Thought Leaders Blog

I recently wrote an opinion piece for Education Update, a monthly newspaper for educators, parents, and students in New York City, on the need for renewed emphasis on arts education under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the reform legislation under the Bush administration which is up for re-authorization later this year. Too often arts education money is funneled to tutoring programs and materials. Here I argue that the arts should be infused and integrated into school curricula in a holistic way, rather than seen as a simple “add-on.”

While health care seems to dominate the news out of the nation’s capital, education watchers are trying to read the signs of change and speculating about what is ahead for No Child Left Behind (NCLB). NCLB was the major force for education reform of the Bush administration. An accountability system based on standardized testing to improve math and reading skills, it focused the attention of the country on the worrisome achievement gap between white students and students of color, the national scandal of high school drop out rates, and the huge challenges faced by English language learners. The Act was intended to give our schools historic education reform based on stronger accountability, more freedom for states and communities, research-based education methods, and more choices for parents.

Everyone expects NCLB will be reauthorized but how will it be changed under the Obama administration? I want to suggest here that we have an opportunity to refocus the goals of NCLB and draw out some aspects of it that have been ignored by the Bush administration. Implementation of NCLB was heavily influenced by the 1998 William Sanders research showing that, “The single biggest factor affecting academic growth of any population of youngsters is the effectiveness of the individual classroom teacher. The answer to why children learn well or not isn't race, it isn't poverty, it isn't even per-pupil expenditure at the elementary level. It's teachers, teachers, teachers” (Sanders, 1999).

No one doubts the importance of high quality teachers. However, complex behaviors like academic achievement and student development are not the result of single factors. Ample evidence indicates that environmental factors powerfully impact the academic and social development of children. Authors of the reformulated NCLB should address the reality that poverty may well cancel out the best teaching; if we do not remove the barriers to learning, children handicapped by poverty will continue to fail. But we also will fail our children and youth if we do not give them deep and rich experiences with the arts.

In our highly technocratic society attention to aesthetic development must be deliberate. Music and art engage the hearts and minds of children, youth and adults. The performing and visual arts develop new lenses for viewing and understanding the world. Through art, music, theater, and dance, children and youth learn to make sense of their emotions, their political stances, their environments, their relationships, their fears, their dreams. Through the arts they also come to understand other peoples, to learn tolerance, to appreciate similarities and differences, and thereby learn to live and work in a global society.

However, principals under pressure to remove the achievement gap and meet standards of Adequate Yearly Progress under NCLB have diverted arts education money to tutoring in reading and mathematics, materials, programs. The budget crisis is further causing many to cancel music and art classes in order to provide more time for coaching in reading and mathematics, areas being tested under NCLB. While wealthier families are able to transfer to schools that continue to offer arts programs, the poor urban schools, arguably most in need of these programs, are least likely to have them. In this arts-rich city of New York, this is a tragedy. The solution is not to take time away from instruction in the basic skills, but rather to create curricula in which the arts are infused rather than added. To develop this rich curriculum requires that art and music educators work ‘elbow to elbow’ with the best artists engaged in their creative disciplines. I hope that revisions of NCLB will include incentives for communities to collaborate in providing the arts: dancing, visual arts, theater and music, to all our children so that we indeed leave no child behind..