Arts Education Partnership

The Arts Education Partnership provides information and communication about current and emerging arts education policies, issues, and activities at the national, state, and local levels.  Our major projects and activities include: commissioning and disseminating research about critical arts and education issues; maintaining and linking databases on state-level policies for arts education; and convening national forums around significant themes and issues in the field.  Our partners include federal arts and education agencies, state departments of education, state arts agencies, national arts and education organizations, and arts and education collaboratives at the state and local level.

Mission of the Arts Education Partnership
The mission of the Arts Education Partnership is to demonstrate and promote the essential role of the arts in enabling every student to succeed in school, life and work in the diverse and global economies and societies of the 21st century.

Focus of the Arts Education Partnership
The primary focus of the Partnership is on the student, in assisting every student to reach high levels of achievement and competence in the arts and in the other subjects and skills essential to their success in school, life and work.

Ford Arts Education Initiative

The Arts Education Partnership works with the Ford Foundation and nine community-based collaboratives around the nation in the Ford Foundation Integrating The Arts And Education Reform (Arts Ed) Initiative. The Foundation created the Initiative in 2004 to achieve two interrelated goals:

• Significantly improve outcomes and opportunities for large numbers of urban public school students by fostering integrated arts education practices across school systems
• Help build the public understanding that arts education is, and must be, an essential part of any high quality public school education

AEP’s primary roles include the provision of site-specific and initiative-wide technical assistance and the coordination of the overall initiative. AEP, the Ford Foundation, and the other partner organizations – Douglas Gould and Company and OMG Center for Collaborative Learning – constitute the Ford Arts Ed Management Team.