positions the arts as a service that can help the “28 million school-age children [whose] parents work outside the home, and as many as 15 million ‘latch-key’ children [who] return to empty homes after school” (1). USDOE reports that afterschool programs have the ability to address these problems and help youth attain positive behavioral changes. The arts are especially valuable to these programs; research shows positive gains in reading proficiency for those youth involved in theater, and increases in empathy, self-control and motivation (USNEA “How” 6).

Increasingly, research has shown that the arts have positive impacts on youth in high-risk environments (“Critical Links,” “Champions of Change”). Current research finds that learning in the arts can help improve student academic achievement (Catteral), increase self-esteem (Heath) and deter delinquent behavior of at-risk youth (Farnum and Schaffer).

Studies have shown that students who participate in arts learning integrated with other academic areas showed significantly more self-regulatory behaviors than their nonarts counterparts (Baum and Owen). A ten-year study of young people living in high-crime and low- socio-economic neighborhoods, who attended afterschool and community programs that included the arts were: “two times more likely to win an award for academic excellence, three times more likely to win an award for school attendance, nearly twice as likely to read for pleasure, four times more likely to engage in community service, and showed higher than average academic aspirations” (Heath 78). The study found that factors in the arts teaching that promoted academic success included high expectations and student responsibility, a wide range of activities connected to school-day learning, participation in peer-critique language fluency, and led to valuable risk taking and divergent thinking (Heath). Studies suggest that the arts help young people develop resilience and protective factors (Weitz; Farnum and Schaffer). Participation in extracurricular activities at school has been shown to decrease student drop-out (Mahoney and Cairns). Other anticipated distal outcomes such as the creation of safe havens, higher academic achievement and increased positive outlook are also supported by current research (Deasy, Fiske).

The U.S. Department of Education sponsors numerous programs that enlist the arts in serving “at-risk” youth. The Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) sponsors the National Institute on the Education of At Risk Students, which supports research and development activities designed to improve the education of students at risk for educational failure due to limited English proficiency, poverty, race or geographic location. The “Arts in Education-Cultural Partnerships for At-Risk Youth” is part of the school improvement programs, and with a $4 million authorization, the grants help to develop “school-community partnership programs that improve the educational performance of at-risk children and youth by providing comprehensive, coordinated arts education.”

National policies, including arts policies, have focused on providing safe havens for youth at risk, and arts advocates made a case for youth arts that took place outside of school time in its ability to provide high-risk youth with these safe havens, adult mentorship and social development. Reports such as those mentioned above have been enlisted to point to the youth crime and drop-out rates, which the arts had the particular ability to address and solve. However, recent research points to a different paradigm for the value of youth participation in arts learning.

Arts as Enrichment in OST?

The current out-of-school-time movement resituates community youth arts as an effective tool to help address problems that youth and communities today face. Foundations, schools, arts organizations, community centers and institutes are coming together to identify benefits and outcomes for research-informed best practices for youth during afterschool programs, which include the arts.

The last five years have seen a rapid growth in the out-of-school-time field, which is fueling a youth arts movement. National programs that focus on the afterschool field such as the National Institute for Out of School Time (NIOST), the Afterschool Alliance and The Afterschool Corporation (TASC)[5] provide important research documenting best practices, and provide resources for research-informed program development.

The community youth arts field shares a history with the OST field. Tracing its historical emergence in the U.S. to the Settlement Houses and the rise of the social clubs and youth clubs at the turn of the last century, it is intertwined with changing policies in schools and education, population settlement, demographics and social services. Foundations such as Charles Stewart Mott, W.T. Grant, Wallace, Robert Wood Johnson, Nathan Cummings and others have made significant contributions to research and large-scale model project initiatives in the OST field (Bodilly & Beckett).

The afterschool movement has generated significant research investigating the continued need for extended learning opportunities for youth and their families through foundation initiatives such as Public Private Ventures (Multiple Choices After School: Findings from the Extended-Service Schools Initiative 2002) and the Wallace Foundation“Making the Most of Out-of-School Time,” which found that available afterschool programs “meet only one-quarter of the need in many urban areas” (Halpern, et al, 2). National organizations dedicated solely to evaluating best practices in the field such as the Afterschool Alliance, the Harvard Family Research Project, and the National Institute of for Out-of-School Time are leading the way in establishing standards and best practices, providing formal evaluation reports and assistance for the multitude of such programs across the country.

The OST field focuses on four primary goals: to provide opportunities for youth to engage in positive social activities within supervised settings, to have a safe place to go after school where youth are mentored by caring adults, to have opportunities for academic enrichment, and to increase parental involvement and extend social capital.

The program theory supports the assertion that students who participate in afterschool programs will show increased test scores, attitudes towards school will improve and parental participation in student learning and achievement will increase. Recent research has shown that “students who spend no time in extracurricular activities are 49% more likely to use drugs, and 37% more likely to become teen parents than those who spend one to four hours a week in extracurricular activities” (NIOST 2). Students who participate in tutoring and homework assistance are 84% more likely to maintain high standards or show improvement in either “grades, homework completion, study, or other measures of academic success” (NIOST 2).

The Afterschool Alliance is a nonprofit organization that exists to ensure that “all children and youth have access to afterschool programs by the year 2010” (10). The Afterschool Alliance is a partnership between the U.S. Department of Education, the Charles Mott Foundation, the J.C. Penney Foundation, the Entertainment Industry Foundation and the Creative Artists Agency Foundation. Programs are designed to meet the needs of students “who are most at-risk of academic and social failure,” which includes active recruitment of youth from low-income, high-crime, homeless and other hard-to-reach areas,, and to provide nursing care, mental-health therapy, transportation and extended hours of operation as needed. Though programs emphasized are mostly “recreational,” in addition to sports they include dance and other arts forms that create opportunities “to demonstrate personal and social behavior,” “promote inclusion and understanding of the abilities of cultural diversity and people” and “encourage participation in activities for enjoyment, challenge, self-expression, and communication.”

For the NIOST, the arts are considered a key ingredient in the range of services offered through afterschool programs: “Through the after-school program students can participate in club activities such as Drama, Computer, African Dance, Hip-Hop, Poetry” (NIOST “Connecting” 2). NIOST exists to bring national attention to the importance of children’s out-of-school-time experiences, influence policy, increase standards and professional recognition and spearhead community action through three areas: research, evaluation and consultation; policy development and public awareness; and training and curriculum development.

Educational reforms during the last seven years have emphasized the importance of developing model arts program that are research-based. Such models and research have been relatively prolific in arts-in-education (AIE), since the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) provided federal support for arts research. The recent re-authorization of the ESEA of 1965 in the Education Act of 2001 extends school-based arts-education research to include community youth-arts research or activities during nonschool hours. This has had a significant impact on the field as federal dollars support research and model program development for afterschool programs. A key component of President Bush’s “No Child Left Behind Act” was the expansion of the 21st Century Community Learning Centers. These “learning centers” provide “opportunities for students and their families to continue to learn new skills and discover new abilities after the schools day has ended.” Congressional support for these afterschool programs increased from $846 million in 2001 to $1 billion in 2002 (and 1.08 billion in 2007). 21st Century Community Learning Centers provide youth development activities, violence-prevention programs, technology education, counseling and “character education,” art, music and recreation programs.

Youth as Resources in OST

Shirley Brice Heath and her research collaborators at Stanford University suggest that rather than viewing youth as problems, youth who participate in OST programs should be considered resources. Heath’s research examines youth participation in community organizations, and “how young people and professional artists in economically disadvantaged communities make learning work in community-based organizations devoted to production and performance in the arts” (Heath and Roach 20). Citing a Carnegie Corporation 1992 report, “A Matter of Time,” the authors Heath and Roach state that only 26% of young people’s time is spent in school and, of their nonschool time, 40-50% is spent without adult supervision (21). Where they choose to go in their nonschool time and what they choose to spend their time doing shape their social development: “Creative youth-based nonschool organizations and enterprises that have sprung up in response to this ‘institutional gap’ engage young people in productive activities during nonschool hours” (Heath and Roach 21). Regardless of the types of organization, effective CYOs all have in common the recognition that youth are resources, not problems: “Rather than focus on prevention and detention for ‘at-risk’ youth, these organizations urge creativity and invention with young people as competent risk-takers across a range of media and situations” (21).

Heath’s research shows that youth emphasize the importance of “having something to do” (22), and effective organizations challenge youth, providing opportunities for trial and error and practice, and held high expectations — all of which contribute to offering the youth something more than just a place to be after school. Young people assume responsibility in the organization and, as they become one of the “old timers,” to help out the younger children. The longer they are in the organization, the more responsibility they assume. Heath and Roach identify “roles, risks, and rules” as the three “Rs” that characterize places where young people want to be (22). And as adult leaders in the organizations admit, if the kids don’t want to be there, nothing the adults can do will keep the doors open.

Through their many roles at effective arts sites, youth participate actively in efforts to guarantee that the organization will continue not only for them, but their younger counterparts as well. Far from a liability, this confluence of risk heightens learning at youth-based arts organization. While public rhetoric laments the fate of “at-risk youth,” our research reveals how youth depend on certain kinds of risk for development. Rather than live at its mercy, youth in arts organization use the predictability of risks in the arts to intensify the quality of their interactions, products and performances (27).

So, What Are We: Reform or Enrichment?

Increasingly, foundations such as the Annenberg Foundation, MetLife, Nathan Cummings, the Dana Foundation, Charles Stewart Mott, Robert Wood Johnson[6] and others, are partnering with universities, school districts and national organizations such as NIOST and the Afterschool Alliance to provide data and information about programs and outcomes, and to serve as clearinghouses for research, programs and policy. Focus is on sustainability, partnership development, evaluation and research-informed practices.

Community youth arts research has begun to reframe the value of arts learning outside of school time. Rather than viewing youth as “high-risk,” dangerous and in need of reform, researchers such as McLaughlin and Brice Heath demonstrate that high-quality CYOs view youth as resources, and they recommend providing intentional leadership opportunities for youth in the organization. Arts-centric community-based organizations such as the Chicago-based Afterschool Matters and Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Project make available to youth opportunities to increase their responsibilities over time as a result of participation with the organization. Brice Heath’s research suggests that effective CYOs provide youth with “roles, risks, and rules,” which includes the opportunity to work in leadership capacities. The Youth Arts Development Project  identified the importance of understanding social-development strategies and the role of resilience and protective factors when working with youth in prevention programs. A review of the Community Youth Development journal reveals documentation and research in programs that foster youth involvement as agents of social and civic change in their communities: “Know YA Roots: A Youth Empowerment Program for Violence Prevention” (Young Adults Recognizing, Redefining and Reclaiming Our Own True Safe-havens), which seeks to empower African-American youth in Flint, Michigan, to “become active adult citizens and public advocates” (Njai, et al. 65); “If it takes a village to raise the children, how many children does it take to raise the village?” (Wilson); “Youth as Change Agents in Distressed Immigrant Communities,” based on Friere’s methods of reflective action (Knox, et al.). Reed Larson discusses the importance of initiative in adolescents — particularly for the development of 21st-century skills and the particular effectiveness of  nonschool youth activities (“structured voluntary activities”) in promoting positive youth development, and their potential to “give youth activities equivalent status to school, family, and peers as a focal context of development…..with the potential to have equal or greater impact on practice”. (Larson 178).

Staffing for OST and Implications for Leadership and Teacher Education in Community Youth Arts

Increased sophistication in the out-of-school-time field points to the importance for staff development, training and retention. Training for OST staff must be responsive to changes in the field and its increased professionalization. These findings have significant implications for the community youth arts field, as it expands in partnerships with other afterschool efforts.

Increases in afterschool programs across the country have resulted in the “steady increase of full-time positions” to staff the programs — essentially resulting in new roles and positions in a developing professional field (NIOST “Change” 1). NIOST published a report, titled “Setting the Stage for a Youth Development Association Credential: A National Review of Professional Credentials for the Out-of-School Time Workforce,” which could bear implications for current national studies examining the credentials of teaching artists as the primary service provider for the arts, both in school and out. During the history of the 21st CCLC, arts programs have been part of the requirements for the enrichment components of programs that provide youth with opportunities for personal and academic growth during out-of-school time. Because of USDOE requirements, arts organizations and local arts agencies struggle to build a cadre of highly qualified teaching artists as part of the long-term sustainability and partnership-planning outcomes of the federal and foundation seed funding. “Afterschool Grows Up” recognizes that staffing is key for afterschool program:

That means finding a front-line staff for after-school programs that can establish a less formal relationship with students and still maintain order, teach skills, keep students’ attention focused on the tasks at hand, adhere to schedules, and develop or follow plans for productive and interesting activities. In some schools, it’s also a plus if the participating adults know the community, reflect its ethnic composition, and maintain some relationships with its other institutions and activities outside of school (Proscio and Whiting).

The most recent issue brief from the Afterschool Alliance, titled “Afterschool: the Bridge Connecting Schools and Communities,” lists Young Audiences, Inc. (YAI), as a provider of arts during OST, and cites the contributions that teaching artists make to improving student academic achievement [7].

Arts organizations and artists struggle to meet the minimum requirements placed on schools for in-school and out-of-school-time learning in under-resourced environments where lack of staff support and limited resources limit the important sustained planning, partnership development and evaluation that is critical for the policy and programmatic development in the field. National research efforts such as the Teaching Artist Research Project (TARP), led by Nick Rabkin, points to the need to address delivery of arts-learning instruction, both in school and during OST. At the recent UNESCO Worldwide Conference on Arts Education in 2006, Eric Booth characterized arts teaching as a global issue. The community youth arts field could benefit from linking research-policy efforts with those of the afterschool field; to continue to align efforts in the growing community arts-education field with the out-of-school-time movement. Clearly, the arts are an integral part of youth nonschool activities, and OST programs that include the arts have proliferated at a time when arts in the schools are on a meteoric decline.

An important element in the development of the community arts field is the rise of university community-arts degree programs that emphasize training for community arts leaders. Community arts programs such as those at Columbia College Chicago, the California College of the Arts and Maryland Institute College of Art train undergraduate and graduate students to work with youth and the arts in community settings. At the same time, demographic shifts are pointing to need for training arts leadership, which includes community arts administrators and teaching artists, in working with diverse communities.

These conditions point to the need to develop standards and credentials for staff who work with youth in OST programs, multi-year program evaluations that focus on systems implementation and outcomes for the purposes of changing policies, and community-arts degree programs that train arts leaders to administer and teach in community-based youth arts programs.

Challenges (and Opportunities)

The arts-learning field has some critical challenges during the next political administration: addressing the absence of the arts in the schools due to federal policies and NCLB, and its effect on youth development and learning; aligning with the OST and other youth-development fields to foster high-quality arts instruction in nonschool programs; educating parents and communities about the value of arts-learning instruction delivered by qualified arts specialists and teaching artists; training for artists and arts leaders in working with youth in community settings, and credentialing for highly qualified community teaching artists; aligning foundations, universities and CYOs to advance training and research; and establishing a professional association composed of artists, administrators, researchers and educators to intentionally advance policies and priorities in the community youth arts field.

Professional development in the arts has almost exclusively focused on pre-service and in-service classroom teachers. With the emergence of research in the teaching artist field, questions will inevitably arise concerning the training and preparation of teaching artists. As arts specialists continue to disappear from the public schools, and as CYOs continue to proliferate, the community youth arts field stands in a unique position to move forward in critical and new ways. I advocate for increasing partnerships with recreation programs, to enhance and educate recreation leadership about the value of sequential arts-learning experiences during OST and the importance of high-quality arts instruction by teaching artists in partnership with recreation programming. This leads to the issue of fostering training relationships for staff in recreation, and including recreation staff and teaching artists in professional-development programs. As arts-education advocates continue to wage the battle to keep the arts in schools as a core academic area, we can support the growth of the OST field, foster research-based program development, promote partnerships in education that help prepare teachers and administrators, and support professional development for the staff, leadership and teaching artists that sustain our community-based field.

The recent RAND report, “Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate about the Benefits of the Arts,” argues for a “new framework” for approaching the value of the arts and has significant policy ramifications (McCarthy). Reframing value from “instrumental” goals, or arguing for the goals and outcomes of the arts in terms of nonarts goals (academic, social, economic, etc), the report argues for the “intrinsic benefits” of the arts, such as pleasure, the development of empathy and the extension of social bonds. Advocating for “sustained involvement,” the report maintains that the overemphasis on instrumental rewards limits policies and resources.

The “arts as enrichment” for youth has traditionally been an unpopular position for the arts learning community. Challenged to go “beyond enrichment,”[8] the arts should offer more than an afterschool activity that competes with sports and club activities in CYOs, and take place in the context of community organizations with flexible scheduling and transitory populations. The Wallace Foundation study reports that 63 to 67% of “youth development, community development, educational and recreational organizations are involved with the arts” (Walker 4). Further, the National Institute of Out of School Time (2007) reports that:

Music, theatre or other disciplines, nurtures the development of cognitive, social, and personal competencies. Arts focused afterschool programs can increase academic achievement, decrease youth involvement in delinquent behavior and improve youth attitudes towards themselves and others and their futures (2).

However, to date there have been no comprehensive studies about the range of arts programming taking place in OST CYOs, or who is offering/teaching it. Regardless, there is enough recognition on the part of the research, policy and foundation communities that a critical body of research and documentation is in place to drive intentional policymaking and research-based practice in the arts during out-of-school time.

This papers advances a conversation among the arts community, the OST community, policy makers and foundations to work together intentionally for rigorous afterschool arts programming conducted by highly qualified teaching artists, within a management environment that is conversant with and cognizant of best practices in the OST community youth arts field. Issues uncovered by an examination of this area of arts practice include training for teaching artists and arts leadership working with research-based best practices in OST arts programming. How should teaching artists working in community-based settings and with highly marginalized populations be prepared and supported? How should arts leaders and arts managers be trained and educated to support teaching artists in providing the best possible arts experiences for youth in such settings? What should researchers and evaluators pay attention to in support of the best work and when communicating with policy makers? How can foundations effectively partner with researchers and practitioners to support effective models development and policy?

Ruminations on the Future

I work with my arts-management graduate students to think about the ways in which they can reduce the gap between policy and practice to help align research and policy formation with youth as part of the solution. The MICA Nathan Cummings Community Arts convening represents a “best practices” for practitioners, pre-service community arts leaders and researchers who work with youth as “co artists,”[9] and community partners as “co-educators.”

As an academic, I would like to see the universities step up and work with local arts agencies, CYOs and master teaching artists to find a way to recognize expertise in the teaching-artist field, to train future community arts leaders to work with youth (and administration) in in-school programs and in juvenile-detention programs, programs for homeless youth, parks and recreation and other CYOs. My students are hungry to find ways to connect with youth in a variety of community settings as teachers, and as program administrators. The opportunities available to them in our small, primarily rural area are vastly different than those available to pre-service community arts professionals in large urban areas. Could we not look at future convenings as opportunities to build on previous efforts (such as CAPI)[10] and establish a “global, community arts university” that would allow us to share resources in our students, faculty and community partners to provide the best possible education and research environment possible?

This essay is part of the Community Arts Convening & Research Project, 2008, funded by a Nathan Cummings Foundation grant to the Maryland Institute College of Art.  The essay was reviewed and selected by the project's Editorial Board: Ron Bechet, Xavier University of Louisiana; Lori Hager, University of Oregon; Marina Gutierrez, Cooper Union; Ken Krafchek, Maryland Institute College of Art; Sonia Mañjon, California College of the Arts; Amalia Mesa-Bains, California State University Monterey Bay; Paul Teruel, Columbia College Chicago; and Stephani Woodson, Arizona State University.

Lori L. Hager, Ph.D. is assistant professor in the University of Oregon’s Arts and Administration Program, where she co-directs the master’s program in Community Arts and serves as associate director of Community Arts for the U.O. Center for Community Arts and Cultural Policy. Hager presents and conducts research in the area of community youth arts policies and practice, and is currently conducting research that examines professional development for teaching artists who work with youth in afterschool settings.

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Notes