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Initiatives to coordinate schools, cultural institutions, community-based organizations, foundations, and/or government agencies to promote access to arts education in and outside of schools have recently developed. This study looks at the collaboration efforts of six urban communities: how they started and evolved, the kinds of organizations involved, conditions that helped and that hindered coordination, and strategies used.

The Wallace Foundation’s National Summer Learning Study, conducted by RAND and launched in 2011, offers the first assessment of district-run voluntary summer programs over the short and long run. This report, the second of five that will result from the study, looks at how summer programs affected student performance on math, reading, and social and emotional assessments in fall 2013.

Class actions, which are civil cases in which parties initiate a lawsuit on behalf of other plaintiffs not specifically named in the complaint, often make headlines and arouse policy debates. However, policymakers and the public know little about most class actions. This book presents the results of surveys of insurers and of state departments of insurance to learn more about class litigation against insurance companies.

During the past decade, arts advocates have relied on an instrumental approach to the benefits of the arts in arguing for support of the arts. This report evaluates these arguments and asserts that a new approach is needed. This new approach offers a more comprehensive view of how the arts create private and public value, underscores the importance of the artsÂ' intrinsic benefits, and links the creation of benefits to arts involvement.

Are older drivers posing increasing risk to the public? If so, what public policies might mitigate that risk? Older drivers (those 65 and older) are slightly likelier than drivers aged 25 to 64 to cause an accident, but drivers aged 15 to 24 are nearly three times likelier than older drivers to do so. The authors of this paper conclude that stricter licensing policies targeting older drivers would likely not improve traffic safety substantially.

Our discussion so far has focused exclusively on the instrumental benefits of involvement in the arts, but these are neither the only nor the most important benefits that the arts offer. What draws people to the arts is not the hope that the experience will make them smarter or more self-disciplined. Instead, it is the expectation that encountering a work of art can be a rewarding experience, one that offers them pleasure and emotional stimulation and meaning. To discuss these intrinsic effects, we need to abandon the more objective view of the social scientist and focus on the personal, subjective

We previously indicated that a wide range of benefits can be created through involvement in the arts, but that many of them, particularly those most often cited by arts advocates, can only be created through a process of sustained involvement in the arts. One of our objectives was to identify the dynamics behind sustained involvement. In pursuing this objective, we examined three issues: How do people initially become involved with the arts? How does the nature of the experience change with greater involvement (changes in taste, greater competence, more engagement)? Why might levels of involvement change over time? Building upon

Supporters of the instrumental argument for the arts base their case on findings from the growing body of empirical evidence on the benefits of the arts. These studies initially focused on the economic benefits of the arts, but they now cover a much wider range of instrumental benefits, including cognitive, attitudinal and behavioral, and health benefits at the individual level, and social and economic benefits at the community level. As a first step in making our argument for a different approach to the benefits of the arts, we review here the evidence used to support the instrumental argument. Despite some

As underscored in the last chapter, research on the instrumental benefits of the arts fails to specify the mechanisms by which arts participation creates specific benefits. It also fails to specify the circumstances in which benefits accrue, the populations most likely to benefit in such circumstances, and the level of arts involvement needed to generate benefits. To address these issues, we reviewed literature from a range of disciplines to learn what is known about how individuals and communities change and to explore the relevance of this knowledge to arts participation and its claimed effects. Readers interested in a detailed summary

The arts in America expanded dramatically from the 1960s through the 1980s, but they have faced difficult times since then. They have had to navigate a new landscape, one in which demand for the arts has shifted in response to leisure time becoming more fragmented, the population growing more diverse, and competition from a burgeoning leisure industry intensifying. They have also had to deal with many changes—in distribution patterns stemming from emerging technologies; in an organizational ecology that is blurring the distinctions among the commercial, nonprofit, and volunteer sectors; in public and private funding patterns; and, most recently, a