State Funding Provides Daytime Gig for Musicians
By LAUREN HORWITCH
Wednesday, January 2, 2008 - 11:59 am

Thanks to a healthy boost in arts-education funding in California’s 2008-09 budget, narrowly passed by Governor Schwarzenegger and state lawmakers in August, teacher/artists may be in demand next year as never before.

In an attempt to resuscitate arts programs that had all but vanished from public schools, thanks in part to the national No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, the state has allocated $109 million dollars in grants — a $4 million increase from last year — that school districts can use to hire more teachers and implement new music, theater, dance and visual arts classes. The No Child Left Behind Act requires states to test for basic skills in certain grades in order for those states to receive federal funding for schools. (Ironically, the Legislature didn’t increase the embarrassing $5.8 million allocated for arts funding in the budget, underscoring California’s reputation as the state that gives the least amount of money to its artists and arts organizations.)

Now with money to spend, school administrators can search and hire myriad working artists in L.A. — everyone from street drummers to L.A. Opera’s mezzo-sopranos — through the L.A. County Arts Commission’s program, Arts for All, a 10-year initiative to help establish better arts education in all K–12 L.A. County public schools. The Arts for All Web site (www.laartsed.org) features a database of 225 arts programs helmed by teaching artists like Hansen, searchable by art, subject, grade level, program type and cultural origin. All of the programs adhere to the visual and performing arts standards for California Public Schools.
Arts for All’s Director of Arts Education and Community Development Ayanna Higgins says the initiative has already made a huge impact since it launched in 2002. “We’re providing technical assistance to about 28 districts throughout the county,” she says. “When we first began... there was only one school district, the LAUSD, that had an adopted policy and a long-range plan for arts education.”

Of course, school districts are glad to have more funds, but money has not been the major problem for educators struggling to fit the arts into school days that are already crammed with lessons preparing children for standardized tests.
“In our own local research, time was the number-one impediment. Not money, but time,” Higgins says. “But when you have the commitment, you not only find the money, but you find the time within the school day.”

Bradley Kesden, executive director of Rock the Classroom, a nonprofit elementary school program listed in Arts for All’s database, said he encountered the same problem when he and RHINO Entertainment founder Richard Foos and Chrysalis Records CEO Adlai Wertman began their nonprofit in 2003.
“[We] would go to a school and say, ‘Hey, here’s a free music program,’” says Kresde. “‘We’ll bring in the Beatles, bring in Mozart.’ They’d say, ‘Gee, we’d love to have it, but we can’t make time. If we fall behind a week in our literacy curriculum, we could be fired.’”

The answer for Kesden was to create classes that mix music with schools’ academic curricula. For example, Rock the Classroom artists will teach a unit on the Blues and its roots in slavery to a class studying the Civil War.

Singer Destani Wolf, who has recorded with the Pharcyde and the 88, performs with Bay Area Afro-Latin-hip-hop group AguaLibra and recently released her debut solo album, teaches fourth and fifth graders at three different schools through Rock the Classroom. She notes that the program allows her to keep a flexible schedule rarely found in other day jobs.

“That’s what the program wants, people who are out there doing it, making it happen,” she says. “It’s not just people who used to be out there performing. I think it comes across with the students because they can feel that they’re performing, too.”

Fifth-grade teacher Alberto Ramirez says just interacting with Wolf once a week has been a revelation for his 11-year-old students, most of whom are learning English as a second lanugage at Santa Monica Boulevard Community Charter School in East Hollywood.

“It goes beyond just music,” Ramirez says, turning to Wolf. “You don’t know this, but the kids have to write biographies of people that we admire. They’re writing biographies about you.”
“What the kids need to understand is that they can be this,” he says motioning to the now teary-eyed singer only 10 or so years older than Ramirez’s charges. “This is not just somebody they could never be.”