No Child Left Without Arts on His Mind

All the research proves that participation in any art form, will raise test scores. This information has not moved any politician to change the current lack of funding to art, nor my field as a public school music educator.

For a clear understanding of why this has occurred, read the book: Manufactured Crisis by Biddle, 1995.

As a 25-year vetern junior high band director from a midwestern urban public school district, that has been cut millions of dollars, the challenge to maintain the National Standards in Music Education.

For example. Each elementary school offers different music lesson opportunities. Most experience one 15-minute lesson a week with up to 8-10 students of mixed or unlike instruments, some a 30-minute lesson once a week, and at one elementary school, two 30-minute lessons per week. With this lack of continuity in the elementary programs, incoming students do not move into junior high at the same level of ability, yet are all scheduled for the same 7th grade band class.

So what has been done to repair this? In addition to designing a nine-month challenging "catch-up-immersion" curriculum, I earned a second master's degree: Arts Administration. I still teach daily, but also look at my public school band program from a professional managers point of view. I now negotiate and arrange band performances all over town, as I use the new contacts and networks from my intern positions.

Here are a few suggestions for those who want to consider doing the same.
1. Contact a local college music department. Negotiate (sectional) masterclasses at your school, or better yet, take your entire band to the college for a masterclass session. Include parents. Do this yearly, within 2 weeks prior to a concert.
2. Contact area performance venues: Live Theater. Negotiate a small jazz band, flute or brass ensemble, perform prior to a production in the foyer of the venue.
3. Contact local businesses or government centers; Negotiate a business partnership in which the students perform during a holiday season during the lunch period for employees, or in a park or garden area outside.
4. Brainstorm ideas with parents..keep them well informed and inlist their help. The tighter your relationship with the parent community (including calling regarding grades on a monthly basis), will keep the music program in the public schools.

Note; As the parents and students understand their performance abilities will represent their work in public, practicing increases and parents incourage it.

As a Department Chair of the Arts (Music, Dance, Drama, Visual Art) and an art teacher (K-12+) for over 25 years, I have encountered school systems that want to integrate the arts but don't know how. The Arts teachers at all levels have to be involved in this process of writing Integrated Curriculum at the local level and also be part of the professional development team to "educate" non-arts teachers how to "do" art, not just use art materials and call it an art project.

At the university and training levels, we need to develop knowledge and hands on arts experiences for our non-arts teachers with required college level classes for undergraduates and graduates as well.

The road goes two ways. Arts teachers are somewhat accustomed to integrated other world subjects into their programs. After all, what is art but life itself? There isn't a subject you can think of that doesn't contain art of some kind. Non-arts teachers might throw in some art fact in history or perhaps in a chemistry class (components of paint for instance), but the integration is so limited and biased that the art concept becomes relegated to the incidential and trivial.

For our art ed. teachers, we need to emphasize their importance in the education continuum, not only to themselves as a group, but to the administration.

Art is Life. This being so, we not only have a commitment to demonstrate this as teachers, but we also have a need to show the education genre in general how the arts affect learning outcomes. Many of our non-arts teachers have no idea how the artist's right brain works to solve a problem!

Educational research has shown that students who have taken arts classes have higher SAT's. With this fact in mind, is it not in our best interest to emphasize the arts in our core curriculum? The National Stardards for the Arts (the first subject area that was completed before math, science, language arts and social studies when this project was initiated by the government!) has the arts as a necessary component of education. Why have we not followed through more intensely on the state and local level?

As a facilitator and initiator of a pilot program in Integrated Curriculum many years ago, I see today there is minimal progress in this area. Why? The reasons are many, but the problem does not lie in the curriculum itself, however. At most, it is a nice concept and gets talked about in education circles when talking about the rest of educations' ills gets tiresome. Implementation is not forthcoming.

It is one thing to see the problem of the arts being less and less important in the education of our future. It is another to realize being a part of that problem. And lastly, it is that same highly civilized and educated populace who will have to find a solution to this problem.