National Core Standards for the Arts on the Horizon

A newly formed partnership of organizations and states will lead the development of new core arts standards for the United States.

The National Coalition for Core Arts Standards (NCCAS) plans to complete its work and release new, national voluntary arts education standards in early 2014. The standards will describe what students should know and be able to do as a result of a quality curricular arts education program.

The current National Standards for Arts Education have been adopted or adapted by forty-nine state departments of education, and have become the benchmark document by which K-12 arts learning is measured. Curriculum designers, teacher training programs, funders, and federal and state policy makers have relied on the original 1994 national arts standards and, more recently, the 2005 Standards for Learning and Teaching Dance in the Arts to help guide their decision-making.

Arts as Antidote for Academic Ills

 

Stationed in front of one of his large self-portraits, the
artist Chuck Close raised his customized wheelchair to balance
on two wheels, seeming to defy the laws of gravity.

By PATRICIA COHENPublished: December 18, 2012
NEW YORK TIMES

The chair’s unlikely gymnastics underlined the points that Mr. Close was making to his audience, 40 seventh and eighth graders from Bridgeport, Conn.: Break the rules and use limitations to your advantage.

The message had particular resonance for these students, and a few educators and parents, who had come by bus on Monday from Roosevelt School to the Pace Gallery in Chelsea for a private tour of Mr. Close’s show. Roosevelt, located in a community with high unemployment and crushing poverty, recently had one of the worst records of any school in the state, with 80 percent of its seventh graders testing below grade level in reading and math.

Standardized Testing in the Arts. No. Please No.

by Nancy Flanagan from EDUCATION WEEK on June 19, 2012 4:26 PM

When it comes to assessing music students, and their learning, I can say with confidence that I am a bona fide expert.

I did this work for thirty years--by my count, evaluating well over 5000 music students, giving them grades and feedback. Which only means I had lots of practice--not necessarily proficiency--but depth of experience matters here. Over three decades, I developed and continuously adjusted a conceptual framework for evaluating the most important skills and knowledge of student musicians, using (and often rejecting) multiple models and metrics. I did it wrong before I did it right. Once I understood that I finally had it right, I kept fine-tuning.

So How DO We Measure Learning in the Arts...

by Nancy Flanagan on June 27, 2012 4:37 PM

... if we don't use some kind of standardized assessment?

My previous blog has been re-posted, dissected, praised and scorned. But the question is still out there: How do we measure learning in the arts?

Two critical observations:

• Contrary to what some commenters seem to think, nobody is suggesting that learning in arts education can't or shouldn't be assessed. The blog wasn't a half-baked claim that the arts are too creative/expressive/ethereal/woo-woo for teachers to properly evaluate what their students have produced and learned. Assessing learning in the arts is precisely how students grow in arts knowledge and skill--with the assistance of their teachers, who use those assessments to tailor and improve their instruction as well.

• This contention--that we can't measure something unless we standardize it--is driving a whole lot of truly damaging, excessive and deceptive testing right now, and not just in the arts. How many times have we heard this: "If we don't use standardized tests, how will we really know what students have learned? Or how they compare to kids in Singapore?"

Districts Push for Texts Aligned to Common Core

NOTE: For those who believe that the ARTS are not part of the COMMON CORE, and for those states that have not yet recognized the ARTS as part of the COMMON CORE, here is an article that demonstrates why what we do needs to be recognized in the core.  The texts that are being developed nationally are preparing to write the arts out of existence in those states that fail to recognize the contributions of the arts as part of the core.

by Christina A. Samuels

Flexing billions of dollars of purchasing muscle, more than 30 of the nation's largest districts have come together to say they will only buy common-core instructional materials that meet a set of "publishers' criteria" written by a nonprofit organization that played a leading role in crafting the new standards.

The new criteria, meant to govern the development of instructional materials aligned with the English/language arts portion of the standards, were publicized June 28 at a press event organized by the Council of the Great City Schools, the Washington-based membership group to which the districts belong. But the criteria were released last summer by the New York City-based Student Achievement Partners, whose founders were among the lead writers of the Common Core State Standards now adopted by all but four states.