Good morning.
“And the beat goes on……………”

The Arts Education PreConference

Sunday was a glorious day in downtown Chicago. Blue skies, sunshine. What an absolutely spectacular city.

The Arts Ed PreConference centered on one of the more difficult challenges of this area – assessment – of student learning and by implication, teaching models and methodologies. The day was split into two parts with the morning focus on the conceptual and theoretical aspects if Basic Assessment 101 – a quick and concise tutorial on the central elements of assessment by Professor Janmes Pelligrino of the University of Illinois at Chicago, who advised the atttendees to:

Be assessment ‘literate’ and focus on how the arts can be part of the dialogue of quality assessment in support of teaching and learning; and To ask: “What is the nature if competence in the arts on learning progressions.”

Basically “assessment” refers to a process of gathering information for purposes of making judgments about the current state of affairs of something. In education, it helps teachers, administrators, parents, the public and students to infer what students know about a subject and how well they know it. That information is useful on the classroom, district, and state / nation levels to assist learning, measure individual achievement and evaluate programs. There are different assessments for different needs and purposes, and those differing approaches must be coordinated, integrated, and synchronized to reach reasonable conclusions.

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Good morning.

“And the beat goes on…………………….”

Funders in Flux:

I’m off to the Grantmakers in the Arts Conference in Chicago. Funders — government, corporate and foundation — from all over the country, gathering to make some sense of the times in which we find ourselves. I will be blogging from the conference and posting entries Monday – Wednesday of next week.

“Funders” is a broad category that we conveniently use to denote any and all of those entities that offer grants to arts organizations, and there is a tendency to lump them all together into one monolithic whole, with the implication that they are all similarly structured, that their protocols and processes are interchangeable, that their priorities are always aligned, and that their thinking is more alike than dissimilar. Such conclusions are, of course, fraught with peril, for funders are as diverse and different as are arts organizations themselves. They come from vastly different perspectives and legacies, have wholly different starting points based on widely divergent sets of assumptions, are governed by very disparate sets of rules, have the full range of priorities in what they hope to accomplish in the allocation of their funds based on their board guidelines and histories, must address the significantly varied circumstances of local situations and politics, and look at the role of funding in totally different ways. In short, sometimes the truth is that the only thing they have in common is the label “funder”.

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Former Director California Arts Council, President California Assembly of Local Arts Agencies, and Executive Director of LINES Ballet. Author, consultant, blogger and public speaker. Barry published his work Hardball Lobbying for Nonprofits in 2007 (Macmillan & Company, New York). He conducted a two phase study with reports released in 2007 and 2009 for the Hewlett Foundation on the issue of generational management & succession in the arts. He authored several other studies including the California Arts Advocacy Handbook, the Local Arts Agency Funding Study for the Aspen Institute and the City Arts Agency Tool Kit. He is author of the most widely read blog in the nonprofit arts field – BARRY’S BLOG blog.westaf.org.

A founding member and Vice-Chair of California Arts Advocates and the United Statewide Community Arts Association, he was also been a board member of the National Association of State Arts Agencies (NASAA), the California Alliance for Arts Educators (CAAE), California CultureNet, the California State Summer School for the Arts, the California Travel Industry Association (CalTIA), and a member of the State Superintendent’s Task Force on Arts Education. Barry is currently on the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Architectural Foundation.

Read a full bio here.