For example, a report in Illinois found almost no opposition to arts education among principals and district superintendents, yet there were large disparities in school offerings around the state.
In many districts, the arts have suffered so long that it will take years, and massive investment, to turn things around. New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has made arts education a priority in his school reform plans, and the city has launched sweeping initiatives to connect more students with the city's vast cultural resources. Nearly every school now offers at least some arts instruction and cultural programming, yet in , only 45 percent of elementary schools and 33 percent of middle schools provided education in all four required art forms, according to an analysis by the New York City Department of Education , and only 34 percent of high schools offered students the opportunity to exceed the minimum graduation requirement.
Yet some districts have made great strides toward not only revitalizing the arts but also using them to reinvent schools. The work takes leadership, innovation, broad partnerships, and a dogged insistence that the arts are central to what we want students to learn. In Dallas, for example, a coalition of arts advocates, philanthropists, educators, and business leaders have worked for years to get arts into all schools, and to get students out into the city's thriving arts community.
Today, for the first time in thirty years, every elementary student in the Dallas Independent School District receives forty-five minutes a week of art and music instruction.
In a February op-ed piece in the Dallas Morning News , Gigi Antoni, president and CEO of Big Thought , the nonprofit partnership working with the district, the Wallace Foundation , and more than sixty local arts and cultural institutions, explained the rationale behind what was then called the Dallas Arts Learning Initiative : "DALI was created on one unabashedly idealistic, yet meticulously researched, premise -- that students flourish when creativity drives learning.
The Minneapolis and Chicago communities, too, are forging partnerships with their vibrant arts and cultural resources to infuse the schools with rich comprehensive, sustainable programs -- not add-ons that come and go with this year's budget or administrator. In Arizona, Tom Horne, the state superintendant of public instruction, made it his goal to provide high-quality, comprehensive arts education to all K students. Some have restored art and music after a decade without them.
We're preparing them to be citizens. And we're teaching them to be human beings who can enjoy the deeper forms of beauty. The third is as important as the other two. Reviving Arts Education In many districts, the arts have suffered so long that it will take years, and massive investment, to turn things around. They also wrote books about how climate change will affect their climates and the animals that live there.
They studied how the greenhouse gas effect works and made a visual model of it. I was struck by how much John could tell me both about the iterative creative process he went through, and the science his work represented. He says he was frustrated, but he pushed through those feelings and tried something different. The fact that students were showing their knowledge of science through their artwork here struck me as unique. Now, many educators are starting to realize the folly of these practices, backed up by an increasingly robust body of research about the power of art to improve learning.
Johns Hopkins University professor Mariale Hardiman published a paper in Trends in Neuroscience and Education describing the results of a randomized, controlled trial she conducted in fifth grade science classrooms. She and her team found that arts integration instruction led to long-term retention of science concepts at least as successfully as conventional science teaching.
Arts integration was particularly helpful for students with the lowest reading scores. Studies like this one have led to a resurgence of interest in arts integration , a pedagogy that uses art as a vehicle for learning about any subject.
Several schools have led this movement, going all in on art at a time when many schools around the country were slashing their arts budgets. Maya Lin is one of them. For teachers at Maya Lin, integrating art throughout the curriculum and the school day is about making learning fun, multi-disciplinary, connected and creative.
It gives students a way to think about the world differently, to make connections, and to contemplate their place within it. Art is such a great way to do that for kids because it makes it accessible to them. Before it was called Maya Lin, this school was known as Washington Elementary. Back then, Washington served a mostly low-income population and over a third of its students were designated English language learners. And, like many schools, it was a mainstay of the local community with many committed teachers.
They applied for an innovation grant from the district, emphasizing that if they won, they would build a school centered around art. Students would learn all the required standards, but art would be a critical way for teachers to evaluate what students understand.
The district accepted the proposal. Washington Elementary closed in the spring of , but reopened again as Maya Lin School in the fall of with a new focus on arts integration. District officials told the principal, Judy Goodwin, that she could hire her own staff.
She first invited the teachers at Washington to join the project. About half of them did, and the other half were transferred to other jobs in the district.
They learned how to build arts-centered projects collaboratively with other teachers, how to assess learning through art, and they figured out ways to integrate state standards from disparate disciplines — like science and social studies — using art in everyday learning and the habits of successful artists to guide the way. She has found that when art is at the center of the learning experience, it evens the playing field for kids with learning disabilities, or those who are still learning English, or who have less background knowledge about a topic.
I think it allows children to learn about how the process of something is just as important, if not more important, than the product. For example, in order for a student to play in tune, he must have a scientific understanding of sound waves and other musical acoustics principles. Likewise, for a student to give an inspired performance of Shakespeare, she must understand social, cultural, and historical events of the time.
The arts are valuable not only as stand-alone subject matter, but also as the perfect link between all subject matters -- and a great delivery system for these concepts, as well. You can see this in the correlation between drawing and geometry, or between meter and time signatures and math concepts such as fractions.
One can make an argument that communication may be the single most important aspect of existence. Our world is built through communication. Students learn a multitude of communication skills by studying the arts. Through the very process of being in a music ensemble, they must learn to verbally, physically, and emotionally communicate with their peers, conductor, and audience.
Likewise, a cast member must not only communicate the spoken word to an audience, but also the more intangible underlying emotions of the script. The arts are a mode of expression that transforms thoughts and emotions into a unique form of communication -- art itself. While many find the value of arts education to be the ways in which it impacts student learning, I feel the learning of art is itself a worthwhile endeavor.
Art is at the very core of our identity as humans. I feel that the greatest gift we can give students -- and humanity -- is an understanding, appreciation, and ability to create art. Growth Mindset Through the arts, students develop skills like resilience, grit, and a growth mindset to help them master their craft, do well academically, and succeed in life after high school.
Self-Confidence A number of years ago, I had a student enter my band program who would not speak. Improved Cognition Research connects learning music to improved "verbal memory, second language pronunciation accuracy, reading ability, and executive functions" in youth Frontiers in Neuroscience.
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