Arts in The NEK

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Created on Thursday, 12 May 2016 14:03

Written by Tim Laroche

A NATIONAL ISSUE

Art teachers in the NEK are not the only art educators who are facing challenges right now.

“There are a lot of conversations going on in schools of this stuff,” Clements said. “You sit down with any art teacher and you’re probably going to get the same sort of stuff that you’re getting from me and everyone else, because we all feel the same. We all have the same sort of issues as art teachers, at least in this state.”

Recent advents in the areas of public education have seen the fine arts dropped from many curricula. And in many cases, there has been a pushback from the federal government against the fine arts as a core subject in modern education.

Furthermore, the current federal educational climate has seen so-called “non-essential” subjects dropped from large-scale funding in lieu of mathematics and reading.

America’s education system, although is has been recently ranked as one of the best education systems in the world, has been labeled inadequate by many legislators. This oft-repeated statistic is generally seen in reference to the trend of high-stakes, standardized testing.

Nonetheless, the United States ranks as the 9^th highest achieving country as measured by NECAP test scores, and the 6^th highest achieving country as measured by PIRL test scores.

A number of individual states, many of which are in New England, have test scores well above the national average.

In a few countries though, standardized test scores for students have out-paced those of students in the United States of America. So, in an attempt to “catch up,” many US lawmakers have passed legislation to evaluate students and their schools via a system of tests.

The proliferation of testing has seen the most commonly measured subjects emphasized over their less commonly tested counterparts. And through a series of acts and laws, non-tested subjects, such as the fine arts, have fallen to the wayside.

This means that such subjects as mathematics and reading now constitute the bulk of many schools’ curricula. And so the national educational model – which is oftentimes driven by politicians, rather than developmental psychologists and educators – has dropped a number of subjects.

The federal landscape surrounding arts education has been fraught with a number of problems too. In 2002, when the Bush administration pushed for and passed the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) – a reauthorization of 1964’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act -- many schools saw a reduction in teaching hours and resources devoted to the arts.

Although language in NCLB specified that arts education was a “core subject,” and Secretary of Education Rod Paige insisted on the importance of arts education under NCLB throughout his term from 2001 to 2005, – going as far as to pen a letter in 2004, that affirmed the administration’s emphasis on the arts.

Paige wrote in his 2004 letter: “The arts, perhaps more than any other subject, help students to understand themselves and others, whether they lived in the past or are living in the present. President Bush recognizes this important contribution of the arts to every child's education.”

His letter went on to state that despite accusations to the contrary, NCLB is a positive step for arts educators. And any elimination of arts programs in an attempt to comply with NCLB was not the intent of the bill.

“As I travel the country, I often hear that arts education programs are endangered because of No Child Left Behind. This message was echoed in a recent series of teacher roundtables sponsored by the Department of Education. It is both disturbing and just plain wrong.

It's disturbing not just because arts programs are being diminished or eliminated, but because NCLB is being interpreted so narrowly as to be considered the reason for these actions. The truth is that NCLB included the arts as a core academic subject because of their importance to a child's education. No Child Left Behind expects teachers of the arts to be highly qualified, just as it does teachers of English, math, science, and history.”

But many education advocates criticized NCLB’s lack of any definition for the subject.

Whereas, in math and reading, NCLB included strict provisions for students to meet goals of “adequate yearly progress,” which would be evaluated through a series of high-stakes tests, the arts included no such testing.

Schools and teachers were to be evaluated through the test scores of their students, and, under NCLB, states could step in at schools that continually underperformed.

Seeing that schools were evaluated by the test scores of their students, NCLB created an incentive for teachers and schools to “teach to the test.” That meant that subjects and specific facts that might appear on the standardized tests would be the focus of instruction, but, on the inverse, subjects that did not appear on the tests were assigned less importance.

To make matters worse, NCLB provided for a number of monetary incentives that would be allocated to higher performing schools, but the inverse was also true. Schools that did not garner high test scores could have their budgets cut under the bill.

In many schools systems throughout the country, teachers were afraid for their jobs, and schools were scrambling to raise test scores in an attempt to retain their federal funding. So, nationwide, instructional time became increasingly devoted primarily to subjects that would be tested, such as math and reading.

Despite the “core subject” designation of the arts, and despite Paige’s public comments on their importance, many schools cut instructional hours for the arts in an attempt to allocate that time to the test subjects that would determine their budgets.

Many arts education programs fell to the wayside.

In other disciplines that were not the primary subjects of high-stakes testing, such as history and science, instructional hours also experienced a drop-off. For instance, many schools were forced to cut their social and physical science programs.

But initiatives from the Obama administration have seen resurgence in interest for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

In more recent years, STEM subjects have been steadily gaining ground, heralded by advocates and the Obama administration as key areas in which the United States can improve to take higher rankings in international competitiveness scales.

The growing interest in STEM education is due in part to the disproportionally higher starting incomes and the market demand that jobs in the fields are currently enjoying. Engineering, computer science and petroleum science are all currently some of the highest demand jobs in the US. But, according to a 2010 report by the Vermont Arts Council entitled Economic Footprint of The Arts, careers in the arts generated more than $300 million in revenue, employed almost 7,000 people and generated $19 million in taxes for Vermont in 2009.

However, in some education circles, the arts are gaining traction again.

Recent research into the value of the arts has warranted their inclusion alongside the STEM subjects in what are now being called STEAM subjects – science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics. Advocates argue that the creative elements of the arts lend themselves to complementing and improving other areas of education.

Much in the same way that Arnold argued for art as part of compulsory education in the 1860’s, STEAM advocates argue that the inclusion of art in the STEM model develops critical thinking skills and creative problem solving.

However, even among national advocacy groups for the arts, there is a divide between educators who see the arts as a complimentary subject and educators who see the arts as having intrinsic value.

During the heyday of NCLB, many schools that did not cut out their arts programs entirely implemented them into other subjects. Schools were teaching mathematics through music, reading through visual arts. Although many of the integrated programs did have their merits, some educators argue that they also delegated the arts to secondary importance.

On the other side of the argument, a number of advocates cited statistics [find statistics] that an education in the arts was correlated to improved test scores in mathematics and reading. Students who scored higher in the arts also tended to score higher in such key concepts as pattern recognition and literacy.

Others educators say that the data painted a different picture though; schools that had more money and resources to offer art programs often were in areas in which students came from higher-income families. The link between arts and better test scores was only a correlation, whereas the link between economic prosperity and better test scores was one of causation.

For instance, in such private academies at St. Johnsbury Academy, which has a far greater budget than either Burke Town School or Lyndon Town School, the arts programs have much better funding, and their students regularly go on to achieve highly in the arts duirng and after their time in secondary education.