Round 4: Federal Funding of Arts Education Research

Here's an email I received yesterday from Dr. John Eastman, the newly-confirmed Director of the Department of Education's Institute for Education Science (IES). I've added a couple of embedded URLs, but not edited it in any other way.

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From: Easton, John [mailto:John.Easton@ed.gov]
Sent: Monday, June 22, 2009 1:54 PM
To: jim@igetitmusic.com
Subject:

Dear Mr. Plamondon,

Thank you for your interest in education research and your belief in the importance of arts education. As you may know, we recently released NAEP assessment results for music and visual arts for grades 4 and 8. I attended the release and was heartened by the turnout of so many people who believe in the importance for arts education in our schools today.

As the Director of IES, it is my responsibility to propose priorities for IES to the National Board for Education Sciences, which has the authority to approve or reject those priorities. The current priorities were approved by the Board on September 6, 2005. Over the next year, as I expand my understanding of the needs of schools in our country, I will develop new priorities for IES. The proposed priorities will be available for public comment through the Federal Register and the IES website. After consideration of those comments, the priorities will be proposed to the Board for approval. I will be eager to hear your input, along with many others.

Please note that currently there are provisions for proposed research that is not directly linked to our priorities -- through our “unsolicited proposals” program. See http://ies.ed.gov/funding/unsolicited.asp

Finally, as you may know, I just started in this position on June 1, having come from Chicago where I worked with schools in a variety of research related positions. I made several visits to CPS’s Plamondon school this past year. I wonder if there is a connection?

Sincerely,

John Q. Easton
Director
Institute of Education Sciences