But two very different city laws set up a struggle over the right of the art to occupy public space. “Are these murals art?” then becomes another question: How is public space really public?

In 2002, the Los Angeles ordinance Comprehensive Sign Code banned murals on private property.

Why? In 1986, in response to the profusion of murals on unwanted public space, the city decided it had to respond. “We created this definition of mural signs in order to actually codify this ‘anything goes’ approach,” says Tanner Blackman, the Planning Director in City Councilman Jose Huizar’s 14th District office, who is now working with city officials to revise the 2002 ordinance. The city, he recalls, “felt they needed regulation and definition, but the point was to let art happen.”

Tanner explains that according to the 1986 code, “murals with more than three percent text, whether graffiti-style or manuscript, were classified as signs, while theoretically, giant paintings of commercial logos could be considered a mural.”

As a result, says Blackman, advertisers started suing Los Angeles and other cities that had an art exemption in their sign codes. He adds: “If we were going to allow unlimited art in a city, we were going to have to allow unlimited space for advertising in our city.” So, to avoid a potential legal Armageddon, mural art on private property was officially banned. A decade later, muralists are still angry, and some are fighting back.

SCENES FROM A BATTLEGROUND

Boyle Heights native Raul Gonzalez	Raul Gonzalez “From Chicano studies, we learned that the culture was destroyed through a system of colonization and a system of global white supremacy. Everything that was burned on purpose we’re going to bring it back on purpose and we’re going to make them pay for it.” This payback is revolutionary, but also perfectly legal. After taking art and business classes at East Los Angeles College, Gonzalez decided to bid on public contracts that allow him to paint murals over gang graffiti. The city of Los Angeles awarded his business a three-year contract, partially due to his strategic underbidding.
Raul Gonzalez’ “Art Heals” mural features Toypurina, a 24 year old shaman who fought the San Gabriel Mission in 1785 to preserve her native culture	Raul Gonzalez “We’re not doing it just for the money, we’re doing it because we want to bring the truth,” Gonzalez says in an emphatic, rapid-fire rhythm. “Boyle Heights, L.A. is pretty much Little Mexico. What makes us see each other as a common ground? That’s how we came up with Mictlan Murals. “Mictlan” means the place of rest and transformation, and it also means the ultimate common ground.”
	Raul Gonzalez Gonzalez’ distrust of authority was heightened by the creation of his 2008 “Art Heals” mural in Ramona Gardens, L.A.’s oldest housing projects which opened in 1941. ‘We finished it in three weeks, and we got the hell out of there because the cops kept on coming and stopping and trying to intimidate us.” [The police deny this.] That trouble reminded Gonzalez of the true purpose for his art. “The cops don’t live here” he says. “The only people that matter to me are the people who live here because they have to see this [mural] every day.”
Ramona Gardens native George Sarabia addresses the murder that inspired the community to request the “Art Heals” mural	George Sarabia As a fixture in the Ramona Gardens community for forty years, gang interventionist George Sarabia has a different perspective. Sarabia considers the image featuring a clash between two men wearing an ancient headdress and a military helmet as a symbol of divisive confrontation. “There was a young man that was killed in police custody [Mauricio Cornejo in 2007] and the community wanted to memorialize him and that was a way for them to heal and to remember. But what it does, I think, is it creates a tone for future generations to be reminded of the hatred between the police and the community and that leads to violence between one and other.”
Hollenbeck officers Jack Tuck and Jose Padilla consider murals with cultural symbols as an acceptable form of art		Officer Jack Tuck Ironically, a Hollenbeck graffiti enforcement officer who works in the Boyle Heights area has a more positive view of the “Art Heals” mural. In addition to contentious imagery, this painting includes images of Ramona Gardens residents that mirror the history of their ancestors. “Personally I think it’s alright” says officer Jack Tuck. “It’s been there for years already. It’s not really anything. Most of that is Mexican culture.”
Hollenbeck police officer Jose Padilla believe the “Ghost of the Barrio” mural could have been a gang corner	Officer Jose Padilla Two murals from the 1970s are a part of a landscape of public art that Hollenbeck police officers in Boyle Heights perceive as gang messages. Wayne Healy’s “Ghosts of the Barrio” has been celebrated by the Los Angeles Mural Assessment and Conservation Project, but to community relations officer Jose Padilla, the mural’s meaning is what’s important.“ That’s the way gang members dressed back in that time. Had I seen that when I was growing up around there, I would say this is a gang corner.” Officer Padilla explains what complicates his association with gang activity. “The way they got away with it is they had a dynasty: the revolutionary, the Spaniard, so now its art. It’s no longer just depicting the gang life.”
	George Sarabia For Sarabia, “Ghosts of the Barrio” reflects conflict of a different kind. “When I look at this mural, I see culture, I see the warrior, the rebels who are fighting for our cause and I see the guys hanging out like they would on any day. People might not like the culture or might not understand it, but it’s the culture that I grew up in and a lot of other people did too.”
Hazard Grande mural currently stands behind a water pipe construction area in Ramona Gardens	Officer Jose Padilla An even more obvious example of potential gang imagery is Ramona Gardens’ Hazard Grande. Though this neighborhood is situated near Hazard Park, it’s also known for Big Hazard, a gang rooted in Ramona Gardens for several generations. Padilla is well aware of the gang connection, but he is not alarmed by this work. “It’s not glorifying the gang. It’s not saying that ‘we’re better than anyone else’.” The painting of a bell-bottomed couple standing in front of rainbows is far from what most would imagine as gang art.
	George Sarabia Despite the police tension and gang activity that was prevalent during Ramona Gardens’ first murals, Sarabia believes that before the private mural ban, the predominantly Chicano residents had the safety of being surrounded by their Mexican heritage. He witnessed cultural symbols in the community “get erased little by little” as police crackdowns on perceived gang murals led to an increased ‘pinkwashed’ landscape of artless, aging buildings. “It [the murals] was a way to create peace throughout the Boyle Heights community” says Sarabia. Those involved could have been both the problem and the solution. The history of murals in Ramona Gardens is as complicated as the fight to restore it. “A lot of the murals that you see, they’re connected to the gang because they were the ones to help the artist put them up and design them.”

In this short documentary that was produced for USC Impact we visit some of the interesting happenings taking place in Californian art museums.

But Thomas has a dream: to grow vegetables in planters down on Main Street, where the people of Skid Row would have easy access. So far his attempts have been prevented.

(Video produced by Helena Liikanen-Renger. Photos in the video by LA CAN)

The 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, which aimed to create accountability and ways to measure the quality of all public education, included the arts as a part of core curricula. However,  testing standards applied to other areas such as reading and math didn’t easily translate to subjects like visual arts or music. Arts educators have almost universally said the result is that support for the arts in school budgets has dropped off in favor of funding areas that could be measured, which directly affect school performance evaluations.

President Barack Obama’s widely-praised Race to the Top program promised billions of dollars to school districts that agreed to evaluate all teachers based on student achievement data. The program encouraged school districts to also find ways of assessing difficult-to-measurable subjects such as arts and physical education.

In the beginning of 2012 National Endowment for the Arts publishes a research called “Improving the Assessment of Student Learning in the Arts”, the first attempt to assess the practices of measuring the quality of arts learning.  The paper found 30 high-quality assessment tools used in the country and also recommended the creation of a national database with quality arts assessment tools.

But Steven Seidel, faculty director of the Harvard Arts in Education Program and the head of Qualities of Quality Research  suggests that measuring quality through test results is unsatisfactory.  “Judging the quality of any education is quite challenging”, Seidel says. “Quality is a kind of moving target.”

So what is good art education? Is it when students produce excellent artworks? Or when they learn art appreciation? Or a combination of both? Given the subjective nature of art and the difficulty of meaningful standardized measures of an education experience, why do we even need to assess quality? Can’t we just agree that exposure to art is good for us and move on?

Lynn Waldorf, the principal researcher of the “Arts for All School Survey done in Los Angeles, and the executive director of Griffin Center for Inspired Instruction goes to the bottom line. If you want to make sure the arts are taught in schools, you have to have a way to measure how they’re being taught. Otherwise, other subjects get priority. “We are seeing some evidence that if you have a strategic plan in place to support the arts education, those programs are not being cut as severely as those who don’t have a strategic plan in the arts.”

Additional reporting by Ricky O’Bannon

(CHART) 

Five Difficulties Assessing Quality

• SUBJECTIVITY: Arts education is value-based. So how do you define meaningful objective results? (source: interview, Lynn Waldorf)
• TEACHER EVALUATIONS: How do you develop a standardized measure for teachers in the arts? (source: interview, Lynn Waldorf)
• ONE SIZE DOESN’T FIT ALL: How do you define a measure of arts education quality that can be standardized across school systems? (source: interview, Lynn Waldorf)
• WHAT DO YOU WANT TO MEASURE?: Do you measure skills or understanding? For example, testing knowledge of art terminology is not actually assessing the arts, but rather how well students memorize a specialized language. (source: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/06/standardized_tests_for_the_arts_is_that_a_good_idea_.html)
• THE QUALITY ARGUMENT: Assessment can distort arts education to focus on test success. (source: The Qualities of Quality Report)

Difficult as it is to define a quality arts education experience, many are trying.

Five Attempts to Measure Quality (US)

• PROGRAM EVALUATION: LA Arts for All School Arts Survey used 16 indicators to assess the school arts education programs in five school districts. (source: http://www.lacountyarts.org/pubfiles/SummaryQAE_SurveyResults_2011.pdf)
• STANDARDIZED TESTS:  In the NEA’s National Assessment of Educational Progress in the Arts (2008) students were required to do paper-and-pencil tasks and performance tasks. (source: http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/main2008/2009488.asp) South Carolina Arts Assessment Program (SCAAP): Students complete multiple-choice tests and must complete performance assignments. (source: https://scaap.ed.sc.edu)

• CLASSROOM PERFORMANCE: In the State of Washington teachers evaluate students throughout the school year.(source: http://www.k12.wa.us/Assessment/OSPI-DevelopedAssessments.aspx)
• STUDENTS PORTFOLIOS:  The students of International Baccalaureate art program are required to complete a portfolio in two years that is judged by an outside evaluator. IB program is a study program that provides internationally accepted qualification for universities all over the world. IB programs are offered in over 140 schools, USA included. (source: http://www.ibo.org)
• ARTS TEACHER EVALUATION: The arts teachers in Memphis are testing a new method where a teacher collects a digital portfolio of his students’ works and videos showing student progress. The portfolio is evaluated by a blind faculty peer review. http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2012/sep/17/memphis-arts-teachers-pilot-method-to-measure/

Five Attempts to Measure Quality (International)

• CANADA: Assessments based on knowledge and understanding, use of critical and creative thinking skills, communication, and application – the use of knowledge and skills to make connections. (sources: http://nccas.wikispaces.com/file/view/College%20Board%20International%20Standards%20Report.pdfhttp://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum/elementary/arts18b09curr.pdf)
• SINGAPORE: Assessment is tied to specific arts projects. Criteria includes presentation, projects, work in progress, portfolios and written tests. Assessment is divided into categories: Art making (60-80%) and Art Discussion (20-40%) (source: http://nccas.wikispaces.com/file/view/College%20Board%20International%20Standards%20Report.pdf )
• NEW ZEALAND: Precise assessment process for education,. Assesment tools and guidelines are available online. Evene examplars of children’s artwork are displayed for teachers to use in order qualify work. (source: http://assessment.tki.org.nz/
• MALTA:  Students (lower secondary) who are studying arts and design are assessed only in two areas: painting and drawing. Students are evaluated on 1) work produced on a theme which is given to them 2) what they are capable of reproducing from an object which they are asked to observe. (source: http://eacea.ec.europa.eu/education/eurydice/documents/thematic_reports/113EN.pdf)
• IRELAND and UK : Students (lower secondary) who choose optional art subjects have to take a national assessment test. It consists of a ‘paper and pencil’ examination as well as producing a personal project . There is also a practical test in music. (source: http://eacea.ec.europa.eu/education/eurydice/documents/thematic_reports/113EN.pdf )

5 More Ways To Measure Arts Education

• CROWDSOURCED TEACHING: Teachers share their study plans with other teachers. (http://betterlesson.com)
• CROWDSOURCED GRADING: Students’ performance graded through crowdsourcing. (http://hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/how-crowdsource-grading)
• COMPUTERIZED EVALUATION IN MUSIC: Knowledge of music tested with the help of computer programs. (http://www.smartmusic.com/SmartMusic/Features/Assessment.aspx)
• COMPUTERIZED EVALUATION IN ARTS (?): Fine arts are yet to be evaluated by computers, but maybe that time will come too? (http://ikono.org/2012/09/can-computers-understand-art/)
• ONLINE TEACHER EVALUATIONS: Students evaluate their professors / teachers on a open online website. (http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/toplists/topLists.jsp)