The Rossier School of Education at USC has long held a particular, esteemed position in academic life, producing educators, administrators, and policy thinkers. However, over the past few years, a much more restless vision has emerged from the larger university ecosystem. The campus, which is located in the University Park neighborhood of Los Angeles and is surrounded by the city’s peculiar mix of chaos and ambition, appears to have made the decision that creativity is not a supplement to serious academic work. It serves as the basis.

You can see how carefully this has been built by taking a stroll around the USC campus. Tucked away in the Leavey Library’s basement, the recently opened Digital Creative Lab was created with direct student input and isn’t the kind of institutional afterthought that colleges occasionally implement. It’s a signal. USC Arts is the same. The university’s broad interdisciplinary arts initiative now publicly states that its goal is to “inspire all students, no matter the field, to engage with the arts as a way of being and thinking.” It may not seem like much at first, but that final phrase—a way of being and thinking—is doing more work.

The unique combination of forces the university has been able to bring together is what makes USC’s strategy noteworthy. The Thornton School of Music, the Kaufman School of Dance, the School of Cinematic Arts, and the Roski School of Art and Design comprise the deep infrastructure. These are not ornamental additions to the resume of a research university. They create performers, directors, and composers who go on to influence real culture. According to most accounts, the faculty members are not scholars who speculate about creativity from a distance. They seem to genuinely incorporate their professional life experiences into their teaching.

Conversely, there is a willingness to try new things that don’t always feel comfortable but consistently yield intriguing outcomes. The then-radical notion that play and curiosity could be the catalyst for learning rather than an impediment to it served as the foundation for the PlayMaker School concept, which actually has some roots in USC’s own engineering department more than ten years ago. The questions posed by the educators who contributed to the development of that model are still urgent: shouldn’t schools be fostering deeper skills like real thinking, real creative problem-solving, and real resilience if a student can find any fact on a phone in twenty seconds? That question may be more pertinent now than it has ever been.

It’s simple to write off the celebrity appointments—like Solange and the Cactus Jack course—as marketing. And perhaps a portion of it is. A more intriguing interpretation, however, is that USC views creative professionals as legitimate intellectual partners rather than as objects to be showcased. It’s not a gimmick to think that a musician with Solange Knowles’s unique sensibility, whose work lies at the nexus of art, politics, and personal mythology, has something to teach upcoming educators about vision and expression. That is a philosophy of the curriculum.

Perhaps more than most universities, USC appears to recognize that students entering its doors in 2025 will be entering a world that demands true creative agility. Not only technical proficiency and knowledge, but also the ability to think in uncharted territory. There are no simple answers to the questions of whether this campus’s incredibly innovative curriculum can grow, withstand financial constraints, and continue to be truly experimental rather than merely labeled as such. However, the attempt itself is worth closely observing as it takes place against the expansive and complex backdrop of Los Angeles.

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MasonARC, the George Mason University Arts Research Center, is at its core. It is a multidisciplinary project that resulted from an improbable partnership between the university’s psychology department, the College of Visual and Performing Arts, and the College of Education and Human Development. Simply put, the objective is to investigate how children’s and adults’ cognitive and social development is impacted by creative engagement, such as theater, visual art, and imaginative play. Not in a gentle, qualitative manner. in a quantifiable, empirically supported, and scientific manner. That’s a more uncommon goal than it seems.

America’s arts education system has long relied heavily on faith. We teach kids to perform and draw because we have a gut feeling that it benefits them. Relatively little rigorous research has been done to support that belief in ways that meet behavioral science standards. MasonARC is essentially placing a wager that George Mason is the ideal location to close that gap and that the time has come to do so. It’s still unclear if that wager will be profitable.

Dr. Thalia R. Goldstein, a psychology professor who has spent years examining the precise impacts of theater education on children’s social and emotional development, is one of the researchers working on the most intriguing projects within this framework. Her work takes seriously the question of whether learning to pretend to be someone else, hold a character in your mind, and navigate a scene does anything quantifiable to a young person’s capacity for empathy, perspective-taking, and self-regulation. Anyone who has spent time with children acting out plays will understand this type of research intuitively, but it has seldom received the controlled investigation it merits. One gets the impression from reading Goldstein’s work that this field of study has been waiting a long time for someone to treat it seriously and with true scientific rigor.

This push is more credible at Mason than it might be at a smaller school because of the larger institutional context. The university has been actively developing its research infrastructure for a number of years. The College of Humanities and Social Sciences are now housed under one roof thanks to the new Horizon Hall, a $191 million project that completely changed the Fairfax campus. This physical proximity allows interdisciplinary work to take place rather than just be discussed at faculty meetings. Students from 47 different majors attend the Mason Innovation Exchange, which is housed inside Horizon Hall. At the same time, the university is expanding its Grand Challenge Initiative with a $15 million investment across six research areas, funding quantum computing research, and pursuing partnerships with the U.S. Air Force.

MasonARC is a university actively working toward something greater, which fits into that larger pattern.
The most telling signal is probably the NEA Research Lab designation. Mason is positioned as a federally recognized hub for precisely the type of evidence-based arts education research that has been absent from the national discourse, and the National Endowment for the Arts does not award that designation lightly. This may continue to be a specialized endeavor, significant in scholarly circles but unseen by the general public. In ten years, the research being conducted in Fairfax may have subtly changed the way that art is taught in American classrooms. That’s not a promise. However, it’s a real possibility, and it’s the kind of thing that usually goes unnoticed until the work is finished.

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The university was established in 1910 as the first public liberal arts school in the country for African American students. Over the past few years, it has taken steps that would seem ambitious for any university, much less one that has historically received inadequate funding from state and federal systems. The Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Research was established by NCCU in January of this year. In a matter of months, it announced a collaboration with OpenAI, secured $1 million from Google.org, and partnered with IBM, FICO, and Cisco. Later this year, the 5,000-square-foot facility that will serve as the institute’s permanent home is anticipated to open.

This is not the type of lineup that usually favors HBCUs, so it’s worth taking a moment to consider that list of partners. Though it’s difficult to determine how much of this partnership energy is strategic positioning rather than deep commitment, there’s a sense that the larger tech industry has finally begun to acknowledge that it spent decades largely ignoring historically Black institutions. In any case, NCCU appears committed to making use of its leverage.

The goals of the institute go well beyond campus. The plan, which was created in collaboration with OpenAI, calls for providing workshops and developer training for HBCUs across the country. If it succeeds in scaling, this could change how dozens of institutions approach AI education. PhD candidate in integrated biosciences Shantel Riddick explained how an OpenAI Academy workshop expanded her knowledge of AI workflows and challenged her perspective on integrity-driven research methods. It’s simple to write off such an individual impact as anecdotal. However, when it is spread throughout a network of historically Black universities, it becomes worthwhile to observe.

This was not an unexpected development. A little more than a year ago, NCCU opened a $38 million business school building that is outfitted with virtual reality technology, 3D printers, and AI tools. It looks like it belongs on the campus of a well-funded research university. The institute, which adds interdisciplinary courses and research tracks covering everything from cybersecurity, health sciences, assistive technologies, and AI and social equity, is the next level of that investment. The framing is intentional. These are not technical, abstract subjects. These are areas where the communities that NCCU has consistently served face actual, tangible difficulties.

In contrast, HBCUs are frequently discussed in the national media, typically in relation to funding shortages, enrollment pressure, or political threats to diversity initiatives. Presumably, NCCU is also handling all of that. However, Durham’s current situation appears to be less of an institution in a defensive crouch and more of one that has made the decision to move in the direction of something rather than just away from issues. At a recent event, Ronnie Chatterji, chief economist at OpenAI, told students that their freedom to experiment is their biggest advantage. That’s a message worth hearing anywhere, but at a university whose whole history has been an argument for being taken seriously, it resonates differently.

It’s not yet clear whether the institute will impact 200 students in its first two years, whether HBCU-wide programming will take off in the fall, or whether the partnerships will strengthen rather than wane after the press releases. It is evident that NCCU has determined that this is the ideal time to give it a shot. Getting this right is more important than the building because of the stakes for the students it serves and the institutions it hopes to bring along.

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It wasn’t an accident. It was the result of decades of quiet, unyielding, and frequently unappreciated work by a professor by the name of DeAnn Huinker, a woman who dedicated the majority of her career to fixing something that the majority of powerful people refused to acknowledge was flawed.
Huinker, a professor of math education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, had spent years witnessing the district’s pupils lag behind in math—not because the kids weren’t talented, but rather because the teachers weren’t given the resources they needed to truly comprehend what they were teaching. The fact that we send adults into classrooms to explain ideas they were never taught properly and then act perplexed when students don’t learn is an unsettling reality of American education. When Huinker realized this, she made the decision to take it seriously in the early 2000s.

She received a $20 million grant from the National Science Foundation in 2003, which at the time was the largest in the university’s history, to establish the Milwaukee Mathematics Partnership. Bringing university math experts into direct collaboration with classroom teachers, allowing teachers to participate in training design, creating feedback loops that truly work, and preventing district politics from consuming funds are all ideas that seem almost too good to be true. It turned out to be more significant than it sounds because Huinker was in charge of the funding herself. Districts with limited resources have a method of identifying conflicting emergencies.

The years that followed, roughly from 2004 to 2014, are now referred to by seasoned Milwaukee educators as the “golden years.” There are 120 math teacher leaders dispersed throughout the district’s schools. Test results increased. Proficiency increased. One school saw a 40 percentage point increase in math proficiency, despite the fact that 98% of its students came from low-income families. People began traveling from all over the nation to observe Milwaukee Public Schools. If this had persisted, the city’s current relationship with public education might be very different.

But it didn’t go on. The collaboration with the university ended in 2014 when a new superintendent took office with different priorities. Surprisingly, considering how long it had taken to create what was there, the end arrived quickly. In the words of one of the first teacher leaders, Beth Schefelker, who had spent years negotiating doubtful principals and uncooperative administrators: “They broke it.” Threading that needle required years of labor. Unraveling it took months.

Public schools are susceptible to a specific type of institutional amnesia. Within a few years, a program vanishes, the leadership shifts, and even the building’s remaining employees are unsure of what was lost and why. That’s what took place in Milwaukee. Currently, 41% of students in the state are proficient in math, while only 12% of students in the district are. One former colleague referred to Milwaukee’s math instruction as the “crown jewel,” but it has become silent.

When viewing this story from a distance, it’s remarkable how recognizable the pattern seems. A teacher or researcher fights bureaucratic indifference at every turn while creating something truly effective, frequently with little acknowledgment. It functions. Then years of meticulous work are abandoned because institutional priorities change, funding stops, or a new leader wants to put their own stamp on things. It’s not just Milwaukee. In American public education, it’s practically a tradition.

Huinker never gave up. After the partnership ended, she continued to work with district teachers, training the next generation of math teachers, finding small funding sources, and maintaining the methods in some areas of the school system. Open forums, content-focused learning, and teachers teaching teachers are all features of the current early childhood education sessions. Kayla Thuemler, a first-grade teacher who had always claimed to detest math, discovered that she was actually enjoying a fractions lesson with a number line. She asked her coworkers, half laughing, “Why am I enjoying myself right now?”

Even though it’s a straightforward question, it’s probably the best thing that can happen during a professional development session. It indicates that a genuine message was received. It’s still unclear if the district has the financial means or stable leadership to rebuild what was lost on a large scale. However, those who were present during the heyday of the building are still there, sharing their knowledge. That’s something, at least.

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For years, Project Zero principal investigator Edward Clapp has been advancing this claim. Clapp does not think that creativity is a personal quality. He is an advocate of participation, which holds that creativity exists in social settings rather than in people’s heads. There are important practical ramifications for school leadership. A principal who is trained to inquire about “which students are creative” will create a very different school culture than one who is trained to inquire about “how can every student participate in the development of creative ideas.” Harvard is purposefully and increasingly placing bets on the second type of principal.

Much of this thinking is rooted in Project Zero, the research center that has operated out of HGSE since 1967. In ways that weren’t entirely established ten years ago, its work on maker-centered learning, participatory creativity, and what it refers to as “Agency by Design” has been moving from theory into principal training. The Principals’ Center at HGSE has been conducting workshops that divert working administrators from the day-to-day grind of management, such as budgets, compliance, and personnel disputes, in favor of asking more fundamental questions like: What do you truly believe about how children learn, and is your school building meaningfully reflecting that belief?

It’s difficult to ignore how this framing differs from the conventional principal preparation model, which viewed school leadership as essentially a managerial role for the majority of the 20th century. You were in charge of the union, the parents, the building, and the schedule. The teachers’ job was to teach. The idea that a school leader’s primary role is to create an adult learning culture that makes better teaching not just possible but inevitable is what HGSE has been promoting and what its relatively new Ed.L.D. doctoral program was intended to formalize. not overseeing educators. cultivating them. There is a significant distinction.

This conflict between vision and practice is the foundation of the Ed.L.D. program, which was established in 2009 and is currently turning out graduates like Tamesha Webb, who finished her residency at Uniondale Union Free School District on Long Island. Webb’s capstone project, which focused on what she called “portrait of a graduate” frameworks, the competencies districts want students to possess by the time they graduate from high school, discovered something that, once stated, seems almost obvious: simply listing the skills you want students to acquire is insufficient. For those skills to be taught every day in real classrooms by real teachers who have been trained for that shift, you need a real, working plan.

Critical thinking. originality. cooperation. Every district website uses these words. It’s a different matter entirely whether they show up in the way a Tuesday afternoon third-period English class operates.
The AI context that is encroaching from all sides is what makes the present moment at HGSE feel intense. The school leadership landscape that the graduating class of 2026 will enter is one in which generative tools can perform a wide range of cognitive tasks that educators once thought were exclusively human. Participatory creativity frameworks are intended to foster the qualities that are still clearly indispensable, such as genuine curiosity, the capacity to form unexpected connections, and the willingness to sit with uncertainty and produce something original. This timing could be coincidental. The likelihood that it isn’t seems higher.

Observing all of this from the outside, it seems as though HGSE is addressing an issue that the majority of those involved in education policy continue to frame incorrectly. The topic of curriculum—art classes, music programs, and theater budgets—tends to dominate discussions about creativity in education. Harvard is teaching its principals that scheduling subjects is not the key. It’s whether the adult in charge of the building genuinely thinks that each student can make a fundamental contribution to the advancement of ideas. Everything is shaped by that belief—or lack thereof. It influences how teachers receive coaching, how classrooms are set up, and how students who don’t conform to the stereotype of “the creative kid” are viewed and handled. It is still uncommon to find a principal who truly believes in that and knows how to create systems that support it. Harvard is attempting to downplay that.

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For decades, the research on this topic has been in plain sight. In 1967, E. Paul Torrance documented what he called the “fourth-grade slump”—a quantifiable, steady decline in divergent thinking that occurs in children between the end of the third and the start of the fourth grade, usually between the ages of eight and eleven. It’s not a secret. It nearly perfectly corresponds to the point at which children enter what developmental theorists refer to as the concrete operational phase, when reasoning begins to feel more fulfilling than creativity. Instead of acting as a buffer against this change, the educational system tends to hasten it. Children are subtly taught to wait for permission before thinking in IRE classrooms, which follow the initiate, respond, evaluate pattern that most teachers were trained in. Many of them have completely given up on trying to be unique by fifth grade.

The cost of that may not have been sufficiently considered by anyone. structurally as well as for the individual kids. Generative AI will be able to write reports, summarize documents, and pass the majority of standardized tests by 2026. What it can’t do, at least not yet, is sit in a room full of perplexed people and come up with a truly original solution to a problem that no one has completely defined. Every year, we insist that the correct response is more important than an unexpected one, which erodes that skill. Tulsa, with its comparatively strong early childhood infrastructure and community-driven creative programming, has been quietly sitting on one side of the growing conflict in education policy between the old metrics and the new reality.

Researchers distinguish between “big C” and “little c” creativity in the scholarly literature on creative pedagogy. Big C is the stuff of history books: movements that transform culture, inventions that alter the world. Little C is more subdued. A nine-year-old comes up with a fresh explanation for why her response differs from the teacher’s. Despite not knowing what “lateral thinking” is, the student uses common household items to demonstrate it. Little C is not a lesser version of big C, according to the argument being made in classrooms that take this seriously. It is a prerequisite for it. Without supporting the other during its most vulnerable years, you cannot reach one.

The conversation about creative education in 2026 feels different from earlier iterations of the same argument because context is bearing down on it from all sides. According to data from a survey of sixteen to eighteen-year-olds, 93% of them said that creative education improved their mental health and well-being. Ten years ago, this figure would have been considered aspirational, but in light of the recent changes to adolescent mental health, it now seems almost urgent. Separately, studies have revealed that schools affected by the pandemic are still recovering in terms of teaching creative subjects in particular, with participation falling even as the need for creativity continues to grow. It’s difficult to miss the irony.

Here, teachers bear the majority of the responsibility, which is where the theory usually becomes convoluted. A teacher who doesn’t back down when a student’s response is unexpected rather than incorrect is necessary to create a classroom atmosphere that truly fosters little C creativity. According to research, a lot of educators have unintentionally picked up preconceived notions about creativity, such as the idea that it entails nonconformity, that it necessitates creating something tangible, and that it belongs in art classes rather than math classes. It is not difficult to modify these beliefs. But a policy memo is not enough to change them. Time, education, and an institutional culture that genuinely upholds its stated values are necessary.

As I watch all of this unfold, I get the impression that the kids in the most innovative classrooms, whether in Tulsa or anywhere else with the financial means to do so, are creating something that won’t appear on any standardized test for years, if at all. the capacity to maintain curiosity when a problem defies simple solutions. the ability to tolerate ambiguity, which is actually necessary for sound judgment. These aren’t “soft skills” in the derogatory sense. They are becoming more and more popular. Additionally, a third-grader may be constructing more of it than most people realize with a piece of cardboard and an unresolved dispute about story structure.

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For years, Milwaukee has been conducting one of the nation’s more genuinely fascinating experiments in arts education, but it hasn’t received nearly the national attention it merits. Working artists and arts organizations are being directly integrated into public schools and youth-serving spaces throughout the city through the Partnership for the Arts & Humanities, a program run by Milwaukee Recreation and supported by $1.7 million in funding from the Milwaukee Board of School Directors. not as invited speakers. Not as visitors to a one-day workshop. as inhabitants. financially supported to be there, creatively involved, and consistently present.

A significant portion of this has been driven by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, which has made deepening arts education for kids from birth to high school and artists-in-residence in community-based settings explicit among its arts and culture priorities. It’s possible that nobody outside of this ecosystem truly understands how well-coordinated it has become. This isn’t a single program with a single vision; rather, it’s a network of organizations operating in the same city with somewhat similar goals, each doing something slightly different.

One of the more well-known companies in the field, Arts @ Large, places local artist-educators in classrooms for extended periods of time. Throughout the academic year, their Artist in Residence Academy is divided into two six-week Saturday sessions, and their Community Center in Walker’s Point functions as a sort of creative hub, a physical location where young people in grades three through eight can come and create things under the supervision of professionals. The artists who work there are not volunteers working on the weekends. They are paid and given studio space. It may not seem important, but that distinction is crucial. A paid artist is a professional carrying out their duties. Children notice the difference.

A Truck Studio, which is exactly what it sounds like—a mobile art space that rolls into parks and playgrounds during the summer months and offers free programming to children as young as four—is an almost theatrical addition to Artists Working in Education’s approach. AWE’s artist-in-residence model operates out of Doerfler School during the academic year, where young people participate in programming for an average of three hours each visit. That number has a subtly radical quality. Most adults don’t dedicate three hours a week to any one creative endeavor.

Because it doesn’t rely on a single theory of what art education should accomplish, the larger Milwaukee model is worth observing. Certain programs, such as ArtWorks for Milwaukee, specifically focus on preparing students for the workforce through paid internships, portfolio building, and professional development workshops on financial literacy and resume writing. Others, such as the Healing Arts Programming at the Sojourner Family Peace Center, target children who have been traumatized and homeless by using artistic expression as a means of achieving something more elusive and difficult to quantify: a sense of agency. A section of Hope House is transformed into a youth art gallery by Hope Illustrated, which operates out of Hope House with artist Marina Lee. Giving children without stable homes a wall that is temporarily theirs is a thoughtful gesture that is difficult to ignore.

It seems as though Milwaukee has been quietly constructing this infrastructure for decades, adding pieces here and there, and that the current network is more developed than most cities have been able to. Professional touring artists participate in free programming at the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts. Second through fourth graders can take free ballet lessons from Milwaukee Ballet. Founded in 2015, Bembé Drum and Dance is a year-round public performance company that uses Afro-Latino percussion culture to foster intergenerational relationships. Black Arts MKE uses musical theater, drumming, and chorus to introduce young people to African American artistic traditions. Each of these is an independent organization with its own resources, personnel, and goals. However, when you consider the entire list of programs that the Partnership for the Arts & Humanities is currently funding, the overall impact begins to seem greater than the sum of its parts.

It’s still unclear if this model can withstand the political pressures that eventually erode funding for the arts in American cities. The funding cycle for 2025–2027 is now set, with awards given for both years. However, the application period won’t reopen until 2027, and the state of school-based arts programming has been inconsistent across the country. Milwaukee appears to have discovered, at least for the time being, that putting a working artist inside a school building for an extended length of time—not just a day or a week, but an entire academic year—can alter the way that learning can feel for children who might not otherwise experience it. The part worth watching is whether or not that lesson extends outside of the city.

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It’s difficult to ignore the numbers. Over 13 million students from 122 countries participated in Crayola Creativity Week in 2025. That is not an impact statistic disguised as a marketing figure. That equates to 13 million kids working on creative projects during scheduled time in classrooms, libraries, community centers, and homes under the direction of lesson plans created by actual teachers. With almost 90,000 learning sites, the 2026 edition is already anticipating increased participation. To put things in perspective, that’s more reach than the majority of federally funded arts programs accomplish in ten years.

The texture of its construction is what distinguishes this from a standard corporate education play. Teachers were not given a promotional toolkit and instructed to make it work. Teachers requested the program, according to Crayola; instead of treating art as a stand-alone elective that is eliminated when funds are tight, they wanted something that celebrated creativity across subjects. The end product is a week of activities that purposefully incorporate literacy, STEAM, and social-emotional learning. Each daily block is created to fit within thirty minutes, meaning it was created by someone who has actually stood in front of a class and realized that time is a teacher’s most valuable resource.

The Art in Education Grants are a smaller but potentially more significant part of the story. Previously known under a different name, they now offer up to $2,500 in cash plus $1,000 in Crayola products. These grants are not intended for wealthy suburban districts with adequate funding for arts programs. They are affordable, competitive, and reaching schools without a dedicated ceramics studio, an arts coordinator, or a line item in the budget for anything more than the necessities. Maybe $3,500 in cash and supplies doesn’t seem like much until you see what a dedicated elementary school teacher can accomplish with it in a room that didn’t have anything before.

Crayola’s YouGov-commissioned research adds something worthwhile. According to the study, which polled more than 700 kids between the ages of six and twelve, 92% of them said that being creative makes them feel more confident. By itself, that finding is not shocking. However, the data also revealed that when faced with difficulties, children turn to creative thinking before giving up or seeking assistance. This suggests something about what regular creative practice actually adds to a child’s internal toolkit. It develops a kind of self-assurance that doesn’t shout itself out loud but consistently comes through when things get tough.

There’s a feeling that Crayola recognizes something that the larger discourse on education policy consistently fails to grasp: that classrooms, not conference rooms, are the best venues for promoting creativity in education. An 81% increase in students’ enthusiasm for learning and an 85% teacher-reported improvement in literacy support are not results from a controlled study, and they come from a business that clearly has an interest in the results. Here, skepticism makes sense. However, 97% of teachers who were surveyed said they would like to take part again, which is the kind of percentage that usually indicates true utility rather than kindness toward a sponsor.

This is furthered by the Ambassador Schools program, which was introduced in 2026. It chooses schools that have made creativity a key component of their operations and highlights their narratives as examples rather than anomalies. In the context of education reform, it’s a modest gesture, but it also shows that this isn’t just a yearly event with favorable press coverage. Something more resilient appears to be emerging.
As all of this develops, it’s difficult to ignore the fact that a company that produces colored wax sticks is currently the most steadfast supporter of creativity in K–12 education. That reveals something about the business. It conveys something about everyone else as well.

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The first state in the nation to implement a long-term, federally recognized teacher apprenticeship program was Tennessee. Just that would be noteworthy. However, the more focused aspect of this story—the part that doesn’t fit neatly into a press release—focuses on what happens when individuals with years of experience in industrial craft, manufacturing, and fabrication begin to enter art classes. not as invited speakers. as educators.

A real-world issue served as the foundation for the University of Tennessee system’s Grow Your Own initiative. The traditional pipeline—college, certification, and classroom—was not producing enough people quickly enough or in the right places, and Tennessee’s teacher shortage isn’t going away on its own. In order to prevent working adults from quitting their jobs or accruing unmanageable debt, the state developed an earn-while-you-learn model. Instead of dragging people through a far-off university system and hoping they return, it covers tuition, offers mentorship, and keeps people connected to the communities they actually live in.

The particular knowledge these workers possess is what makes the creative arts aspect of this so intriguing. Most qualified art instructors just don’t have the same understanding of material, form, and tolerance as a machinist who has worked in metal fabrication for ten years. A woodworker understands joinery, grain direction, and the patience required to work with a medium that will not cooperate when you rush it. These are not artistic abilities. They are precisely what students need to see modeled by someone who takes them seriously in a well-designed arts classroom.

Tennessee Tech’s Appalachian Center for Craft has been offering educator workshops that focus on this relationship. The center, which is located on a campus surrounded by cedar-forested hills outside of Cookeville, offers immersive sessions where participants work with clay, glass, and metals as practitioners attempting to sharpen something real rather than as hobbyists. A teacher who has recently struggled with a new medium is thought to be more sympathetic than one who mastered it twenty years ago and has since forgotten what it was like to fail at it. There is a component to that. It’s possible that when the person in front of the class still has a stake in the outcome, arts education is most successful.

All of this is further complicated by the Tennessee Arts Academy, which has operated its Summer Institute through Middle Tennessee State University since 1986. Every year, about 325 educators come to Murfreesboro for a week of intense training that includes visual art, dance, theater, and music. The Academy estimates that participants directly impact over 200,000 students the following school year, demonstrating the truly remarkable reach of that one week. That adds up to something noteworthy over forty years. According to the institution’s own count, over 7,500 educators received training, impacting over three million students.

The overall effectiveness of the factory-to-classroom transition is still unknown. There is a significant difference between someone who is skilled at making things and someone who can captivate twenty-two eighth graders on a Tuesday afternoon in February, and career transitions are rarely as straightforward as program materials imply. No apprenticeship model can completely close that gap before someone enters a room by themselves with students for the first time.

However, there’s a sense that something worthwhile is emerging in these hills as Tennessee works through this and pulls on threads that most states haven’t even realized exist. Up to $18,000 in teacher training grants are available from the Tennessee Arts Commission to school districts and arts organizations that take their curriculum work seriously. It is not coincidental that the state places a strong emphasis on integrating creative arts with career and technical education. It reflects a true, if flawed, theory: those who are most familiar with materials, processes, and manufacturing are frequently the most qualified to instruct others in using their hands to think.
Tennessee is currently addressing the question of whether that theory holds true at scale.

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The majority of readers have probably scrolled past its name twelve times without pausing. And it’s most likely intentional.

It is more difficult to sum up what the Foundation has been constructing—through a combination of core grants, fellowship support, and strategic partnerships—than a press release would imply. It goes beyond simply providing funding for art. It’s supporting educators who teach art and who think that creativity is more closely related to the structural basis of human learning than a supplemental subject to be eliminated when funds are tight. Making that case to a school board is more difficult. A teaching fellow standing in a Bronx classroom at seven in the morning, wondering if any of this will matter, would find it easier to make this point.

A helpful window into what this type of work actually looks like on the ground is provided by the NYC Teaching Fellows program, which is run independently but in philosophically related areas by the city’s Department of Education. Due in part to a state class size requirement that is compelling the city to hire at a rate it hasn’t tried in decades, nearly a thousand participants trained this past summer, double the number from the previous year. Recent graduates, former case managers, former accountants, and career changers. People who decided they wanted to do something that felt important after taking stock of their lives. One of them, Kimba Williams, a 44-year-old who had worked in foster care for years, joined because he wanted to be a visible and encouraging presence for Black boys in schools. That is not a goal of policy. It’s a human one.

However, the summer wasn’t without its problems. Fellows accumulated credit card debt and borrowed from family members while the Education Department sent ambiguous assurances regarding “transitions to new payment structures.” Stipends of up to $4,500 were promised and then postponed. Williams used all of his credit cards. Another man, a former accountant, borrowed $6,500 from relatives and couldn’t tell them when he would be able to repay them. It’s the kind of circumstance that causes people to reevaluate everything—not because they don’t believe in the mission, but rather because the organization in charge of carrying it out was unable to deliver a check on time.

There is a sense that this specific failure highlights a significant difference between the administrative apparatus that is meant to support such programs and the idealism that drives them. A different organization, the New York Foundation for the Arts, has been working in parallel, providing support not to teachers but to artists and arts administrators whose work eventually finds its way into classrooms, curricula, and the cultural imaginations of students who might never know where the ideas originated. A few years ago, Austin Bunn, a professor at Cornell, was awarded a NYFA fellowship for screenwriting, which he described as recognition for a genre that is rarely honored—no Pulitzer, no Guggenheim, no literary awards for screenwriting. Small interventions, such as that fellowship, add up.

This experiment has been carried out in Indiana by the state’s Arts Commission, which has established a network of educators with training in creativity and arts integration. The Merwin Creative Teaching Fellows have been quietly bringing educators in Hawaii together around concepts of focus, creativity, and learning that are grounded in nature. These programs don’t speak loudly to one another. There isn’t a unified brand, a national summit, or a trending hashtag on any platform. It’s still unclear if this fragmentation keeps the work close to the ground, makes it more difficult to co-opt, and makes it more difficult to defund in a single budget cycle.

What is evident is that the participants in these programs—the fellows, the grantees, the career changers who borrowed money from their relatives to spend a summer learning how to run a classroom—believe something that the larger education debate frequently finds difficult to express: that teaching is a creative act and that treating it as a purely technical one results in teachers quitting, disengaged students, and schools that serve as holding environments rather than places where real things happen. For more than a century, the New York Foundation has placed bets on that conviction. With $55,000 grants and long-term commitments that most funders won’t touch, quietly and consistently.
It’s worth writing about. Even if, particularly if, no one has as of yet.

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