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OSSE Ed Digest
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Vol. 4, Issue 8
August 2007
Bringing urban P-16 education resources to policymakers, parents, advocates, and district and school staff in the District of Columbia
Research on DC Schools
National Lessons Learned
New Ideas
The Office of the State Superintendent of Education does not endorse the views expressed in the resources and reports contained in the OSSE Ed Digest.
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Discussions about reviving and strengthening arts education in public schools are emerging and gaining momentum across the country. When the Massachusetts Department of Education recently failed to include the arts in MassCore, a recommended curriculum designed to increase students’ college readiness, arts advocates and educators took note and immediately began a boisterous lobbying campaign. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced in late July that the city will require arts programs in all schools. In Los Angeles, a 10-year initiative to restore arts education recently received a boost when Governor Schwarzenneger approved over $600 million for arts programs throughout California. And in Washington, D.C., former Superintendent Clifford Janey’s efforts to reform the school system’s curriculum ultimately led to the development of new draft K-12 standards for music and the visual arts.
Proponents argue, essentially, that the arts are an essential component of education, and all children, not only those with specific artistic talent, benefit from an education in the arts including opportunities to create, perform, and communicate through various artistic media. Major debates today within K-12 arts education concern issues of fundamental justification. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, an increasing number of studies have found that arts programs motivate children to learn, assisting in improving performance in core academic subjects. For some children, the arts provide the impetus to stay in school until graduation and, for others, inspire them to pursue a college education. Arts education programs will continue to play a pivotal role as the nation struggles to improve high school graduation rates, develop pre-kindergarten programs, and counter the achievement gap in urban communities. This issue of the OSSE Digest presents a range of research and information on the emerging prospects for arts education.
Selected Articles
Arts in Education Organizations
Arts in Education Standards and Lesson Plans
Reports and Research
Selected Articles
 
Arts in Education Organizations
Arts in Education Standards and Lesson Plans
The organizations and institutions listed either specifically cater to the K-12 arts or have school outreach programs.
Reports and Research
The purpose of this report is to provide a national profile of the status of arts education in the nation’s regular public schools during the 1999–2000 school year. Specifically, this report presents information on the characteristics of public elementary and secondary school arts education programs, including data on the availability of instruction in the arts, staffing, funding, supplemental programs and activities, and administrative support of arts education. This report is based on data that were collected from elementary and secondary school principals and from elementary school arts specialists and classroom teachers during the 1999–2000 school year. The teacher-level component provides data on the educational backgrounds and experience of arts teachers and the curricula and learning environments that characterize arts education. Findings include the following: the overwhelming majority of elementary and secondary schools provide music and visual arts instruction, while dance and theater offerings remain meager; at the elementary level, a majority of music (72%) and visual arts (55%) classes are taught by specialists, while dance and drama specialists represent a severe minority of all instructors; a very high percentage of secondary school principals report one of more specialists in each of the major disciplines: music (91%), visual arts (94%), dance (77%) and theater (84%); 45% of music specialists and 39% of visual arts specialists held a master’s degree in their field of study. approximately 90% of teachers were certified to teach in their respective fields, 66% of music specialists and 55% of visual arts specialists had at least ten years of in-discipline teaching experience; most elementary schools have dedicated rooms and specialized equipment for music and visual arts (77% and 56% respectively), but do poorly with dance (14%) and drama (13%); and 35% of secondary schools teach creative writing, with 90% of the courses offered in English departments.
The “arts” are considered a core academic subject as part of the core curriculum for K-12 education, according to the Goals 2000 panel and as defined in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), as amended. The federal program that supports integrating arts in the schools at the K-12 level is the Arts in Education program, authorized under the ESEA, as amended, and administered by the Department of Education (ED). This program provides grants for model projects that integrate the arts into school curricula. It has, in the past, given two major grants: one to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and one to the Very Special Arts (now VSA ARTS) program for children with disabilities. This report provides background and legislative history on arts in education.
This report offers methods, findings, and implications for research and policy from 10 meta-analytic reviews of the effects on non-arts cognition from instruction in various art forms. Three analyses demonstrate generalizable, causal relationships: classroom drama and verbal achievement, music listening and spatial reasoning, and music learning and spatial reasoning. Five do not allow causal conclusions: multi-arts and academic achievement, arts rich instruction and creativity, visual arts and reading, dance and reading, music and reading. Findings for two analyses are equivocal: dance and spatial reasoning, music and mathematics. The authors urge arts education researchers to keep research syntheses in mind when conducting studies and advise policy-makers to support arts programs that demonstrate learning in the arts.
Study of the arts in its many forms—whether as a stand-alone subject or integrated into the school curriculum— is increasingly accepted as an essential part of achieving success in school, work and life. Yet, at the same time, study of the arts is quietly disappearing from our schools. In schools across the country, opportunities for students to participate in high-quality arts instruction and activities are diminishing, the result of shifting priorities and budget cuts. Poor, inner-city and rural schools bear a disproportionate share of the losses. Studies show children from low-income families are less likely to be consistently involved in arts activities or instruction than children from high-income families. This report examines the reasons why is it so important to keep the arts strong in our schools and how the study of the arts contribute to student achievement and success. It describes in nontechnical terms what the research says about how study of the arts contributes to academic achievement and student success. It offers impartial, to-the-point reporting of the multiple benefits associated with students’ learning experiences in the arts.
In its 1997 report, Priorities for Arts Education Research, the Arts Education Partnership’s Task Force on Research recommended the creation of this Compendium. The Task Force applauded the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Education (USED), for commissioning an earlier compendium (Schools, Communities and the Arts, published in 1995) and urged that periodic surveys of recent research be regularly produced as a service to researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers. Both the NEA and the USED responded positively to the Task Force recommendation and awarded funding to the Arts Education Partnership (AEP) to commission and publish the next compendium. Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development is the result. The primary task of the researchers of this report were to establish the criteria for the inclusion of studies; examine and select recent research in five art form areas: dance, drama, music, visual arts, and multi-arts; and prepare summaries of the studies, including comments on the contribution of each to the field of arts education and its implications for future research and/or practice. This report identifies strong arts education research that would make a contribution to the national debate over such issues as how to enable all students to reach high levels of academic achievement, how to improve overall school performance, and how to create the contexts and climates in schools that are most conducive to learning.
This report summarizes key findings culled from the data in the comprehensive ArtScan database. Findings include the following: 49 states have state-level standards in the arts (with Iowa the one exception); 36 states and the District of Columbia require some art to receive a high school degree; and more than half of the states require art teachers to acquire explicit certification or ‘demonstrated knowledge’ of the arts. Of interest is that fact that only Kentucky assesses student knowledge by means of state-level testing. The report also emphasizes the paucity of arts offerings in rural schools in particular, and it highlights a general concern among principals from high-minority racial districts about projected funding shortfalls. The report concludes with a series of recommendations to strengthen arts education, including: production of annual reports to consistently and effectively update the ECS; consistent production of policy option papers, particularly relating to teacher quality and alternative routes to certification; and expansion of the ArtScan database to facilitate better, data-driven public policy.
The Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the Nation’s Report Card, is a yearly assessment of elementary and secondary students’ academic achievement. In 1997, eighth-graders were administered a comprehensive performance assessment in music, theater and visual arts. The next arts assessment is scheduled for 2008. Test exercises asked pupils to create, perform and respond to art. The assessment also gathered data about students’ overall exposure to the arts in schools, as well as school resources made available for the arts. This report provides a variety of findings from that assessment, including the following: most students could select appropriate functional uses for different types of music and could partially justify their choices in writing but showed limited abilities in creating music; more students could describe feelings conveyed by actors in dramatic performances, or what actors did with their faces, voices, or bodies, than could explain how actors used their faces, voices, and bodies to convey character and feeling; some students were able to accurately describe some aspects of artworks but linking aesthetic features of artworks explicitly with meaning seemed challenging for students. The study also found that: a large percentage of grade 8 students attended schools in which music and visual arts were taught, in most cases by full-time or part-time specialists; student access to theatre and dance instruction was more limited; most students attended schools in which instruction following district or state curricula was offered in the subjects of music and visual arts, but not in theatre or dance; most visual arts and music instruction took place in school facilities dedicated to that subject; where available, dance was usually taught in gymnasiums; and where available, theatre instruction usually took place on a stage or in a room dedicated to theatre teaching.
This policy brief, a collaborative effort of the Arts Education Partnership and thirteen other arts organizations, summarizes the effect of NCLB on arts education and delineates major grant programs available to arts educators under NCLB. NCLB currently defines “the arts” as a core academic subject, although it does not explicitly define which discrete content areas comprise the arts. This leaves ultimate definition of the arts to the states. Most states consider the arts as music, visual arts, theater and dance. NCLB requires states to develop challenging standards for at least math and science (yet allows for standards in other subjects, including the arts), mandates resource allocation in arts education based upon scientifically based research, and issues requirements for “highly qualified” arts instructors, although precise requirements vary according to whether a teacher is new, or a veteran. (New teachers have separate sets of qualifications depending on whether they teach elementary or secondary students.) Final recommendations include urging states to create arts content standards and assessments, encouraging concerned citizens and educators to lobby for clear definition of the arts in their states, and instituting NCLB-compliant research in arts education activities and programs.
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