Art Decay

With many schools budgets being cut, they have to find places to make these cuts within their school. With No Child Left Behind the main concern of school districts is to make sure all students are performing at the same level. Thus, the arts no longer become important to schools. I find this very sad and possibly one of my greater fears for when I become a teacher. Once the art programs are all gone and budget cuts still continue, what will be the next things they take away from schools? Before you know it, English and language arts classes could be the next target.

Even though I enjoyed most of high school I can’t help but remember that art and drama classes were always my favorite. For many high school students that don’t or didn’t enjoy school as I did, these electives can be what makes school bearable.

Luckily, I found that some schools and districts are doing things to keep fine arts in the schools. Though arts still continue to be cut people are recognizing that they are very important for liberal education. But, besides creating well-rounded children studies in the art seem to affect students in other subjects. The National Association for Music Education said,

“Skills learned through the discipline of music transfer well into study skills, cognitive abilities and improved communication that are useful in other subjects.”

If this is the case then fine art and music programs can help contribute to higher test scores. In fact studies have correlated test scores with music programs.

“Studies have shown that students in high-quality music programs score higher than students in schools with deficient music programs on standardized tests, regardless of the school’s socio-economic factors.”

Schools have begun to adjust around this concept that fine art programs help to improve test scores. Without funding schools seem to be finding other ways to keep their students involved. Schools are joining hands with local colleges and universities alone with art groups and organizations to keeps arts in the schools. I believe this is great way to keep giving students opportunities to express themselves.

I feel that this is also a better way to approach the preservation of art programs because it doesn’t leave teachers to their own devices to incorporate after school art programs. These programs also tend to be only once a week. When it comes to many of the arts, especially music, once a week isn’t going to cut it. This also shows that the school districts are actually interested in providing students with other experiences besides being able to pass a standardized test.

Districts like Indianapolis, Los Angeles and Dallas that have found ways to keep the arts in their school systems. This provides a great example that the government isn’t going to do anything about art programs getting cut. Being able to continue fine arts the schools themselves have to take control and come up with ways of to preserve the arts.

Schools get creative to squeeze in arts

Associated Press

24 January 2008

Full Article

To begin with my major is English and my minor is Psychology. But, besides the obvious, I am also extremely interested in art. Unfortunately I could not minor in photography at my school, or even communications for that matter, thus I am stuck with psyc. Though, I have found that art and any class can really go hand in hand.

English and art are two things that I am very passionate about, along with funny cat pictures but that is besides the point. I have noticed in the years since I was in high school till now the fine art programs of many school have seemed to slowly deteriorate, usually to a lack of funding. Essential I will be exploring the loss of many art programs in schools and how this may be effecting students. Being that fine art includes theater and theater, or drama classes, tend to fall under English, I could possibly be subject to this plight of eliminating classes and programs. I believe that fine art programs are extremely important for students because they give students options and other ways to express themselves. Hopefully I’ll find that fine art programs maybe aren’t as bad as I think they are

I subscribed to a number of feeds. The first few are from the New York Times. I subscribed to both the art and design feed and the education one. I believe these are fairly explanatory  for why I chose them. Also, at CNN I subscribed to the education feed. One of the blogs that I subscribed to is called Change Agency. It is a blog that focuses on technology and education. I found this relevant because I know that a lot of fine art programs find themselves having had to abandon the classical way of doing thing to a more technological way because it is cheaper, and in reality more realistic. I saw this happen with my schools photography program. They had to switch to mostly digital photography rather than dark room photography because they no longer had the funds to support a darkroom based class. One of my search query’s is art and education.