Fine Arts in K-12 Education: Curriculum, Assessment, and Achievement

Introduction: The Place of Fine Arts in K-12 Schools

Including the fine arts in a K-12 curriculum has become a controversial issue in educational institutions and local school settings. Some educators and administrators view the arts as a "frivolous" appendage to the overall school program. Others believe the arts are an integral part of developing well-rounded individuals and contend that they support academic achievement. Because the arts are not included in high-stakes testing and are not part of the No Child Left Behind legislation, communities that support fine arts programs are finding it increasingly difficult to justify the resources and time allocated for music, art, and drama. In higher education, fine arts departments have built extensive community outreach programs for local schools, but intensifying budget pressures now threaten such initiatives. The sections that follow address how an instructional leader might develop a program that supports the arts in an era of sharply limited resources.

Identifying Stakeholders and Addressing Teacher Testing Concerns

Increased reliance on teacher tests has contributed to recruitment problems for the profession. Increasingly, states, colleges, and universities are requiring teacher candidates to pass competency tests for certification (Nagel & Peterson, 2001). Most teacher tests are technically sound and provide important information about content-related knowledge (Blair, 2001). However, tests designed to measure teaching competency have been criticized for failing to measure the full range of knowledge and skills teachers need, or to adequately predict classroom success (Blair, 2001; Nagel & Peterson, 2001; National Research Council of the National Academies, 2000, 2001; Scherer, 2001). Concerns about relying on a single teacher test to evaluate competency were raised by Scherer (2001), who argued that teacher tests should be part of broader assessment programs incorporating multiple measures (Nagel & Peterson, 2001; Scherer, 2001; Zimmerman, 1997).

Blair (2001) reported that states are required by Congress, under Title II of the Higher Education Act (authorized in 1998), to rank institutions by the passing rates of their teacher candidates on state tests. Under this act, the federal government could limit funding to state and teacher preparation programs based on students' performance on state teacher tests. As a result, some students may perform well in college but still be barred from the teaching profession if they do not pass the requisite tests. While no one wants incompetent teachers in any classroom, teacher-testing programs have discouraged some capable individuals from pursuing teaching as a career (Scherer, 2001). Studies of passing rates specifically among art education teacher candidates have not yet been conducted, representing a gap with great potential to illuminate the impact of testing on recruitment in the field of art education.

A related issue is that the current emphasis on standards and testing has driven people out of the profession more broadly (Scherer, 2001). Teachers feel an increasing lack of control over curriculum planning because of pressures imposed by national, state, and local testing programs, which effectively determine what and how teachers teach. This erodes the sense of professional autonomy that is central to teacher identity and further complicates recruitment. Sabol (1999) reported that emphasis on state testing in the visual arts was an increasing concern for art teachers in both rural and urban schools, who found testing programs distracting, time-consuming, and insufficiently broad to measure the full range of visual arts learning. Stakeholders who demand accountability for learning in public schools should be made aware of the negative impact that narrowly designed testing programs have on both students and teachers. A fuller understanding of these drawbacks may enable stakeholders to reevaluate demands for high-stakes testing and to reconsider its form and content.

Numerous and complex factors shape the recruitment of teachers for the field of art education. Researchers must actively engage in work that provides policymakers and stakeholders with the information needed to address recruitment needs in visual arts education.

Curricular, Instructional, and Giftedness Considerations in Arts Education

There are no universally agreed-upon definitions for the terms gifted, talented, and creative. In popular usage, gifted often refers to students with superior academic abilities, while talented typically refers to students with superior abilities in the visual and performing arts or sports. Teachers often describe their outstanding academic students as "gifted" and their outstanding art students as "talented," implying a hierarchy in which talent connotes a lesser endowment. The term gifted and talented has, in many contexts, been replaced by talent development, shifting the emphasis from identifying predetermined gifts to nurturing emerging talents (Feldhusen, 1992; Feldhusen & Hoover, 1986).

Winner (1996) offered a useful framework for distinguishing giftedness from talent and insisted that the term gifted should apply equally to individuals with abilities in academic and artistic fields. She identified gifted children by three traits: (a) precocity, demonstrated by early and surprisingly great skill in mastering a given symbolic domain; (b) the urge to master, characterized by total immersion in the domain of their choice and an insatiable drive to absorb and learn; and (c) finding their own way, whereby gifted children often arrive at unique solutions to problems and may not require the same instructional scaffolding as less advanced learners. This is not to say that gifted children require no instruction, but rather that their instruction needs to be qualitatively different from that offered to less advanced individuals.

The relationship among talent, giftedness, and creativity remains unclear. Sternberg and Lubart's (1999) widely accepted definition of creativity as "the ability to produce work that is both novel and appropriate" (p. 3) distinguishes it from talent, which focuses on the ability to do something well (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996). Gardner (1996) categorized creative individuals as those who "lack fit" within an established domain of knowledge and only after considerable time and effort produce a body of work that comes to be valued in a culture. Feist (1999) further argued that giftedness as measured by high IQ scores may be a poor indicator of adult creative achievement, suggesting that the small relationship between intelligence and creativity limits the predictive validity of aptitude tests.

In discussing arts learning among gifted and talented individuals, it is important to emphasize that special abilities in the arts are every bit as intellectual and cognitive as gifts associated with high performance in mathematics or science. Gardner's (1983, 1999) research on multiple intelligences and Arnheim's (1969) foundational work on visual thinking firmly establish artistry as flowing from intelligent behavior, not merely from emotional expression. The relationships among giftedness, talent development, and creativity are therefore challenging areas of research, partly because researchers have not reached consensus on what constitutes creativity itself, making the development of operational definitions slow (Clark & Zimmerman, 1992; Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; Hunsaker & Callahan, 1995).

Educators have suggested a number of strategies for developing curricula that support creativity and talent in the arts. These include having students: (a) practice both problem-finding and problem-solving; (b) use unfamiliar materials that elicit novel thinking; (c) experience both convergent (structured) and divergent (unstructured) tasks; (d) rely on both visual and verbal materials; (e) engage with curricula that have open-ended outcomes; (f) pursue their own interests, working both independently and in groups; (g) choose environments that support their talents; and (h) encounter a wide range of tasks designed to encourage and enhance emerging talents (Feldhusen, 1995; Mumford et al., 1994; Runco, 1993; Runco & Nemiro, 1993; Sternberg & Williams, 1996).

Conclusion: Toward Authentic Assessment in Arts Education

If we assume that the ACT, SAT, NAEP, and AP tests are reasonable measures of the domains that a state's high-stakes testing program is intended to affect, then we have little evidence at the present time that such programs work. Although states may demonstrate increases in scores on their own high-stakes tests, transfer of learning is not a typical outcome of high-stakes testing policy. Sixty-seven percent of states that use high school graduation exams posted decreases in ACT performance after those exams were implemented, and these decreases were unrelated to whether participation rates increased or decreased at the same time. On average, college-bound students in states with high school graduation exams decreased in levels of academic achievement as measured by the ACT.

The current high-stakes assessment practice in the United States has created a difficult and no-win scenario for art education. Art is not seen to be valued sufficiently by administrators in 43 states to warrant inclusion in high-stakes assessment programs, and in the remaining 7 states it is assessed using means largely inappropriate to the subject. In a national educational context in which the results of high-stakes assessments can affect real estate values, the salaries of school administrators, and the professional futures of school faculties, art teachers increasingly feel the need to demonstrate student learning through systematic assessment that is ill suited to measuring the quality of holistic artistic performances. Meaningful reform will require stakeholders, policymakers, and educators to reconsider both the purpose of arts education and the tools used to evaluate it.

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