UB study shows disparities in local K-12 arts education

Changes in education policy, including an increased emphasis on standardized testing and assessment, have resulted in less time and fewer resources being devoted to visual arts, creating new demands on Western New York’s visual arts teachers, according to a groundbreaking collaborative study between the UB Department of Sociology and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery’s Innovation Lab.

The results of the Education Discovery Project (EDP) survey suggest considerable variation across public and private schools, as well as inequities among urban, suburban and rural schools.

Previous national research shows how cuts in public school arts funding have been felt most acutely by specific groups, including African-American children who were 49 percent less likely to have received arts education in 2008 than in 1982. Hispanic children were 40 percent less likely.

The EDP sought to identify what was specific to Western New York and serve as a critical first step toward addressing the gaps it revealed in the local arts education experience.

“This project itself, to understand the landscape of arts education in Western New York, is so important to providing our young people with an appreciation of the beauty and the challenge of the arts,” says Bruce Pitman, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

The UB team brought its expertise to design the EDP survey that offers a telling picture of how art teachers and, by extension, their students experience arts education in classrooms across the eight counties of Western New York.

“We wanted the best possible partner for this particular challenge and we found it at UB, and specifically in the Department of Sociology in the College of Arts and Sciences,” says Janne Siren, director of the Albright-Knox. “Without their help we could not have done this work.”

“As sociologists we understand how important arts and culture are to creativity and effective performance in the 21st century,” says Robert Adelman, UB associate professor of sociology who led a team of graduate students on the project with Shelly Kimelberg, an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Sociology. “We are thrilled to partner with the Albright-Knox on this important project because we know this internationally renowned institution has so much to contribute to young people’s lives in Western New York.”

The EDP provides new insights into teacher’s perception of the arts, classroom conditions, budgets and teachers’ workloads.

Siren says instinct for years has told arts leaders that something tragic was happening because of cuts in arts education, but now the EDP provides the scientific research findings to support that hunch.

“We now have the data that show a real problem is out there,” he says. “The EDP is our way of saying the Albright-Knox is putting its full weight and international reputation behind the state of arts education in our area.”

Key findings from the EDP include:

• 50 percent of the respondents who work in traditional public schools believe that K-12 arts education in Western New York will get worse in the future, compared with 32 percent of teachers who work in private or charter schools.
• 31 percent of respondents in traditional public schools teach more the 400 students, while only about 2 percent of their peers in other school types are responsible for that many students.
• 40 percent of teachers in private or charter schools teach fewer than 100 students across all of their art classes, compared with 15 percent of teachers in traditional public schools.
• 67 percent of respondents said they experienced “substantial budget cuts” that affected their ability to teach at some point in their career.
• 59 percent of respondents are forced to change lesson plans occasionally due to limited resources.
• 80 percent of those with classes larger than 25 students have a budget of $2,000 or less.

“All of these findings make for a complex teaching environment in Western New York,” Adelman says.