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JUNE 2004

NYC Blueprint for the Arts
by Scott Noppe-Brandon

It gives me great pleasure to witness the impending “birth” of the NYC Department of Education’s new Blueprint for Teaching and Learning in the Arts. We all owe a debt of gratitude to DOE’s Sharon Dunn, Senior Instructional Manager for Arts Education, Nancy Shankman, Director of Music, and Barbara Gurr, Director of Visual Arts; Tom Cabaniss, Director of Education at the New York Philharmonic; and Tom Cahill, Executive Director of Studio In A School, for the excellent leadership that brought the Blueprint to a successful completion. The purpose of the document is to support an arts plan for all NYC schools in which arts specialists are key players, the school community is actively involved, and the unique collaboration between the schools and the New York City cultural community is used to its full potential. By recognizing that potential, the Department of Education honors this relationship as part of a new educational paradigm, one based on a public/private partnership.

Why do I think of this as a new paradigm? It certainly could be claimed that the schools have always worked in partnership with NYC arts organizations. In fact, much of the education in the arts presented to NYC students since the mid-70s has been provided by the many NYC arts organizations. The difference is that the arts community only served as vendors to the NYC schools. There was no systemic structure that brought all of us together. This time, the DOE and the arts community worked together: the creation of the Blueprint is a result of a true partnership. My voice was heard both as a reviewer and consultant to the development of this document. In the Blueprint we finally have a document that requires, hopefully mandates, that we relegate the vendor-based relationship to the past.

This does of course raise the question of what an authentic partnership between the DOE and the arts community should be like, both in design and implementation. Today, there are over 240 organizations in New York City presenting arts-based instruction to students, at every grade level, in the city’s schools. Yet the only citywide quality control mechanism that exists is the contractual process, which once again, treats the arts organizations as vendors, not partners. No formal process exists that speaks to creating a partnership, such as represented by the Blueprint, between the DOE and the approved organizations.

To be fair, it would be extremely difficult, politically and educationally, for the DOE to establish a process through which certain organizations become partners and certain organizations remain as vendors. In the face of that difficulty, I hold the Blueprint to the promise of using the NYC arts community to its full potential: long-term partnerships must be established between arts organizations and the DOE that will represent a systemic change in their relationship. Only in partnership can we work successfully toward ensuring that the arts are valued as a vital component of the overall educational goals of every school, for every child.#

Scott Noppe-Brandon is the Executive Director of the Lincoln Center Institute.

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