The Center for Arts Education

The Center for Arts Education (CAE) is a nonprofit organization in New York City, New York, in the United States. It promotes arts education in the public schools and between 1996 and 2008 spent nearly $40 million. It claimed to have affected over 500 schools, 490,000 students, 21,000 teachers and 75,000 parents and to have supported more than 400 cultural organizations.

The Center for Arts Education was founded in 1996 to restore and sustain arts education in New York City’s public schools after two decades of system-wide cutbacks in funding for arts programs. The fiscal budget crisis of the 1970s immediately impacted the City’s commitment to arts education. Budget cuts resulted in teacher layoffs and the gradual abandonment of the arts as essential to academic development. For the next twenty years, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers experienced a K-12 education without instruction in arts education, aside from schools with private funding.

In the early 1990s, the New York City Board of Education, New York City’s cultural institutions, and private-sector foundations grew increasingly alarmed by the changes. By 1991, two-thirds of New York City schools had no licensed art or music teachers.

In 1993 Walter Annenberg announced the single largest gift ever made to American public education, the Annenberg Challenge, a half-billion dollar, five-year challenge grant designed to support efforts at school reform throughout the country. In a collaboration, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and Board of Education envisioned a five-year plan, The Annenberg Arts and Education Initiative, to initiate arts education reform. This plan, created under the guidance of consulting firm Artsvision, proposed a model for institutionalizing arts education in NYC public schools.

In March 1996, The Annenberg Foundation approved the proposal and The Center for Arts Education was created to administer the initiative, serve as a liaison and oversee the distribution of funding. The Annenberg plan established CAE as an independent agency that was administratively distinct from the BOE. The initiative began with a two-to-one $12 million grant from the Annenberg Foundation, to be matched by a $12 million investment each from the public and private sectors, for a total $36 million.

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