Arts Education in America: What the declines mean for arts participation

In June 2009, the Cultural Policy Center and NORC were awarded two of five competitive research grants from the National Endowment for the Arts to examine and interpret data from the 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts and previous SPPA surveys (1982, 1992, 2002). Nick Rabkin headed a project investigating the relationship among arts learning (both past and current), overall educational attainment, and all forms of arts participation. Vince Welch, a senior statistician at NORC, headed the project on "Race, Ethnicity, and Arts Participation." The projects resulted in monographs that speak to a broad group of scholars and cultural practitioners. Rabkin's monograph, co-authored with E.C. Hedberg and published in February 2011, received attention in the Los Angeles Times and was cited in a report by the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities titled "Reinvesting in Arts Education.