AGENCIES’ COMPROMISE KEEPS EVERYONE HAPPY

“We’re really quite delighted that we’ve been able to achieve this compromise,” Frank Hodsoll, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, commented in Washington last week.

“I don’t feel anyone has been compromised, “ said Jonathan Katz, executive director of the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies. “Reasonable people got together. With the changes in the process, everybody can find a happy home.”

“I think the new guidelines provide a home for all interested parties,” noted Joe Prince, director of the endowment’s arts-in-education program.

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New Guidelines on Arts Funding Accommodate Education Initiative and Preserve Residency Programs

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Six months after the matter of arts education erupted in a storm of controversy at the assembly’s convention in Seattle, after months of negotiation, polling individual states and trading views on rewritten sets of guidelines, the endowment and the advocacy group for the state arts agencies have finally resolved their differences.

They did it the best possible way: Both sides got what they wanted.

The agreement was ratified recently at a regular meeting of the National Council on the Arts, the endowment’s advisory body on policy, programs and procedures. Hodsoll also chairs the 26-member presidentially appointed council.

The issue: How to move toward making the arts in education a basic course of study, much the way reading and arithmetic are, and not sacrifice long-standing state artist residency programs, whereby artists spend a specified chunk of time in schools--or in hospitals, prisons and other institutional settings.

The solution was to provide several funding categories to accommodate Hodsoll’s goals and the residency programs. Indeed, under Draft 12, the previous set of guidelines that caused all the fuss in Seattle, artist residencies that were not in schools from kindergarten through the 12th grade were to be eliminated.

At the same time state arts agency representatives worried that all artist-in-residence programs would fall by the wayside. Although the NEA generally contributed on a 4 1/2-1 matching basis, a change in national direction could influence state policies. While Hodsoll and his deputies kept trying to defuse matters by claiming the endowment was not anti-artists and anti-residencies, his approach certainly heralded a major shift.

Until the agreement, the endowment chairman appeared to take a single-minded approach. He wanted the state arts agencies to work toward “a serious, systematic and sequential” course of arts education, designed to make high school graduates “literate” in the arts, and having “some measure of critical judgment or taste.”

Hodsoll said he intended to use his office as “a bully pulpit” to bring that about. Moreover, funding would eventually be based on arts agencies’ efforts to achieve that goal.

As Hodsoll kept saying: “Artist residencies can supplement but never substitute for regular, continuing high-quality arts education, guided and directed by professionally qualified teachers.”

Now with the ratification of the new “Arts in Education Guidelines” for fiscal years 1987 and 1988 beginning Oct. 1, the endowment has laid out several methods to achieve funding under its newly-named arts-in-education--previously called the artists- in-education--program.

“The arts-in-education program, through its three categories of funding,” states the guidelines’ introduction, “provides a broad and flexible approach with an overall goal of advancing the arts as part of basic education. It is a partnership program that is planned, administered and financed through cooperative efforts of the arts endowment, state arts and education agencies, local communities. . . .”

As Hodsoll noted before leaving for Montauk, N.Y., where he was to speak at an international conference dealing with assisting American artists, the endowment’s controversial Draft No. 12 guidelines advocated “one (funding) program in which all states begin planning for the arts as a basic in schools.” The revised program, he said, “gives benefits to those who do that, but doesn’t require it.”

The key to the new guidelines, the Assembly of State Arts Agencies director said, is its flexibility.

“When the comments from the state agencies came in,” noted Katz, “there was unanimity on the need for responding to the new initiative with some flexibility. The name change reflects the endowment’s intent not to use this grant category as a category to support artists directly, but as a category to support arts education directly.”

Ironically for all this activity and effort, the pot of money for the overall arts education program is relatively tiny. In the current fiscal year, before the mandatory 4.3% cut under the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings budget-balancing law, the program was allocated $5.3 million--about 3% of the endowment’s $165.7 million budget. In the proposed new Reagan Administration budget for fiscal 1987 beginning Oct. 1, the program would receive $4.8 million.

The new arts-in-education categories of funding, as listed by the guidelines, are:

--State Arts in Education Grants, formerly the artists residency grants category. Under the new guidelines, grants “may support projects which, for educational purposes, place practicing artists of professional excellence in a wide variety of settings. . . . Grant funds may also support projects which emphasize the broader role of arts in education.”

--Arts in Schools Basic Education Grants. This essentially is the Hodsoll category--”a whole new category,” says the endowment chairman, “which attempts to do what we were proposing.” Or as the guidelines state, the category is designed to “encourage plans and projects which promote the arts in schools as a basic through the development and establishment of specific objectives and competencies . . . for student accomplishment in the arts; curricula and resources aimed at sequential achievement of these objectives . . . and methods for evaluating student progress.”

--Special Projects. These do not include funding artist residencies, the guidelines state. Under this category the endowment will fund such programs as “curriculum model development” for making the arts a basic, teacher training, and development of audio and visual teaching aids.

Clearly the second category has the chairman’s and therefore the endowment’s preference. In fiscal 1987, the endowment will award up to $200,000 or up to $20,000 per state in planning grants based on competitive review. The endowment estimates about five to 10 states will receive planning grants.

Meanwhile at a cocktail reception Thursday at Los Angeles’ Music Center in his honor, Robert Reid, director of the California Arts Council, said the agency would apply for a planning grant.

For fiscal 1988, Hodsoll said he would like to earmark up to $1.5 million--$500,000 from special projects, $500,000 from the state arts or residency grants, and $500,000 from elsewhere in the endowment. “I’m just seeing my way here,” Hodsoll said.

“Now we have both (residencies and making the arts an educational basic),” the endowment chairman concluded. “But we also moved them (the states) along a bit.”