November/December 1999

The Arts Step Out from the Wings

As interest in arts education rises, researchers explore what young people learn from the arts-and how to make sure at-risk students benefit, too

By Jane Buchbinder

Creativity, perseverance, and striving for excellence. According to U.S. Education Secretary Richard Riley, these qualities define both the goals of education reform and the process of studying the arts. Small wonder, then, that attention to the presence of the arts in classrooms is dramatically on the rise. In less than two decades, the number of states requiring study of the arts for high school graduation has surged from two to 32, according to the National Arts Education Association, and an additional 14 states intend to adopt arts standards in the near future.

With this increased emphasis on the arts, researchers and practitioners are trying to sort out what role the arts play-or should play-in education and how to develop quality programs that reach more students.

The renewed interest in the arts is actually rooted in events that took place decades ago. Following the excitement of the Sputnik challenge of 1957, the United States turned its educational focus to math and science. As the National Science Foundation mushroomed in size, the humanities were relegated to a second-class status, and arts education became viewed by many as a luxury rather than as a vital means for developing young minds.

In the early 1960s, arts educators and researchers reexamined the arts with a scientific lens, debating whether in fact the arts were-or could become-a discipline with a fundamental structure and curriculum. Scholars such as Jerome Bruner, then at Harvard, and Ohio State's Manuel Barkan argued that a more rational, cognitive approach to arts education was needed. Philosopher Nelson Goodman founded Harvard's Project Zero in 1967 to study and improve arts learning in this context.

Elliot Eisner, professor of education and art at Stanford University, later experimented with an arts curriculum project that emphasized professional development. That laid the groundwork for what is now called discipline-based arts education-an approach that integrates art making with art criticism, art history, and aesthetics. In the early 1980s, the Getty Education Institute for the Arts in California began spending millions of dollars to promote discipline-based arts education.

A New View of the Arts

Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences has paved the way for a broader outlook on the contributions the arts make in the classroom. This cognitive psychologist has helped educators recognize that learning takes place through many means in addition to book reading, and that children are best served by having opportunities to gain and demonstrate their understanding in a variety of ways.

This relatively new way of viewing the arts-as a process embracing thoughts, emotions, and reason-has led some to hope that the arts can help repair the nation's education system. Proponents of arts education say the arts make learning more enjoyable and interactive, foster an interdisciplinary approach to learning, build self-esteem, teach critical thinking and self- discipline, and allow students with different learning styles and language skills to be successful in their own way.

With this in mind, research projects supported by corporate, foundation, and government offices are focused on three central questions: Are the arts aiding student achievement? Who has access to good arts programs? What do high-quality arts programs look like? The recently issued Champions of Change, a collection of seven research studies by some of the country's best arts-education researchers, attempts to answer some of those questions (see Making the Case for Arts in Schools).

Achievement and Access

One well-regarded examination of the effects of the arts on achievement has been led by James Catterall of the University of California, Los Angeles. Looking at the results of the 1988 National Educational Longitudinal Survey (NELS: 88), which tracked the progress of 25,000 middle and high school students over 10 years, Catterall found that students with "high arts involvement"-that is, those who took at least two arts classes per week and participated in extracurricular arts-performed far better on standardized tests than students with "low arts involvement." Of "high arts" 8th graders, 66.8 percent scored in the top half on standardized tests, compared with 42.7 percent of "low arts" students. By the 10th grade, 72.5 percent of those same "high arts" students scored in the top half of standardized tests, while just 45 percent of the "low arts" students did. That suggests that students involved in the arts have an advantage that grows with time and experience, according to Catterall.

Not surprisingly, the study also shows that students are twice as likely to have low arts involvement if they are of low socioeconomic status (SES)-that is, from less-educated or less-affluent households. Students from high-SES households typically enjoy many advantages-private art lessons, affluent school districts (where arts programs are more prevalent), access to transportation for after-school arts activities, and the encouragement of parents who have themselves benefited from exposure to the arts.

One noteworthy finding came from Catterall's comparison of low-SES students with either "high arts" or "low arts" involvement: the "high arts" students performed much better than their counterparts on standardized tests and in such subjects as math, reading, history, and geography.

If the arts are an important part of learning, say arts advocates and researchers, then they will need to be made available not just in affluent school districts or in a few less-affluent schools chosen for research and experimentation, but across the board. Arts research in the next decade will likely point in that direction.

The Quality Question

Much arts education research is also focused on how to build quality arts programs. Gaining the Arts Advantage, a nationwide study issued earlier this year by the President's Committee for the Arts and Humanities and the Arts Education Partnership, cites several common elements of the high-quality programs in the hundreds of school districts it surveyed. These include: community and parent involvement in school arts programs; opportunities and funding for student exhibitions and performances; written policies that affirm the value of the arts; top-rated artists in residence; and administrators and school boards that treat arts education the same as other subject areas, especially at budget-cutting time.

Districts that get hard hit at budget time can still succeed in building effective arts programs by using a little creativity, the report shows. Redondo Beach (CA) School District, for example, trains parents to assist in its elementary school arts programs, giving them a chance not only to learn more about the arts themselves, but also to build stronger ties to local schools. Another example is the Linwood A+ Elementary School in St. Paul, MN, where founding principal Kris Peterson shrewdly hired a part-time grants writer who doubled as a vocal music instructor.

Teachers as Artists

Bringing teachers into the world of arts, and artists into the world of teaching, is another important element of successful programs. That's the focus of SUAVE (the Spanish acronym for United Community for Arts in Education), a research project directed by Merryl Goldberg of California State University, San Marcos. The program provides teachers with weekly in-class coaching from professional artists on ways to teach subjects such as math, science, language arts, and social studies through the arts. In addition, teachers get discounted tickets to arts events and professional development at arts centers. Goldberg's research, which consists of classroom observations and interviews with students and teachers, shows that the arts become another means of expression in the classroom-an important resource in a multilingual state like California. "The teacher-artist relationship goes to the core not only of teacher learning, but [also] of teachers' relationships with their students, because teachers learn new ways of communicating content," says Goldberg. "Teachers in turn invest their students with the same skills. So kids who have trouble understanding or expressing themselves in English have an opportunity to fully participate in learning."

A wealth of anecdotal evidence from students, teachers, and administrators seems to confirm the notion that the arts can invigorate the learning process in a variety of ways. When Kathy Greeley's humanities class at the Graham and Parks School in Cambridge, MA, creates a play, she challenges her students to incorporate local history and places in order to gain a better understanding of the world they live in. Nina Ward, 13, the lead actor in one of the plays Greeley directed about the construction of the American Dream, agrees: "When I have to show history through acting, I learn more because I kind of have to live it to explain it to myself."

Christopher Forehan, former principal of the multicultural Chavez Elementary School in Norwalk, CA, which serves mostly low-income kids, says he didn't think much about what his students might gain from the arts. A pro-arts superintendent changed that, insisting that arts be given a bigger role in his district. With strong arts partnerships from the Getty Foundation and the Music Center of Los Angeles, the arts were blended into the Chavez School curriculum. The move changed Forehan's perception of the arts in education.

"As the principal, I had to be involved, and that's why I think it worked. We had total school involvement," he says, explaining that he participated in creative activities whenever there was a resident artist. "We learned to use descriptive words by focusing on a Monet painting. We used dance to describe the geography and plant life in our region. The kids worked with a writer and professional actors to create plays. That got them very excited and motivated. And that's how I learned to love the arts, too."

Can the Arts Be Measured?

One of the most challenging questions facing arts advocates and researchers is how to evaluate arts programs. Last year, while calling into question several studies that claim to link arts education with achievement in other subjects, Elliot Eisner of Stanford argued in the pages of the journal Art Education against trying to make such links. "When such contributions become priorities," he wrote, "the arts become handmaidens to ends that are not distinctively artistic and in the process undermine the value of art's unique contributions to the education of the young."

Some scholars point to the Mozart Effect as a good example of what goes wrong when arts research is misunderstood. In 1993, researchers from the University of California, Irvine, suggested that college students who listen to Mozart have temporarily improved performances on spatial-temporal reasoning (especially valuable in math)-evidence that seemed to bolster the idea that the arts enhance learning in other disciplines. But an exaggerated interpretation by the press and policymakers of the findings turned it into one of the most misreported and misused studies in recent memory. The governor of Georgia, for example, raised $100,000 in private funds to provide families with newborns with classical music CDs, in the hope of improving the future intellectual capacities of children.

Ellen Winner, professor of psychology at Boston College and senior research associate at Project Zero, is countering what she calls "bogus reporting" with the Reviewing Education and the Arts Project (REAP), a reexamination of hundreds of arts studies from the 1950s to the present. Formerly an art student, Winner is an advocate for arts in education. Nonetheless, she says her study is finding more anecdotal evidence than hard scientific data about the link between arts and achievement.

Criticized within the pro-arts community for questioning the work of researchers, Winner says her motive is to set the arts on the sturdiest ground possible: their intrinsic merit. If arts programs live by the sword of rising test scores, they may die by that same sword, she contends. "If research ultimately refutes the arts' ability to raise academic test scores, people will say, 'Well, okay, we don't need the arts.'"

The difficulty of trying to scientifically document the value of the arts may itself be a measure of their educational depth and complexity, says Jessica Davis, founding director of the Arts in Education program at Harvard's Graduate School of Education. "If, in responding to a child's writing, you notice the emotional, expressive content and the intellectual excitement of the plot, and say, 'This is very good, but I don't know how to measure it,' you're forced into the wrong conversation," she says.

By demanding conventional assessment measures for content that isn't easily tested, policymakers may be hindering the development of vital programs in the arts, as well as in math, English, history, and science, arts advocates say. Perhaps this is part of the reason that spending on the arts makes up only 6 percent of elementary and secondary school budgets. Only 3 percent of students in 1997 attended schools with a substantial dance program for 8th graders.

The Big Disconnect

In fact, despite all the good press that school arts programs have gotten, the arts still have only a marginal presence in mainstream education. The arts-friendly districts highlighted in reports like Gaining the Arts Advantage are the exception, not the rule, says Steve Seidel of Project Zero. "There are lots of voices talking about the importance of the arts in education, but there's a big disconnect in action," he says. "One reason is that models of high-quality arts-in-schools programs are not commonplace enough. Like any advance in education, it is difficult to design a program that is highly effective. Good arts programs require a sustained effort, sustained resources, an actively involved community, and significant professional development. And all that doesn't come together often enough."

Richard J. Deasy, coauthor of Gaining the Arts Advantage, says that another impediment to the arts is that it's not generally assumed that they provide good career options. "This is a terrible misconception," he says. The arts certainly have a huge audience: consumers spent more than $10 billion on admissions to performing arts events in 1997, a figure that had nearly doubled over the previous five years.

As researchers continue to examine the role the arts can play in educating young people, practitioners who are already convinced-often by their own experiences-that the arts have an essential place in the classroom aren't waiting for "hard" evidence. Jackie Frisbee, principal at the Hanna Woods Elementary School in Chesterton, MO, says she can see for herself how beneficial her school's arts programs are: "I see them teaching kids respect for talent and creativity, both their own and that of others. And that increases their love of learning. My feeling is that the arts enrich a student's whole life."

That goes to the heart of what schooling is all about, says Project Zero's Steve Seidel. "The job of education is to be engaging and challenging, to address important issues in human experience, to inspire children to think hard, and to provide them the opportunity to demonstrate what they've learned. Seems a shame not to link the two enterprises."

Jane Buchbinder is a freelance writer based in Brookline, MA.

For further information

ArtsEdge, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, DC 20566; 202-416-8000.
Arts Education Partnership, One Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20001-1431; 202-326-8693.
J.S. Catterall. "Does Experience in the Arts Boost Academic Achievement? A Response to Eisner." Art Education 51, no. 4 (July 1998): 6-11.
E.W. Eisner. "Does Experience in the Arts Boost Academic Achievement?" Art Education 51, no. 1 (January 1998): 7-15.
Getty Education Institute for the Arts, 1200 Getty Center Dr., Los Angeles, CA 90049; 310-440-7300.
M. Goldberg and A. Phillips (eds.), Arts as Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educational Review, 1992.
M. Goldberg. Arts and Learning: An Integrated Approach to Teaching and Learning in Multicultural and Multilingual Settings. NY: Longman Publishers, 1997.
National Arts Education Association, 1916 Association Dr., Reston, VA 20191-1590; 703-860-8000.
Three important studies--Champions of Change; Young Children and the Arts, and Gaining the Arts Advantage- are available from: The President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, 1100 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Suite 526, Washington, DC 20506; 202-682-5409.
Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education, 321 Longfellow Hall, 13 Appian Way, Cambridge, MA 02138.
Reviewing Education and the Arts Project (REAP), Project Zero.
SUAVE, California State University, San Marcos, 333 S. Twin Oaks Valley Rd., San Marcos, CA 92096-0001; 760-750-4000.