Art Education Advocacy

A Pasadena elementary school uses art to teach third graders addition, subtraction and long division. An advocacy group wants to expand the program across the state.

Video on msnbc.com: Orchard Gardens, a school in Roxbury, Mass., had been plagued by bad test scores and violence -- but one principal’s idea to fire the security guards and hire art teachers is helping turn it around.

Student achievement was down. Teachers were demoralized. Until a bold strategy -- integrating the arts into curricula -- helped students embrace their learning and retain their knowledge.

Why we must defend creative education / Arts / Culture / Home - Morning Star

"A strong visual and performing arts education is proven to improve students’ academic performance in other classes. Providing arts instruction as early as possible is vital, north Okaloosa County educators say. It’s in elementary school that teachers recognize which students have latent artistic talent and can start to develop it."

"Encouraging children to achieve success by thinking creatively is what has often produced the people who thought limitlessly enough to change the world, and did. There is no blueprint for success other than hard work. Imagine a world where we taught our children to work just as hard at the melody or vision playing in their heads as the arithmetic set sent home by their teacher. That’s right-- imagine."

Education should be about critical thinking, challenging the status quo, and developing individual talents and abilities, not merely the rote acquisition of knowledge.

Tuesday is Arts Advocacy Day on Capitol Hill. With so many complex challenges facing America — in education, public health and the economy — should Americans care? The answer is yes.

GOOD is a global community of people and organizations working towards individual and collective progress.

"This is based on a new belief — after years of emphasis on standardized testing — in the power of the arts. Today, more and more policymakers think it is the arts, after all, that can motivate kids, engage them and help them develop 21st-century skills such as teamwork and innovative thinking — in sum, be the key to their salvation."

Controversial artist Tracey Emin once said the Conservatives were the only hope for the arts in Britain but has warned of rioting in the streets if the subject is not a core part of the Government’s overhaul of GCSEs.

"Although kids who are involved in the arts do tend to test better, there’s no direct cause-and-effect evidence that participation actually helps raise scores.
This sounds like awful news and justification to slash school arts programs even further, right? But “dismissing the arts if they don’t directly boost scores is a big mistake,” says Richard Kessler, executive director of the Center for Arts Education in New York City. “In fact, plenty of research shows that children who spend time in school doing visual art, performing music or dance, or even acting in a play gain a whole set of creative and analytical skills that are quickly disappearing from the rest of the curriculum.”

“We have to do what Thomas Jefferson said when he founded the University of Virginia: There has to be a renaissance education provided,” state Sen. Don Gaetz said. “A student has to be broadly educated....The relationship of the brain between the arts and what some people might call more practical applications is well documented.”

"People who engage in the arts or watch others do so are more likely to be civically engaged, socially tolerant, and altruistic.  At a time when arts budgets are being decimated, it's concerning that we're depriving students of such critical benefits. Indeed, "If policymakers are concerned about a decline in community life," says LeRoux, "the arts shouldn't be disregarded as a means to promote an active citizenry."