Arts Education

Arts in Education Week (Sept. 9-15) is a time to celebrate the importance of the arts in a well-rounded education for all students. Through dance,music, theatre, and the visual arts, young children explore the world through sight and sound, creative movement, and drama. Through the arts, young people acquire invaluable cognitive abilities and social skills — problem solving and perseverance to name only two — that prepare them for the rigors of college, careers, and life in the 21^st century. We also know through research that arts-rich schools make for quality learning environments, heighten student engagement and correlate to increases in attendance and decreases in behavior problems. In addition, robust arts education has shown short and long-term academic achievement gains, including the pursuit of higher education and college completion.

“We’ve Got Trouble …”

Despite all this, a recent Department of Education survey tells us that for far too many students, the arts do not play a role at all in their K-12 educations. Here are some disconcerting facts as of the 2009-10 school year:

• More than 1.3 million elementary students attended schools where no music learning occurred and 3.9 million students, in nearly 20 percent of America’s elementary schools, lacked the opportunity to paint, sculpt or draw a picture;
• Since 2000, when an earlier survey occurred, the availability of theatre and dance in elementary schools went from bad to worse —20 percent of elementary schools offered these arts disciplines in 2000; in 2010, only one out of every 33 schools offered dance and one out of every 25 offered theatre; and
• In more than 40 percent of our nation’s secondary schools, students can graduate without taking a single arts course.
  

Here's a test question: What increases elementary students' proficiencies on math and language arts tests, engages them in ways that direct instruction does not, and motivates them – even to the point of not wanting to go home even when they are sick? The answer: The arts integrated with other core academic subjects such as math and English language arts, according to the evaluation results of the Arts in Education Model Development and Dissemination (AEMDD) Grants.