Turnaround Arts: California

Four overarching goals guide our work with each partner school, known as our Priorities for Improvement Through the Arts (PITA):

Development of a shared vision and collaborative leadership in and through the arts. We work with our school partners to develop and adopt a school-wide strategic arts plan that outlines their goals for bringing their shared vision to life.

Improved teacher and leadership capacity to integrate the arts into classroom instruction, providing multiple, culturally and linguistically responsive entry points for learning.

Improved school culture and climate that embraces an equity and growth mindset, supports risk-taking, collaboration and empathy, and honors student voices and agency.

Increased student and family engagement as participants, advocates, volunteers, and equitable partners in learning.

Our program model leverages partnerships to catalyze change. We act as the strategic thought partner to each of our schools, offering financial, strategic planning, and implementation support to principals, teachers and other school administrators. Our work is school-driven, culturally responsive, and focused on long-term sustainable transformation. Rather than prescriptive, it is responsive, and the goals we build with each partner school are unique. In order to achieve our Priorities for Improvement Through the Arts (PITA) goals, we support our schools in the following ways:
Coaching: Each of our establishing partner schools receive regular coaching throughout the school year, via our Regional Coach partners who provide hands-on technical assistance, and support sustainable implementation of arts-based strategies across the school’s faculty. Wealso provide one-on-one coaching for principals at each school during the school year to align the arts with existing priorities and initiatives at their schools and the district, as well as identify opportunities for school leaders to amplify their arts advocacy.

Professional Development: TACA brings our network of school and community arts partners together throughout the year for retreats and trainings to support planning, peer-learning, and accountability, as well as provide professional development on special topics. These gatherings provide time and space for schools to work on their annual Strategic Arts Plans, to exchange best practices, to learn new arts-integration strategies, and introduce community art partners to the network.

Grants: Each year, TACA grants year one through three establishing school with funds to invest in community engagement and professional development. Through professional development grants, we support teachers across subjects to identify learning opportunities that will support them with engaging their students in deeper and more meaningful ways within the classroom. With the community engagement grants, schools are able to partner with local and regional arts organizations that we help vet, to offer expertise that aligns with their Strategic Arts Plans, in culturally relevant arts disciplines such as poetry, hip hop, and musical theatre.

In-Kind Support: TACA provides schools with licensing rights for their annual school musicals, and during their first year partner schools receive musical instruments of their choice, along with needed art supplies.

Increased Visibility: Partnering with high-profile artists, we bring positive attention to schools using the arts to fuel growth and student success. These visits are not only exciting for students, they also help raise the visibility of the schools and increase the community’s interest in investing in the schools that need it most.

In the years since our founding as an organization we have evolved the program model to better meet the needs of our school partners. To supplement the direct and grant support we provide, in 2016 we launched the Regional Coach Program and in 2017 we launched the Principal Coach Program. The Regional Coach program utilizes partnerships with community orgs that have expertise in arts integration, including P.S. ARTS, Collaborations: Teachers and Artists (CoTA), Create Humboldt, and Sunset Cultural Center, to provide in-depth and hands-on technical assistance to our establishing school partners throughout the yea. The Principal Coach program is supported by coach Dr. Akida Kissane Long who before joining TACA, served 25 years in the LA Unified School District as a teacher, curriculum specialist and central office administrator and principal. Dr. Long provides one-on-one coaching and supports our annual retreat where principals at establishing schools are supported to be effective advocates for equity, strong instructional leaders through the arts, and collaborative problem-solvers.

Our innovative approach relies on eight key pillars. These are the levers we employ to ensure comprehensive and sustainable transformations. The pillars include a focus on: 1) principal leadership, 2) the strategic use of arts specialists, 3) non-arts classroom teachers integrating arts into core content, 4) the use of teaching artists and community organizations, 5) the engagement of the district, parents, and community, 6) strategic arts planning, 7) professional development, and 8) improvements to the school environment. Through work in each of these areas, we ensure the arts are well supported, resourced, and sustainable within the schools.

Our organization was co-founded by arts-education advocate Malissa Shriver who currently serves as a board member and plays an ongoing role in cultivating strategic relationships for the organization and continues to be an external spokesperson for the organization. Since joining as Executive Director in 2019, Tiffany Siart has been working to diversify the organization’s funding base, bringing in and cultivating new relationships with foundations and individual donors. Tiffany also successfully saw the organization through a strategic planning process. Her leadership has been critical in helping the organization navigate the challenges of the pandemic, including swift programmatic adaptations in partnership with Program Director Barbara Palley and financial scenario planning to ensure our sustainability. Director of Program and Strategy, Barbara Palley, has been with the organization since 2017 and in that time has overseen the organization's growth from 10 school partnerships to 24. Barbara also launched the Principal Coaching program and has strengthened our program evaluation processes and feedback loops, allowing us to be more responsive to the unique needs of our school communities.

In addition to the continued refinement and development of our programming to respond to the needs of our school partners as mentioned in previous sections, we have also seen several positive growth trends in our partner schools since they began with the Turnaround Arts Program:

English Language Arts proficiency has increased at 78% of our LA partner schools, by as much as 102%
Math proficiency has increased at 78% of our LA partner schools, by as much as 167%
Suspension and/or school absence rates have decreased at 67% of our LA partner schools

According to a survey of teachers at our partner schools across the state:

90% of respondents agree or strongly agree that their principal is an advocate for the arts, and targets the use of the arts to address school priorities.
90% of respondents agree or strongly agree that their school’s atmosphere and culture celebrates creativity and artistic achievement.
88.5% of respondents agree or strongly agree that their school regularly engages families through the arts.
86% of respondents agree or strongly agree that their school uses a shared leadership approach to the arts.
82% of respondents agree or strongly agree that their support and training for teachers in the arts is ongoing and embedded at our school

We are also proud that two of our partner schools including one in Compton, received the 2018-2019 Exemplary Arts Award from the California Department of Education. State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tony Thurmond shared, "We know that access to arts and STEAM is an important part of closing the achievement gap, and these Exemplary Arts schools put the 'A' in 'STEAM.' Congratulations to these 13 schools for supporting arts and STEAM education, which prepares students to be leaders in the creative economy."

Turnaround Arts: CA completed a strategic planning process in July 2020. After many in-depth and thoughtful conversations and stakeholder research, including work with our strategic planning consultants, the board and staff of Turnaround Arts: California have identified three strategic priorities to guide our work over the next three years (2020-2023) - refining our program model, expanding our evaluation practices, and building a foundation for long term financial sustainability. Threading throughout these three priorities is our focus on developing stronger equity and anti-racist practices to ensure our organization is best prepared to respond to and support the communities with which we work.