Arts for All School Arts Survey: Measuring Quality, Access and Equity in Arts Education

As part of its goal to make quality, sequential arts education a reality in all public K-12 classrooms in Los Angeles County, Arts for All connects school districts with effective tools and resources to improve arts learning. The Arts for All School Arts Survey: Measuring Quality, Access and Equity in Arts Education is the most recent of these tools to be introduced. It was developed to measure access to and quality of arts instruction at the school site level as well as to develop a system for collecting and reporting the data. The results are useful to schools and school districts to find out what is working, what's not working, and to point the way toward improvement. But the results can also provide a picture of what's happening across a region. The following summary describes how the survey was built and its first test in five school districts encompassing 100 schools. As a result of this test, some refinements will be made in the survey, but the survey's strength and utility have been proven. Los Angeles County now has a means of objectively measuring quality and access to arts education and making the results easily accessible

Strategies for Recruitment and Retention of Secondary Teachers in Central U.S. Rural Schools

This study sought to identify differences in strategies used for teacher recruitment and retention by successful and non-successful rural high schools. According to data from the 2003-2004 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), small towns and rural areas in the central U.S. states did have relatively more difficuly in recruiting teachers than did larger communities. However, when the successful and unsuccessful school districts were compared on the strategies and benefits included in the SASS, the only difference was with signing bonuses, which were offered significantly more often in the unsuccessful group than the successful group. The researchers also interviewed seven principals identified as successful by their state agencies. Their responses revealed minimal reliance on the strategies addressed in the SASS. however, there was some alignment between many of the strategies they did use and the three approaches investigated in previous research: grow-your-own, using federal funding opportunities, and using targeted incentives