Empire State Partnerships Project

EMPIRE STATE PARTNERSHIPS PROJECT FIVE YEAR EVALUATION SUMMARY REPORT CCT REPORTS NOVEMBER 2002 EMPIRE STATE PARTNERSHIPS PROJECT FIVE YEAR EVALUATION SUMMARY REPORT PREPARED BY TERRY BAKER BRONWYN BEVAN NOGA ADMON PEGGY CLEMENTS ANSLEY ERICKSON SARAH ADAMS EDUCATION DEVELOPMENT CENTER, INC. 96 Morton Street, 7th floor New York New York 10014 tel 212] 807.4200 fax 212] 633.8804 tty 212] 807.4284 web www.edc.org/CCT Copyright © 2004 by Education Development Center Inc. This report was written and produced by EDC’s Center for Children and Technology All rights reserved. No part of this report may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, except where permitted by law. To inquire about permission, write to: ATTN: REPRINTS Center for Children and Technology 96 Morton Street, 7th Floor New York, NY 10017 Or email: cct_reprints@edc.org I TABLE OF CONTENTS BACKGROUND AND HISTORY . .2 EVALUATION METHODOLOGY . .9 ROLES AND LEADERSHIP . .10 PROJECT GOALS . .17 SITE EVALUATIONS . .20 BEST PRACTICES . .24 PARTNERSHIP . .26 ARTS-BASED CURRICULUM . .29 ASSESSMENT . .36 STANDARDS . .40 STUDENT IMPACT . .42 SCHOOL CHANGE . .44 TECHNOLOGY INTEGRATION . .51 PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT . .56 SUMMER SEMINAR . .67 IMPLICATIONS . .95 1 n 1996, the Empire State Partnership program (ESP) was initiated as a collaboration between the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) and the New York State Education Department (SED). This report chronicles the program from its origins through its initial five-year implementation phase. The report concludes with a synthesis of Iimpacts derived from the evaluation reports of the participating sites and from Education Development Center/Center for Children and Technology’s EDC/CCT evaluations, interviews, observations, and survey data. By the year 2001, the Empire State Partnership (ESP) Initiative had funded 56 cultural organization-based partnerships involving 84 separate cultural organizations, and reaching a total of 113 schools, 2,200 teachers, and more than 34,000 students. The program continues to fund cultural organizations and their school partners to develop innova- tive arts-integrated curricula at multiple grade levels. The arts curriculum is explicitly tied to core curricular areas—such as English literacy or mathematics—and is intended to support the development of arts skills and understanding, while at the same time reinforcing and deepening learning in non-arts domains. The work is not only (1) geared to the NYS Learning Standards, but is also (2) interdisciplinary in nature, (3) involves the development of new ways of assessing student learning, and (4) develops from partnership and collaboration among a variety of people and insti- tutions. This report reflects growth and change that resulted from the ESP program from 1996 to 2001. It is based on the data evaluators collected from surveys, inventories, interviews, and observations. The data were mostly self-reported by participants, and anecdotal, but they were confirmed, when possible, by multiple methods and by multiple member checks. Some of the points in this report come from reviews of local site evaluation reports, and some from EDC/CCT’s data collections. The focus in this report is on the development of the program, its organizational and program impacts, and thematic development, especially in the Summer Seminar Sections. The chronological time frame changes with topics so that the account circles back in time as new topics or themes are discussed. EDC/CCT returned to early 1996 data and traced through to 2000-01data. The program showed progress over the years, as one would hope and expect it would. The reader will find that there were many bumps along the way, especially early on with the early years showing uneven implementation and development, a need for greater clarity, greater need for support at the site level, and mixed implementation and impact results. In the later years, 1999-2000 and 2000-2001, the more positive responses of participants and the generation of positive impact data indicated the successful development of a large and important school/cultural organization partnership. 2 BACKGROUND AND HISTORY OF THE INITIATIVE In 1985 the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) and the New York State Education Department (SED) instituted a formal partnership through NYSCA’s Arts in Education program. The initiative was guided by an Interagency Committee comprising staff from both agencies. Over the years, several written documents were drafted that recorded the changes, adjustments, and addi- tions made to the initiative. In the early 90’s, budget cuts and staff reductions began to take their toll on the initiative. The Interagency Committee meetings became less and less well attended, and soon stopped altogether. In 1995, NYSCA commissioned an outside evaluator to assess the Arts in Education initiative, specifically how the partnership with SED was functioning. The results of this assessment were summarized by Hollis Headrick, then director of the NYSCA Arts in Education program, as revealing that despite ten years of working toward a common goal, there was still an us/them mentality at the table; in fact, the evaluator reported, representatives from the agencies considered themselves in “separate camps.” In 1996, the New York State Regents issued the State Learning Standards in seven disciplines, including the arts. In response to the Standards, the SED Office of Cultural Education (OCE) inter- nally circulated the “Report of the Working Group on Cultural Resources for Excellence in Education.” This report built on earlier findings in “The New Compact for Learning” to describe strategies for increasing the use of cultural resources and materials in formal education. Collaboration was the key, the report indicated; both collaboration among different offices at SED - notably the Office of Elementary, Middle, Secondary and Continuing Education (EMSC) and the office of Higher Education (OHE) - and among cultural organizations and schools. Staff from NYSCA, SED, and the New York State Alliance for Arts Education began to informally discuss and design possible new collaborations, taking into account these developments and others occurring in the cultural organizations domain. At about the same time, there was a change in leadership at SED and NYSCA. The new SED Commissioner, Richard Mills, was experienced in and committed to improving student learning in and through the arts. Newly appointed NYSCA Chairman, Earle Mack, was committed to substan- tially increasing the role of NYSCA in the formal K-12 education realm. In the spring of 1996, the Interagency Committee was reconvened to begin to formalize discussions about how the agencies could rejuvenate their partnership, and what they could do in the field to reflect new understanding and thinking around the Learning Standards. Staff from the two agencies and the Alliance attended the first meeting. Meanwhile, within the arts community, there was a perceived need to do something to support the momentum being developed through SED and the Learning Standards. In late April 1996, NYSCA, the Alliance, and SED staff invited approximately 50 arts education advocates from across the state to attend the New York State Arts Education Summit. At this meeting, Commissioner Mills spoke to the attendees for about an hour, expressing his strong interest in working with them to 3 achieve change in and through arts education. The Summit had the effect of directly signaling the Commissioner’s support of arts education, and directly challenging the arts education field to think about what it could do to help student achievement of the Learning Standards through the arts. As Headrick put it, “The learning standards created an intersection point for all of us con- cerned with improving learning experiences and outcomes for K-12 students.” There was a shared understanding that to create change, more than one organization, more than one point of view, more than one agenda, needed to be leveraged. Mills requested that OCE work with Headrick to develop a plan for a new collaborative project. Carole Huxley, the Deputy Commissioner of OCE, assigned Mary Ellen Munley, and James Kadamus, the Deputy Commissioner of EMSC, assigned Mary Daley to work with Headrick. Elissa Kane, of the NYS Alliance for Arts Education, joined this working group to begin to put together a plan for the project. All four had been crucial in helping the conversation and vision develop along lines that Mills and Mack found intersected with their own visions and institutional priorities. The leadership for the project developed a common vision, and put tremendous drive behind it, bolstered by the history of success of SED and NYSCA’s collaboration, and the vision and commitment of the agencies’ staffs. In August 1996, NYSCA Chairman Mack secured $260,000 through the State Legislative budget process to fund the startup of what is now called the Empire State Partnerships Project. Theories that supported this initiative included the concept that students learn through exercising many of their “multiple intelligences” - that is that, some students learn kinesthetically, while others may be better visual learners, or aural learners. Learning through the arts allows different learners to approach the subject matter in different ways, thus providing avenues into the content for more students. Another theory that underpinned the work was that allowing students

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