The impetus for Arts for All's Leadership Fellows Program was a brainstorming session in July 2008 on how best to move the Arts for Allcollaborative toward its goal of restoring arts education into the core curriculum for each of Los Angeles County's 1.6 million public K-12 students.

Session participants repeatedly circled back to Arts for All's need to engage school district leaders in order to be successful. The goal of the program, the first of its kind in the country, was to increase the capacity of school district leadership to advance quality, access and equity of arts education within their respective school districts.

This report focuses on the work and results of the leadership fellows program in the 2009-2010 school year.

The arts embody one of the oldest forms of knowledge and knowing and action research provides opportunities to experiment with art as an integral part of the creation and dissemination of knowledge.

This report is a personal account of a teacher with 16 years' experience as an elementary classroom teacher, who found that young children are drawn to an arts-based approach of inquiry, one that is grounded in arts practices. He describes many incidences inhis classroom where there have been many instances of students using methods to enhance their learning experiences that were similar to those found in artsbased learning and arts-based educational research settings.

Every day, American young people spend more than four hours watching television, DVDs or videos; one hour using a computer; and 49 minutes playing video games. In many cases, youths are engaged in two or more of these activities at the same time. Little wonder this era has become known as the "digital age," and Americans born after 1980 have become known as "digital natives."

Yet it might be equally accurate to refer to the current era as a visual age. Although many digital tools rely on sound and text, most disseminate images, and youths who spend a third of their waking hours in front of a screen are saturated with images. The ubiquity of images in young people's lives has transformed the way they learn and perceive the world. And their use of images has created a demand for new skills to enable all young people to make sense of the visual world.

The predominance of visual images and demand for new abilities has also transformed the workplace. In the "flat" world that the journalist Thomas L. Friedman describes in his influential book, The World Is Flat, aesthetics and creativity are just as important as technical knowledge in the new economy. "The secret sauce comes from our ability to integrate art, music, and literature with the hard sciences," Friedman says. "That's what produces an iPod Revolution or a Google. Integration is the new specialty. That is what we need to prepare our children to be doing."

These transformations place a premium on the types of abilities visual arts educators develop: visual-spatial abilities, reflection, and experimentation. They suggest that schools and their community partners need to strengthen visual arts education as a content area and to integrate the arts into other areas of learning to ensure that all young people become knowledgeable and skillful in the visual age.

Yet in a short-sighted effort to help make children competitive in a global economy, many schools have reduced visual arts instruction in favor of a greater emphasis on mathematics and science. These actions in some cases have resulted from accountability policies that measure school performance on a narrow set of abilities

This report is the result of a year-long -- and ongoing -- conversation within NAEA that included discussions in board meetings, conversations with Association members, and a three-day summit of leading educators from across the nation (held in August 2008 in Aspen, Colorado). This document examines evidence about the capacities that art education develops in students and what it can prepare them to do. It explores what high-quality instruction looks like and takes a look at some environments in schools and in other settings in which excellent visual arts instruction takes place. The report concludes with recommendations for federal policy makers that will strengthen visual arts education to help ensure that all young people can thrive in the visual age.

Contains board chair's message, farewell letter from founding president, mission statement, summary of grantee perception reports and comparative performance analysis, program information, financial overview, grants list, and lists of directors and staff.

Contains board chair's message, executive director's message, program information, grant guidelines, grants list, and lists of board members and staff. 2010 financial statements available at separate link.

Provides an overview of an initiative to expand access to integrated arts education with partnership building, advocacy, and strategic communications activities. Discusses Ford's theory of change, challenges, lessons learned, and case summaries.

As a follow-up on the 2007 report Involving Youth in Non Profit Arts Organization, offers findings and recommendations from arts organization administrators of various ages on bridging generational gaps and recruiting and retaining younger leaders.