Arts for All : All Four Arts Kentucky Alliance for Arts Education
The Kentucky Alliance for Arts Education is committed to ensuring that all of Kentucky’s students receive sustained, sequential education programs in dance, drama, music, and visual arts. The provisions of Senate Bill One seriously jeopardize the opportunities for Kentucky’s students to receive a comprehensive arts education at a time when the American public and the corporate sector are recognizing the need for imagination and creativity to meet the challenges of the 21st Century World.
The current Elementary and Secondary Education Act states that the arts are “an integral part of the elementary and secondary school curriculum.” (No Child Left Behind Act, Subpart 15, Section 5551.)
Removing the state-level assessment for Arts and Humanities relegates dance, drama, music, and visual arts to a non-core status. State-level assessment allows Kentucky to measure its progress in Arts and Humanities against other states. State-level assessment also helps Kentucky align its core content with the National Standards for Arts Education (a MENC publication) which has provided a qualitative base-line for the arts since 1994.
Merely quantifying the opportunities that students may have to study any or all of the arts does not address the effectiveness of such programs. The 20% of school districts that would be audited annually, as proposed, does not ensure that all school districts will reach proficiency by 2014.
It is widely recognized in the arts education field that standardized testing in the arts does not adequately measure students’ creativity. Nonetheless, to jettison completely a standards-based assessment for the arts is a disservice to Kentucky’s students. Other states have developed objective rubrics for authentic assessment of dance, drama, music, and visual arts which can serve as models for Kentucky to develop such rubrics. Such measurements would quantify not just the opportunity to “express their creative talents in visual arts, music, and other performing arts” (Senate Bill 1.b.7) but also the effectiveness of such programs. It is desirable that measures be considered that move to a longitudinal assessment of students.
It is also essential that all of the arts be included in the language of the bill. There are national standards in dance and drama, as well as visual arts and music. Kentucky has teacher certification programs in dance and drama, as well as visual arts and music. There are state and national organizations for educators in both dance and drama, as well as visual arts and music. Dance and drama are not merely “other performing arts” but arts disciplines in their own right,
Text Box: Arts for All : All Four Arts and should be recognized as such. Section 1.b.7 should be amended as follows: “…creative talents in visual arts, music, dance and drama.”
In recent months a number of studies have been released that demonstrate the efficacy of arts education and arts integration for our nations’ students. The proposed changes with regard to arts education in Senate Bill One run counter to the data that is being gathered by such organizations as Imagine-Nation www.theimaginenation.net, The National Center of Education and the Economy (Touch Choices or Tough Times, The Report of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce) and www.keepartsinschools.org. The current proposals for arts education will mean that Kentucky’s national profile in arts education will be significantly reduced.
The Kentucky Alliance for Arts Education, together with Kentucky’s other Arts Education Organizations, support and endorse the national statement “Arts Education: Creating Student Success in School, Work and Life” signed by 60 national arts and education service organizations.
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