Survey Says
Dunkirk NY – For those of you interested in weather phenomena, yes, I do live right in the heart of the upstate NY snow belt that got walloped over Thursday and Friday. How bad was it? Bad enough for Paul Goodloe of the Weather Channel to be reporting from right down in the harbor. There were some impressive totals in the area, but right here on the Lake Erie shoreline there was only about 8 inches or so. The 40-60MPH winds did push it around a lot, though. My snowblower did not start. I have little luck with machinery.
Of course, Mother Nature can’t whip up a storm anything the likes of what the theatrical blogosphere can when it wants to. Isaac Butler tweeted a statistic about the educational background of playwrights, and there was a lot of commentary from all quarters about that stat (you can read the comments on his blog and follow an assorted variety of links from there). The statistic came on the heels of the forum on diversity held by Arena Stage last week, as well as an NEA Cultural Workforce Forum. All these issues seem to have stirred much heat.
And there was a livecast on Dec. 10th from the NEA concerning its recent release of its latest survey, the 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. Ian Moss at Createquity has the remnants of the tweetcast on his blog. This survey has been around for some time, since 1982 I believe, but few people ever paid attention to them. Until now. I’ve read all of them and actually wrote about some of them in earlier posts. I am sure this latest one will get more attention than any of the other surveys ever received.
I was at first tempted to write a post analyzing the data in the 2008 report, but the more I read the data and the more I thought about what to say on the matter, the more I realized that an analysis of the data is, in many ways, utterly besides the point. Why? Because the data is so stark and clear, there is little left to analyze. We are now, for the first time that I can ever recall in terms of thinking about the state of American theatre, drowning in data. It should now be obvious to anyone who can read a bar graph that the arts, and theatre in particular, have little place in American culture. Theatre is now clearly an activity for a white, predominantly female, upper-middle-class, baby boomer, highly educated demographic. Do we really, truly care about that?
I have become something of an assessment “expert” on my campus over the past two years. For those not in the know, the notion of assessment is something that, over the past ten years, has hit many college campuses hard. For many years, universities tended to follow their own whims in terms of whether or not to make changes in their curricula. Some professor somewhere got a bright idea of some sort, tinkered with some changes, and created a change. Few changes initiated in this manner ever had data attached to them.
But since the advent of No Child Left Behind, assessment has become a mantra, because it is tied to federal dollars. At the university level, this new reality asserts itself through the regional accreditation process. This process evaulates a university’s various operations to determine if it is, in fact, doing what it says it is doing. If a university does not pass its accreditation process, it cannot be eligible for federal dollars, and students who want to attend the university are not eligible for federal tuition assistance. The most important principle of this process is that change in any aspect of the university’s processes – whether it be curricular, procedural, or financial – must be accompanied by data demonstrating that the change is warranted. In terms of the curriculum, student learning must be constantly assessed, and data must be kept demonstrating that educational goals and learning objectives are being achieved.
Closing The Loop
When the data indicates that learning goals are not being achieved, change must be instituted. This is commonly called “closing the loop.” It means that you actually have to act on the data you have obtained. And here is where it gets tricky, because in some instances it is difficult to determine if there is an honest attempt to close the loop based on the data, or if the changes made simply move the target so as to make the data fit the current model.
There has been much resistance to this process at most college campuses, not because people do not like to do assessment, but because the process involved a large amount of paperwork as far as documenting the data and the changes that the data prompts. In addition, most academics fear that the data collected will not be favorable, will require them to change (which means more work), and so will resist the process. The hardest part about closing the loop is facing the reality of the data. Some people faced with these decisions simply move the target by changing the learning outcomes they choose to measure. Others change the rubric to gain better results. Others change one or two cosmetic aspects of the assessment. Few departments ever go through a wholesale change in their approach based on the data as a whole.
Relating this back to theatre, we now possess a body of pretty solid data indicating that theatre as an art form is suffering in many areas. It is economically weak in that it has difficulty supporting itself (as witnessed by the many financial issues affecting theatres), it is culturally insignificant (as the 2008 SPPA clearly reveals), it is homogenous (again, the SPPA), and by and large its audience is aging away. That’s what the data says.
How will we “close the loop?” Because theatre has no centralized authority to dictate to it what it should do and what standards it should uphold, closing the loop will be extraordinarily difficult. Every theatre blogger, every theatre artist, and every theatre institution will have its own vision of what changes should be made. Some will advocate no change, some will advocate a few changes designed to re-model and patch up the current system, some will advocate radical changes. There will be no consensus on this issue, because there will be no one to mandate consensus.
And that, I think, is both good and bad. The danger is we will talk the matter to death and never change any action. I’ve nothing against good robust discussion, but discussion must ultimately lead to action. Who will take the first steps toward action remains to be seen. It’s good because, if we can break the monolith of “professional” theatre, the data offers us the opportunity to develop a multitude of options we can develop and assess to see what the American public will participate in.
In a speech in 1957 Mao Zedong, the founder of the Communist Chinese state, had this to say:
Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting progress in the arts and the sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in our land.
Now of course Mao then executed those whose “flowers” were contrary to the idea of socialist rule, but the principle behind the quote is sound: we should encourage many ideas from many sources. We should be encouraging theatre to blossom in all sorts of forms in all sorts of places. I am really not all that interested in tearing down any particular theatrical institution as such. What I would support, however, is a breaking down of the monolithic attitude that permeates the world of theatre today. That monolithic attitude to me can be summed up in the following way: we must do what we can to break the myth that quality theatre can only be achieved by perpetuating the largely urban-centric model of regional and Broadway theatre. That’s the deepest riverbed that must be changed. All the data that has been pouring out for the past month or so clearly indicates that this model is dying, and does not serve American society as a whole. The vast majority of Americans do not buy into it. And the most essential question for theatre artists of all stripes to ask about this is – do we really, truly care? -twl
