Attempting to set educational standards for the arts may seem like the worst case of hubris. In an era of budget-cutting, we may well ask, what arts education? Is there art beyond finger-painting in elementary school and the marching band in high school? Those who believe the arts are essential in American education want more and see standards as a way to get it.
In the drama now unfolding, the plot revolves around the strategy of arts educators to halt the —alization of the arts. But in order to understand the interaction of plot, characters, and situation, we have to set the scene. What follows is the equivalent of the opening exposition, where characters tell each other what they already know but the audience doesn't.
The Cast of Characters
Already demoralized by disappearing dollars for the arts, the arts education community suffered a further blow when the arts did not appear in the national goals. Goal No. 3 lists five academic subjects—English/language arts, mathematics, history, geography, and science—in which students will perform at a high level in “challenging subject matter.” The arts are not listed.
Recovering from their snub, the arts educators sought advice on strategy. Make noise, they were told. Establish standards, and get the arts into accountability systems. The arts education community has adopted the threefold strategy with energy, enthusiasm, and money supplied by supporting organizations. The noise has been made at conferences put on by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) of the U.S. Department of Education, and the American Council for the Arts; and by a working group jointly funded by the Kennedy Center and the Getty Center for Education in the Arts. Accountability is coming: statewide assessment of the arts is being encouraged by a consortium of state arts consultants assembled by the Council of Chief State School Officers. And in the matter of the standards, the arts are finally being treated equally: they are one of six standards-setting projects—in English/language arts, science, civics, geography, history, and the arts—currently being coordinated by OERI.
Coordinated, but not directed. This is an important point. The arts education standards, like the others, will result from a consensus process. This is where the plot thickens. Input is not only invited, but it is solicited from everyone who cares about the arts. The money to conduct the process is being supplied jointly by OERI, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and NEA. The organization receiving the money, and therefore spearheading the standard-setting process, is the Music Educators National Conference (MENC). MENC has pulled together a consortium consisting of the National Art Education Association (NAEA), the America Alliance for Theatre and Education (AATE), and the National Dance Association (NDA).
Clearly the arts have been defined in the names of those organizations. For better or worse, design and media arts are subsumed under dance, music, theatre, and visual arts; and creative writing has been assigned to English/language arts.
We've named the funders and the organizations responsible for producing the standards. But we aren't finished yet with the cast of characters in this drama. A two-tiered committee process has evolved from experience in both standard-setting and in establishing frameworks for the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP).
One set of committees is charged with actually writing the standards and usually consists of practitioners, teachers, and university educators. The second committee—called the committee of oversight—includes practicing artists, museum curators and administrators, and professional arts organizations. The committee of oversight is the watchdog over broad issues affecting the standards, such as the balance among the arts and ensuring that both multicultural and technological issues are not ignored.
The First Draft
The first act of the play illustrates the clash of visions and values that makes this drama riveting. When the process began in summer 1992, it was confidently expected that the standards already published by the arts organizations would be a step along the way. But when the committee of oversight received drafts from the four discipline committees, they—along with the funders—almost wept with disappointment.
Each of the four drafting committees had interpreted the charge to produce standards in its own way. Not only were there no commonalities in form, there was also no common understanding of what a standard is. The committee of oversight and the funders thought the visual arts standards lacked substance; they did not encompass what students should know about painting and painters, sculpture and sculptors. The music standards looked too much like a curriculum—the “how” instead of the “what” that students should learn. The theatre standards were written like a series of job descriptions, intended to lay out the experiences theatre education would provide for students. The dance educators, struggling to emerge from the shadow of physical education, shortchanged knowledge about dance as a cultural phenomenon.
The inadequacies of these first drafts are thoroughly understandable (although none the less dismaying) in view of the agendas of the groups cooperating in the standards process. We just mentioned the problems that dance educators have with getting dance accepted as an art and not part of P.E. Other arts teachers find their existence in the schools threatened, not only by budget-cutting. If you want to see an arts teacher go ballistic, mention an interdisciplinary course where the arts would be taught as part of history or literature. They believe that arts teachers will lose their jobs and that the arts will be inadequately taught by English or history teachers.
Additionally, arts educators have been trained either as performers themselves or to identify talented students who will carry on the great traditions of performance and production. By and large—and with exceptions, of course—they find it difficult to see learning about the arts as an integral part of their responsibility.
So the practitioners find “the vision thing” difficult. In this they are not alone, either among educators or the public. All of us have to understand the difference between standards and curriculum: standards are goals, expectations, outcomes—the “what” an educated person should know and be able to do. They are essentially a moonshot, which may not be entirely attainable in practice. Curriculums are the means of getting to the vision. Theoretically, curriculum and instruction can be whatever they want to be so long as students make progress toward the standards.
A Manifesto for the Arts
The oversight committee had plenty of vision, as well as an agenda of its own. Many members believe that to anchor the arts firmly in the curriculum, they must be taught as an academic discipline, not merely quasi-professional training. Not all students are talented, but all can appreciate and understand the arts as essential components of being human. The arts should be taught as separate subjects with their own conceptual frameworks, but also in conjunction with other subjects.
The oversight committee decided to organize the process in order to forestall what might have been an expensive failure. The committee decided that the final document, which will probably be published in 1994, must be prefaced by a clearly articulated vision. Such a vision is intended (1) to inspire arts teachers so that they don't get bogged down in everyday concerns like despair about supplies, and (2) to convince the public and legislators that the arts are essential and should be supported with tax money.
This manifesto will be followed by a document with a common architecture. All the standards will first be divided according to four aspects of learning about the arts: creation and performance, cultural and historical context, perception and analysis, and nature and value of the arts. Under these four headings, the arts will be listed alphabetically—dance, music, theatre, and visual arts—with standards for grades 4, 8, and 12. The difference between content and achievement standards should also be made clear. Content standards are the elements of the vision—the “what” students should ideally know and be able to do. Achievement standards answer “How high?” These achievement standards are essentially guides for assessment, because they are concretely detailed descriptions of student work that indicate progress toward the standards.
The committee of oversight decided that all students should achieve the same standard in grades 4 and 8, so there is only one achievement standard at those grades. However, at grade 12 there will be two levels, proficient and advanced, in order to account for students who intend to specialize (perhaps professionally) in one of the arts.
The common architecture that the four drafting committees will now follow sends a clear message about the value of the arts and how they should be taught. The prominence of the four aspects of learning focuses attention on the imperative to make them equally valuable—and therefore equally taught—both within each artistic discipline and across all four arts. The listing of all four arts under each heading makes interdisciplinary connections easier to find. Above all, the architecture says that “the arts” compose a whole that includes a four-by-four matrix of constituent parts—but the emphasis is on the whole.
The establishment of this common framework for the arts standards advances the process not just by setting the standards, but by centralizing the arts in the education of all students.
Now the real work begins. Guided by a task force—a subset of the oversight committee—the drafting committees will produce a document in the new year. This combined document will become the basis of regional forums to be held nationwide this year. In March, a major event will be a national symposium in Washington, D.C., which will be combined with the National Celebration of American School Music.
The first act has concluded, and we're ready for the second. The third will see the revision of the drafts in response to input from the regional forums, and possibly the completion of the standards. But don't be surprised if this drama proves to need a fourth and a fifth act to satisfy its characters and the plot.
Enter the NAEP Framework
Meanwhile, quite fortuitously, the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) is developing a consensus framework for the 1996 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) arts education assessment at the same time as the standard-setting process for the arts. Not so fortuitously, many of the personnel are the same. NAGB, which oversees and guides NAEP, awarded the contract to the state assessment division of the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), with subcontracts to the College Board and the Council for Basic Education. The framework must essentially emerge as a subset of the standards; otherwise the arts education field would be getting mixed signals.
The NAEP arts education framework will be a series of statements about measurable achievement in the arts. Later, probably in 1994, contracts will be awarded in a separate bidding process to produce the 1996 arts education assessment. The NAEP framework is developed in essentially the same way as the standards. While the standards can afford to articulate a vision, the framers of the NAEP specifications must decide whether the 1996 assessment will report on progress toward it or on what is actually being taught in the schools. For example, will students be chosen randomly to answer questions on dance, regardless of whether their school system has provided adequate training? Are we using the NAEP process to ratchet up arts education or to report on the status quo? How different can we expect that to be from the status quo in 1996, given the intense interest in arts education generated by the standard-setting process?
In a sense the NAEP process is the conscience of the standards. Their simultaneous development seems so natural that people ask why the other subjects didn't develop their standards and NAEP frameworks together.
A National Dialogue
What does a local jurisdiction do with the arts standards document? The standards are clearly voluntary, and undoubtedly they will be ignored by some, with snorts of derision about the gap between dreams of imaginative projects and the reality of scarce resources. How will teachers get the resources, for example, for their students to create catalogs for imaginary exhibitions of pictures they have seen using CD-ROM discs of international museum collections?
Nevertheless, thoughtful educators will find ways to put the standards to good use. They will bring them to meetings of faculty, school boards, PTAs, and local business groups. They will ask what the standards mean for the community's children and what resources can be designated for achieving them. Thoughtful educators will find money for teacher groups to spend six weeks during the summer designing an arts curriculum based on the standards.
Above all, these thoughtful educators will understand that the standards were not written to oppress them with another Washington mandate, but to unify American education in meeting the needs of future citizens. Standards arrived at as a result of a consensus process in which everyone is heard can only contribute to the dual goals of excellence and equity. A group of African-American parents in Mississippi, a similar group of Arab parents in Detroit, and another group of parents in Harlan County, Kentucky, can all point to the standards and say to educators: “This is a national standard. Can you guarantee that our children will reach it?”
Our enthusiasm for setting standards in the arts is not dampened by an awareness of the professional, philosophical, and intellectual problems the process presents. Even if the resulting standards are only partially successful, it will be worth the time and trouble. Standard-setting opens a national conversation about our values, about what we want for our children, and what we as an older generation prize so highly that we cannot imagine a civilized society lacking such knowledge. Such a national dialogue will help us develop an educated society whose perspective and sense of civic responsibility are informed by the enduring and universal values of the arts.
