Alameda County Office of Education

The Alameda County Office of Education provides, promotes, and supports leadership and service to ensure the success of every child, in every school, every day. The Office of Education serves as a resource and oversight agency to eighteen districts and district charters and their 227,000 public school students. It also directly operates juvenile court schools, community schools, and alternative education programs. The agency’s arts education programming invests in teacher practice, and arts education planning and program development at the district level. This grant to the Alameda County Office of Education advances the Performing Arts Program’s Youth strategy through the Policy and Advocacy substrategy.

The Alameda County Office of Education’s Alliance for Arts Learning Leadership was launched in 1999 to demonstrate the measurable benefits of arts learning and to establish the arts at the core of the highest quality public education for every child in the county’s public schools. The Alliance’s ongoing work centers on two strategies: developing a professional development system for culturally responsive, arts-integrated teaching, and supporting policy changes that advance the essential role of instruction and assessment in and through the arts in high-quality public education. Renewed support for the Alliance would enable Alameda County to sustain and enhance its thriving community-building programs—the Teacher Action Research Institute and Arts Integration Specialist Program—and to deepen the work in its demonstration schools to facilitate the adoption of arts-integrated instruction and performance assessment throughout the Bay Area.

The Alliance for Arts Learning Leadership is a countywide network of teachers, school administrators, parents, businesses, artists, arts organizations, universities, and community members, for the purpose of advancing quality arts learning for all children. Created by the Alameda County Office of Education (ACOE) in 1999, the Alliance works to address the huge gap in arts education resources in the county’s public schools. The top priority for the Alliance is building a leadership structure that supports sustainable systemic change in the public K-12 education system. This grant will support a countywide strategic planning process to create a three-year plan focused on moving the Alliance forward in its goals, identifying a collective impact outcome to do so, and developing a blueprint for the Alliance and its partners to leverage their resources together to accomplish what they could not do individually.