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National issues affect access to the arts for students and adults alike.
Learn about current information and public discourse countrywide.
EDUCATIONAL TRENDS
LEGISLATIVE ACTIVITY
POLITICAL VOICES
PROFESSIONAL FINDINGS
National studies support findings that arts-integrated classrooms yield greater benefits than classrooms with little or no arts presence. The benefits: students earn higher test scores, become better thinkers, develop higher-order skills, and deepen their inclination to learn—just to name a few.
Read on, to discover one elementary school’s success story. The school is located in Chicago, but it could just as well be one of our very own ArtSmart schools in Nashville.
To learn more about TPAC Education’s ArtSmart program in Metro Nashville Public Schools, click here.
By Nick Rabkin and Robin Redmond
It is fall. fourth-graders in a Chicago school in a low-income neighborhood are focused and coiled with excitement. They are drawing portraits of each other in a lesson that is part of a unit on descriptive writing. They are deeply engaged, and the rich writing and art on the walls are evidence of real learning and accomplishment. Most other classrooms in the building also integrate the arts with other subjects and buzz with the intensity of discovery.
The same day, in another low-income Chicago school, fourth-graders slump in their chairs, waiting to read a bit of advice to their classmates. They mumble, "Don't hit your sister," and "Do your homework." There is no children's work on the walls, no evidence of learning. Instead, posters remind students of rules they must follow. One asks, "What is freedom?" The answers suggest freedom is a reward for self-control.
The new economy may require higher-order skills such as creativity, adaptability and teamwork, but most schools in low-income areas focus narrowly on "basic" academic skills, testing and discipline. The student boredom and academic failure that follow prompt calls for yet more testing and discipline.
The first school and others like it are proving that integrating the arts into the core of the academic program is a far more productive strategy. Recently, the principal of Edgebrook, Chicago's highest-scoring non-selective elementary school, attributed her school's success to its embrace of the arts. "We were concerned we might see a negative impact on test scores," Diane Maciejewski said. "But actually, just the opposite happened."
A growing body of research is yielding data that support her claim. A study of 23 arts-integrated schools in Chicago showed test scores rising up to two times faster there than in demographically comparable schools. A study of a Minneapolis program showed that arts integration has substantial effects for all students, but appears to have its greatest impact on disadvantaged learners. Gains go well beyond the basics and test scores. Students become better thinkers, develop higher-order skills, and deepen their inclination to learn.
The studies also show that arts integration energizes and challenges teachers. Karen Seashore, a distinguished sociologist who studies urban schools, called the Minneapolis program "one of the most powerful professional development experiences we have seen for large numbers of teachers."
When the arts are an interdisciplinary partner with other subjects, they generate conditions that cognitive scientists say are ideal for learning. The curriculum becomes more hands-on and project-based, offering what University of Chicago researchers have called authentic and challenging intellectual work. Learning in all subjects becomes visible through the arts. Teachers' opinions of their students rise.
Students invest emotionally in arts-integrated classrooms, where the curriculum often connects lessons to their own experience, and where they often work in groups and turn classrooms into learning communities. These classroom changes lead to a cascade of broader school changes. Schedules change to accommodate sustained attention to meaningful questions. Parents become more involved in schools. Teachers collaborate and take on new leadership roles.
These successes make clear that the arts are not just affective and expressive. They are also deeply cognitive. They develop the tools of thinking itself: careful observation of the world, mental representation of what is observed or imagined, abstraction from complexity, pattern recognition and development, symbolic and metaphoric representation, and qualitative judgment. We use these same thinking tools in science, philosophy, math and history. The advantage of the arts is that they link cognitive growth to social and emotional development. Students care more deeply about what they study, they see the links between subjects and their lives, their thinking capacities grow, they work more diligently, and they learn from each other.
Students will not be prepared for work in an economy that demands higher-order skills if their schools focus exclusively on the basics. Students will not learn to think for themselves if their schools expect them just to stay in line and keep quiet. Successful programs in Chicago, Minneapolis and elsewhere have proven that arts integration is within the reach of most schools and districts. Now research is showing that connecting the arts to learning across the curriculum is a strategy that helps close the achievement gap and make schools happier places by moving beyond a crippling focus on basics and discipline. It is time for more districts and schools to make use of this strategy.
Nick Rabkin is executive director of the Center for Arts Policy, Columbia College Chicago, and Robin Redmond is its associate director. They edited "Putting the Arts in the Picture: Reframing Education in the 21st Century."
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Americans for the Arts, the leading national arts and arts education advocacy organization, launched a new membership campaign in November 2004—The Arts Action Fund. Its goal? To enlist and mobilize 100,000 citizen activists who will help ensure that arts-friendly public policies are adopted at the federal, state, and local levels, and that public and private resources are maximized.
Read on, for membership details, and to view the inaugural Congressional Arts Report Card for the U.S. House of Representatives. The report card provides a complete detailed overview of all 435 voting Members' arts support during the 108th Congress (2003-2004).
One person can make a difference, and that person is YOU.
The creation of the Americans for the Arts Action Fund adds a new dimension to arts advocacy in the United States by providing a vehicle through which any citizen can help ensure that all Americans have the opportunity to appreciate, value, and participate in the arts. In November, we will specifically launch a national citizens' membership campaign to encourage Americans to join and support the Arts Action Fund. Our goal is to enlist and mobilize 100,000 citizen activists who will help ensure that arts-friendly public policies are adopted at the federal, state, and local levels, and public and private resources are maximized.
Today, we are proud to announce that the Arts Action Fund has produced a Congressional Arts Report Card for the U.S. House of Representatives. The report card provides a complete detailed overview of all 435 voting Members' arts support during the 108th Congress (2003-2004). The Report Card assigns each Member of the House of Representatives a letter grade and numerical score based on his or her voting record on specific arts and arts education policy issues. Eleven separate government actions are covered, and each is weighted based on its importance to the arts, with the greatest weight given to four votes on funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). A perfect score equals 100 cumulative points, and the points are correlated to a letter grade of A+ through F. The Report Card also includes a detailed arts voting record for each Member.
Thirty-three Members of Congress received the highest grade possible (A+), while the average overall score of Congress was a B. The Report Card shows that arts support is increasingly bipartisan; twice as many Republicans voted for an NEA increase in 2004 than in 2000. We encourage you to view the Report Card as well as the accompanying press release to see your Member's voting record, and compare your state and region with those across the country. You may also read Charles Storch's recent article in the Chicago Tribune about the report card, headlined "Arts Group Gives State Delegation Good Grade." (This article is now archived and you must purchase to read it at http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/chicagotribune/index.html?ts=1112053876)
This is just the first of many initiatives the Arts Action Fund will undertake to increase citizen involvement in the arts. We hope you'll join us as we work to increase the visibility and vitality of the arts for all Americans.
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Since its adoption into law in January, 2002, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has existed amidst a swirl of controversy both locally, and on the national front (Rod Paige, former Secretary of Education for the Bush Administration resigned from the Cabinet in November, 2004—after calling the nation’s largest teachers union, the National Educators Association (NEA) a “terrorist organization”). And yet, exist it still does.
Read on, to learn more about NCLB, and to view the summary page from the recent (March, 2005) report released by the Center on Education Policy (CEP) on the efficacy of the Act to date.
And for a progress report on how Tennessee schools are measuring up in NCLB, click here.
During 2004, its third year of implementation, the No Child Left Behind Act became
a significant force affecting the operations and decisions of states, school districts, and
schools. Over the past year, the effects of NCLB grew more obvious and serious. States
and districts stepped up their actions to meet approaching deadlines for testing more
grades and ensuring all academic teachers and paraprofessionals are highly qualified.
With the passage of time, additional schools have entered the later phases of the law’s
sanctions. And more than a thousand school districts were identified as being in need of
improvement for the first time under the NCLB accountability requirements.
In 2004, the law also reached deeper down into classrooms, influencing what and
how teachers teach, how teachers are trained, how students are grouped, and how much
time students spend studying various subjects. At the same time, debates flared in state
houses, school board rooms, and teachers’ lounges about whether NCLB represented
too much intrusion on state and local authority and whether the federal government
was providing enough funding to carry out the escalating federal demands.
Since 2002, the Center on Education Policy, an independent nonprofit organization,
has been studying federal, state, and local implementation of the No Child Left
Behind Act. This is our third annual report of the most comprehensive, long-term
national study of the Act. This year, our findings are based on a survey of 49 states, a
nationally representative survey of 314 school districts, case studies of 36 districts and 37
schools, four special analyses of critical NCLB issues, and three forums exploring ways
to address the law’s key challenges.
At this point in NCLB implementation, we see early signs of some positive effects,
but we also see clear warning signs of problems that could undermine the future success
of the law if not addressed.
To view the entire report “From the Capital to the Classroom” in its entirety, click here.
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This 159-page report (did we lose you yet?) from the Arts Education Partnership (AEP) is more for the educator or arts professional who wants to check out what researchers are saying about the academic and social development of students who learn through the arts. Despite its length, the report is well organized and very well written—and includes essays on topics like “music and learning,” and “the arts and transfer of learning,” by some of the heaviest heavyweights in the arts assessment profession. It is well worth the read.
Critical Links:
Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development Arts Education Partnership
The following essay can (and should!) be read by all. Eric Booth, one of the nation’s leading arts education experts, explores the art of democracy.
By Eric Booth – January 2005
There are certain things people in the arts know how to do—and I mean all the art forms, and more, as you will read. We take these skills and habits of mind and heart for granted, rarely honoring them or ourselves with any unusual value. Yet we rely on these skills to make our art, to draw others into our artistic offerings and to fill daily life with the kinds of experiencing—thinking, feeling, creating—that makes daily life worthwhile.
In my work, I refer to three essential actions of art: making worlds (the acts of creating coherent new wholes that make the world a better place), exploring worlds (entering into worlds that others have made to explore and discover what they have to offer), and reading the world (using the skills of art in daily life to play with, make sense of, explore the realities we encounter). I get frustrated when people in the arts limit the enormity of these capacities to artistic media. Of course, paint, dance, music, language and theater are the richest media in which to make and explore worlds. Of course, the creations in those media hold most of the greatest accomplishments of human achievement. But the work of art, the playground of artistic skills, is so much larger than just the media. Artists make worlds in all media, including relationships, schools, homes, and daily encounters. And creative people who would never think of themselves as artists engage similarly in the work of art in their everyday media. The work of art is the biggest contribution humans have to offer to the future, and artists are its experts. That is why I enthusiastically support the aspirations and work of the Creative America Project.
The medium of democracy may be the most challenging medium to create in. It is so tough and complex that few engage with it, leaving those who lack the skills and passions of art to create the culture in which we life. Culture, like art, has been relegated to an educated, elite periphery — yet thee word itself comes from agriculture and means the medium in which we grow. We are letting those with little feel for the skills, challenges and processes of making worlds make ours. The time has come for us to take back our democracy, to make it a medium in which we wish ourselves and our children to grow. I have two friends in the arts who have run for and won seats on their local school boards—they are my heroes.
Here are some of the usually-overlooked skills that people in the arts have in abundance that make them brilliantly suited to make a difference in the world of governance.
They can pay attention well. This means they can see under surfaces, see the negative spaces of what isn’t there, see inherent structures in complex material. They can attend beyond first impressions and quick opinions. They can “not know” long enough, tolerate the discomfort of first encounter with the unfamiliar, to really discover what is present and speak directly to it. (This is John Keats’ famous “negative capability” that few Americans have.) They can give themselves to new experiences and discover the value in them, and imagine the ways they can become better. They can keep their attention on something for a long time, and return to it again and again to come to understanding and not just to a position or opinion.
They can respond; I call the skill response-ability. This is the capacity to encounter the new and be able to touch down into something about you as a person and give that back. Not to answer back with how you are supposed to respond, or how they want you to respond, but with how you, as a live individual spirit, authentically respond. Artists are great at this—it gives their work its idiosyncratic communicative power. The honest particularity of the response gives it force in the world. They etymology of the word respond means “to promise back”— and that is a gift we have to give to the political arena as well as the artistic.
Artists make strong connections. They connect to deep ideas, and connect people with those deep ideas. And most importantly, artists do not limit themselves to making logical connections only. They use the full range of human connecting that is our birthright. They connect emotionally, physically, spiritually, intuitively, and in ways we can’t even name. This gives them communicative power, to draw people in through the range of connective abilities humans use to make all the important connections of their lives.
There are a dozen other skills I could name (and have on other occasions), but I want to mention the most important. There are many other names for this, but I call it the skill of yearning. Yearning is the desire for something more that you personally care about. It is entirely individual, and is an expression of who one is as a passionate alive person. We have our own sets of yearnings; they guide our choices, and provide our motivations and satisfactions. This desire for more of something that is most essential to us. Creators are exemplary yearners, and they tap the yearning of others to join their aspirations. I think all of us in the arts are in the yearning business. It is our job to keep our own yearnings alive and well and valuably applied; and it is our job to awaken the yearnings of others and guide them into productive exploration. Imagine what we could do if we could tap the yearnings of Americans and guide them into creating a real democracy, alive with the possibility of making a real difference.
During a live television interview some years ago, I was asked to close the interview with a quick clarification of the difference between art and entertainment. Well, the crap that spewed out of me was humiliating; I had no idea, so I just used big words and endless sentences of hogwash. I determined I had to do better than that—so here is the distinction I drew after that public disaster. Entertainment (which is certainly not the enemy of art) happens within what we already know. Entertainment confirms. Whatever our response, whether we laugh or cry or whatever, underneath that, entertainment says “eyes, the world is the way you think it is.” Art, on the other hand, happens outside of what we already know. Inherent in the artistic experience is the capacity to expand our sense of the way the world is or might be. The art is in that amazing human capacity to open into the zone of the possible, to imagine and create things that extend how it is to make things better in some way.
That is why we need artists, people with the skills of creating in any and all media, actively working in the medium of our democracy. We need people who can see, imagine,create beyond what our democracy currently has become. People who can do what our founding fathers did—use existing ideas, and in the messy medium of a constitutional congress, create something of such lasting beauty and power that it is one of the great contributions to human history, right up there with the works of Shakespeare and Mozart. We need people who embody the priorities and skills of art working at every level of governance to take back the culture.
Has this happened before? Sure. There have been many creative individuals in political office—pick your political heroes for examples. The public thinks the fact that Reagan and Schwarzenegger were actors means that creative people from the arts have held high office. Hogwash. They are entertainers, seeing within the norms and confirming them, every bit as much as the most rigid political hack. The time has come for skilled creators to work in the medium of politics, and then … we begin to make a better world. With the help of the Creative America Project. I hope you join them too.
A former Broadway actor, Eric Booth is on the faculty of Juilliard and The Kennedy Center, and is the author of The Everyday Work of Art, a Book of the Month Club selection. He is a frequent keynote speaker, consultant to arts and arts education organizations and programs around the country, and the founding editor of the Teaching Artist Journal.
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