It occurs to me that there is a lot of talk about how No Child Left Behind is eroding the arts in schools. Field trips and outreach programs are curtailed or eliminated. Arts classes disappear in favor of more instruction in test subjects. Recess time is likewise dwindling. (If you are wondering about the connection, I got my first black eye in 5th grade when we recreated the rumble scene from West Side Story. Kids still recreate cool scenes from musical theatre during recess don’t they?)
But it got me thinking, to be fair do the arts gain anything from NCLB? Lets face it, the arts were getting the short shrift in schools for a long time before NCLB. We claim that music classes help kids with math. Does math in turn help kids with music. Does a good foundation in math help visual artists understand scale, ratio and proportion better?
In terms of reading and writing, obviously the arts can benefit from people who have a high level of comprehension and ability to express themselves well. We can hope these things provide basis to transition from reading well to being well read and possessed of critical and analytical thinking skills. Trading out social and hard sciences to make room for more math, reading and writing may make these skills harder to acquire. If NCLB does cultivate higher quality students then it would certainly be a pleasure to see students enter college without the need for remediation.
There are a lot of people who don’t feel NCLB is going to produce a generally higher quality student which bodes poorly for every industry in the future. If you were going to fight to get the law changed, how would it be improved to benefit the arts? More arts exposure is a given, but what else do you fight for? An excellent artist really can’t develop in a vacuum only experiencing arts classes. And what if you are told arts classes are definitely off the table in this new law? How do you salvage things and make sure students gain the knowledge and discernment they need to be artists via other avenues? What’s more, artists shouldn’t have to operate in a vacuum either, what do you advocate for that will help students become appreciators and consumers of art as they proceed through life?
The fundamental problem with NCLB is that teachers are forced to teach the test, not the concepts. Kids are learning memorization and test taking skills but no critical thinking – there’s no time for questions or creativity in ANY subject, let alone the arts. Also, with the elimination of recess and the creative classes, kids don’t get any outlet in which to expend their excess energy. Thus, concentration becomes harder in the “real” classes because of all the pent-up energy and creative thinking. We’re teaching them to stop thinking. So, arts classes are off the table? Fine. I would fight like hell for recess then, insurance issues be damned. And a curriculum that encourages discussion, asking questions about anything and everything, rather than just memorizing vocab words. And reverse the funding scale – let’s face it; the schools whose students do best on these tests are the schools that need funding the LEAST, not MOST. And the kids and teachers on the other end of the scale need the most help. Rather than abandoning them if they fail, maybe we could remember that these kids are our country’s future and try to figure out WHY the system they’re in isn’t working instead of just punishing them for it.