Schools in Prince George’s County, Md., need more visual arts classes. One school has an art class once every nine weeks and another has a four-week rotation for visual arts classes, because itinerant teachers are shared between a few different schools and can’t be in all places at once.
This means, in many cases, regular classroom teachers have to give students grades for art despite having no consistent feedback from an art teacher about students’ progress in art.
Artful Thinking, for use by regular teachers, can support thoughtful learning across subjects.
However, it does not introduce topics in the visual arts, except as they support other instruction.
One parent told the school board at a recent meeting that she wasn’t sure students were getting anything out of art classes with such limited exposure to the subject. Schools Superintendent Kevin Maxwell, who has been touring the schools to get a firsthand look at their needs, says he has been wondering the same thing, the Washington Post reports.
“I don’t think [one hour every nine weeks is] enough,” the paper quoted him as saying during a recent phone interview. “It’s not that what they are getting isn’t good, but it’s not getting across what we’d like to get across.”
Mr Maxwell said he hopes the County Council will provide funding for 10 additional full-time art teachers in the district. He has proposed about $18 million in changes to this year’s $1.7 billion budget.
“[Students] are getting grades in art,” he was quoted as saying. “This is what we have in an arts program right now at the end of the Great Recession, and we’ll work to fix that.”
Arts on a national scale
Many districts in many states have cut back on the number of hours kids spend in visual arts, as well as in other classes that aren’t tested on standardized tests, such as elementary general music, because they have been required to spend more time on subjects tested under the rules of the No Child Left Behind law. Those subjects are math and reading.
In a report from April 2012, the National Center for Education Statistics, here, said 43 percent of full-time visual art specialists taught at more than one elementary school in 2009-2010. In that year, among public elementary school students nationwide:
- 85% of students received at least one hour of visual arts instruction per week
- 87% had art classes throughout the entire school year
- 83% were in a district that had published a curriculum guide for visual arts
Editorial
We’re happy Mr Maxwell has decided to shift some of the emphasis away from reading and math and toward the visual arts at the elementary level. Arts education gives kids a way to express their creativity. Playing with different materials, like paint, clay, crayons, etc., gives them the opportunity to give their imaginations a workout in ways that might not be available through reading dull texts or learning how to work a math problem.
The visual arts also provide a path toward self-discovery. Many careers have strongly visual components, and in addition, lots of public relations work nowadays requires the creation of materials with diagrams, graphics, and other elements that aren’t covered in math and reading. Some Prince George’s residents have argued that funds for math and reading instruction should not have been shifted to the visual arts, but this view puts too much emphasis on standardized tests and not enough on kids’ futures or their understanding of the world they grow up to occupy.
