Leaving the Arts Behind

by Evan S. Dobelle


Despite the acknowledged fact that children learn at different speeds, the federal No Child Left Behind Act has promoted a rigid focus on standardized tests in math and reading as the measurement of a school's success. Not surprisingly, this simplistic bread-and-butter (or is it bread-and-water?) approach has resulted in sharp cuts in other important subject areas like the arts.

This retreat has grim implications for New England, and especially for the communities of Western Massachusetts, where art and music, theater and dance contribute tremendously to the local economy.

Last summer, former U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige acknowledged the dilemma in a letter to the superintendents of the nation's school districts.

It was "disturbing," Paige wrote, not only that art programs were being cut, but that NCLB had been "so narrowly interpreted" to mean that art no longer had a place in the curriculum. This was a gross misreading of the legislation, he said, which had specifically mentioned the arts as a "core discipline" vital to a student's complete education. He cited studies showing how the arts contribute to other areas of learning, and insisted that NCLB gave no reason at all for cutting such programs.

The superintendents, we can imagine, listened politely and then went right back to doing what had to be done.

Under NCLB, teachers, schools and districts are now judged by how their students score on standardized tests. If scores don't meet expectations, schools lose funding. Period.

The Act puts school districts in an impossible position. On the one hand, the administration asks them to improve offerings across the board. On the other hand, not only is there no financial incentive for any of those improvements -- but rather there are major financial penalties if the math and reading scores don't rise.

Under the circumstances, any responsible superintendent has to devote more resources to raising those scores -- and less time to art or other non-tested material. You teach to the test, and that way, ensure that your school at least stays open.

The sad part is that those studies Paige mentioned were right: art really does transform the way students learn. Different arts have different effects, but committed study in music, drama, visual arts or dance strengthens young people's spatial reasoning skills, their language abilities and their ability to deal with complex information. That's not opinion; that is fact, borne out by research over the past three decades.

Most of all, though, art teaches what students learn almost nowhere else during the school day but need everywhere in life: how to proceed when there are no right answers. It's the exact opposite of the rote memorization that standardized tests encourage.

Anyone who steps into the creative void and chases an idea on a blank canvas -- or a computer screen or a sheet of music -- knows there are no guarantees of success. Half the time in art no one even knows what "success" means. But a good art class forces students to confront that uncertainty and deal with it in practical terms. You keep drawing, even if the picture's not perfect; you defend it, even if no one else likes it. You learn from the criticism and either incorporate it into your next project, or reject it. A good art class, in other words, teaches students to trust their own intuition and at the same time subjects that intuition to rigorous challenge.

That's good training for life under any circumstances, but it's even more valuable now. Analysts have said for years that America's economic future will depend upon a creative work force. Colleges are looking for applicants capable of independent thought and ready to pursue free inquiry. Companies want employees who can devise new solutions to the problems of a constantly changing world. They want kids who score well on tests, but who can develop a new idea too. The challenge schools face is to meet those needs in a time of growing government hostility to the very idea of public education.

Art education promotes that sort of independence and creativity. Investment in art education would be a clear, sensible first step in the right direction.

Evan S. Dobelle is president and CEO of NEBHE.